Almost every wall you will stand in front of in Egypt shows the same man. Same profile, same striped headcloth, same rigid forward step, same oval rings of signs floating beside his head. He is the pharaoh, and once you can read four or five things about him, a temple wall stops being decoration and turns into a document you can partly read.

This is a guide to who the pharaohs actually were, what the objects they carry mean, why one king turns up under several different names, and where in Egypt you meet them today.

What a pharaoh actually was

The word is a misunderstanding that stuck. It comes from the Egyptian per-aa, "the great house", which originally meant the royal palace as a building. Over centuries the name of the building came to stand for the man living in it. The Egyptians themselves had other titles for their king, and used them far more often.

He was also not a king in the European sense. He was understood as a living god, the incarnation of Horus on earth, who became Osiris at death. He stood between the world of the gods and the world of people, and his central duty was to maintain maat: order, truth and justice, the balance that held the universe together. The gods of ancient Egypt are worth learning before a temple visit, because the king never appears alone on a wall.

In practice he held five offices at once: head of state, high priest, commander of the army, supreme judge and chief builder. And Egyptians believed the results of his conduct were physical, not moral. Good rule meant the Nile rose properly and the harvest came in. Bad rule meant the flood failed and chaos moved in. That is an enormous amount of weight to put on one man, and it explains why royal imagery is so tightly controlled. It was never portraiture. It was reassurance.

How to recognise a pharaoh

Egyptian art is a system of signs rather than a record of appearances, so the regalia does most of the identifying work.

  • The double crown, or pschent. The white crown of Upper Egypt, meaning the south, fitted inside the red crown of Lower Egypt, meaning the north. Wearing both together is a political statement: one man rules the two lands as one country.
  • The uraeus. The rearing cobra on the forehead, believed to spit fire at the king's enemies. If you see a cobra on a brow, you are looking at royalty.
  • The crook and the flail. Two short sceptres crossed over the chest, standing for the king as shepherd of his people and as the one who provides for them.
  • The nemes. The striped cloth headdress, the one on Tutankhamun's gold mask, folded to fall over both shoulders.
  • The false beard. Long, straight and squared off, tied on for ceremony. It marks divine kingship rather than the man, which is why women who ruled as pharaoh are shown wearing it too.

One thing to fix in your head before you go: north and south are the reverse of what a modern map suggests. Upper Egypt is the southern, upriver half of the country, because the Nile flows north.

Why the same king appears under several names

This confuses more visitors than anything else inside a temple. The same king is named differently on two walls of the same building, and it is neither an error nor two different people. At his accession every pharaoh took a full titulary of five names, each doing a different job.

  1. The Horus name. The oldest of the five, written inside a rectangle representing a palace facade, with a falcon perched on top.
  2. The Two Ladies name. This tied the king to the two protective goddesses of the country, the vulture Nekhbet in the south and the cobra Wadjet in the north.
  3. The Golden Horus name. The one whose exact sense Egyptologists still argue about. It is usually read as a claim about the king's imperishable, divine nature, gold being the flesh of the gods and the metal that does not corrode.
  4. The throne name, or prenomen. Preceded by the signs of the sedge and the bee, which together read "King of Upper and Lower Egypt". It goes inside a cartouche, and it is the name you will see most often on monuments.
  5. The birth name, or nomen. Preceded by "Son of Ra", also inside a cartouche. This is the one modern books use: Ramesses, Thutmose, Amenhotep.

So Ramesses II appears sometimes as Ramesses and sometimes as Usermaatra Setepenra, which was his throne name. The practical trick is this: find the two cartouches sitting side by side, and you have worked out which king the wall is talking about, even if you cannot read a single sign inside them.

Three thousand years, in four blocks

Historians group the pharaohs into roughly thirty dynasties, and those dynasties into a handful of larger periods. There were long stretches of collapse and division in between, but the office itself survived close to three thousand years, which is the genuinely remarkable part. Four blocks are enough to orient yourself.

Period Kings you will hear about What survives from it
Old Kingdom, around the third millennium BCE Djoser, Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure The pyramid age, which means Saqqara, Dahshur and Giza
Middle Kingdom Few household names Little for the average visitor, since much of it was quarried and reused later, though it is the classical period of Egyptian literature
New Kingdom, second half of the second millennium BCE Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Seti I, Ramesses II, Ramesses III The great temples and the rock-cut tombs of the Valley of the Kings, so most of what you see at Luxor and Abu Simbel
Late and Ptolemaic period The last native dynasties, then the Ptolemies down to Cleopatra VII The best preserved temples of all, precisely because they are the youngest: Edfu, Dendera, Kom Ombo, Philae and Esna

One correction worth making to the popular picture. Royal pyramid building effectively stops after the Middle Kingdom, so the famous New Kingdom rulers were not pyramid builders at all. They cut hidden tombs into the rock of a desert valley instead, and spent their budgets on temples.

And here is the figure that resets most people's sense of scale. More time separates the building of the Great Pyramid from the reign of Cleopatra than separates Cleopatra from us. When she ruled, the pyramids were already more than two thousand years old, and there was already a tourist trade taking visitors out to look at them.

The pharaohs worth knowing by name

  • Narmer, who by tradition unified Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE, and so stands at the head of the whole sequence.
  • Djoser, whose Step Pyramid at Saqqara is the first pyramid, though not the first monumental royal tomb. It is a stack of shrinking platforms rather than the smooth-sided shape that came later.
  • Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and a king about whom we know remarkably little given the size of what he left behind.
  • Hatshepsut, who ruled as pharaoh through one of the most prosperous stretches the country ever had.
  • Akhenaten, who forced through a religious revolution centred on the sun disc, the Aten. Calling it monotheism overstates it. Worship ran through the king and his queen as intermediaries, which is closer to what specialists call monolatry.
  • Tutankhamun, a minor king with a short reign, world famous for one reason only, which is that his tomb was found nearly intact.
  • Ramesses II, who reigned more than sixty years and covered the country in colossal temples, Abu Simbel among them.
  • Cleopatra VII, the last of them, the ruler who closed three thousand years of pharaonic history.

The women who ruled

Hatshepsut

She governed for around twenty years in the New Kingdom, first as regent for her stepson Thutmose III and then as pharaoh in her own right. She had herself shown with the male attributes of the office, ceremonial beard included, not out of pretence but because the office carried a fixed iconography and no female version of it existed. Her reign was prosperous and largely peaceful, and included the celebrated trading expedition to the land of Punt. Decades after her death her name and image were systematically erased from monuments, in a campaign whose motives are still argued over.

Nefertiti

Great Royal Wife of Akhenaten, and unusual in the art of her period: she is shown at the same scale as the king and performing ritual acts normally reserved for him. There are indications that she may have ruled in her own name after his death, though the evidence is thin enough that Egyptologists still disagree about it.

Cleopatra VII

She came from a Macedonian Greek dynasty rather than an Egyptian one, and Plutarch tells us she was the only Ptolemy who bothered to learn the language of the country she ruled. That line gets repeated everywhere as fact, but it comes from an ancient author writing generations after her, so it is best treated as attributed rather than documented. She was a capable ruler in an impossible position, and her defeat by Octavian ended Egyptian independence.

Merneith, Sobekneferu and Tausret

Sobekneferu closed the Twelfth Dynasty at the end of the Middle Kingdom and is securely attested as a ruling king. Tausret ended the Nineteenth Dynasty, though not the New Kingdom itself, which continued through the Twentieth. Merneith, from the First Dynasty, is the least certain of the three. She is usually described as a regent, with royal status inferred from her burial and from a seal impression that lists her among kings. Away from the throne, the roles of Great Royal Wife and God's Wife of Amun gave several women considerable political and economic power without a crown.

Why no two books give the same dates

The Egyptians did not count from a fixed year zero. They dated events by the regnal year of the king on the throne: year five of Ramesses II, year twelve of Thutmose III. When a king died, the count restarted at one. That works well enough inside a single reign and badly across three thousand years of them.

Modern chronology has been rebuilt by combining ancient king lists, records of astronomical events and radiocarbon dating. The result is good but not exact, which is why absolute dates on museum panels and in books sometimes differ by decades depending on the author. That is not carelessness. It is the real margin of uncertainty Egyptology works with, and it is worth knowing before you decide one of your guidebooks is wrong.

Where you actually meet them

The pharaohs are not spread evenly across the country, which matters a great deal when you are working out how many days you need.

The Old Kingdom sits around Cairo, which is where Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur are, along with the Grand Egyptian Museum. The New Kingdom is concentrated in the south, so the Valley of the Kings, Karnak and Hatshepsut's terraced temple all belong to the sites around Luxor. Ramesses II's colossal rock temple lies far south again and makes for a long day out, so it is worth reading up on visiting Abu Simbel before you commit to it. Back north from there, Philae and Kom Ombo stand for the last chapter, the temples of the Late and Ptolemaic centuries.

Those late temples are strung along the river between Luxor and Aswan, which is why a Nile cruise covers them so efficiently. Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo are riverside stops, and the boat moves overnight while you sleep. Your international flight into Egypt is your own arrangement, but everything on the ground, domestic hops between Cairo and Luxor included, is what our tour packages are built around.

What makes the pharaoh a genuinely strange figure in world history is not the gold or the colossal statues. It is the duration. One office, with the same iconography and the same ritual functions, held together for three millennia through invasions, collapses and changes of dynasty. Nothing else in recorded history has come close. Standing in front of a wall where a king in a striped headcloth offers wine to a falcon-headed god, you are looking at an image that was already ancient, and already deliberately old-fashioned, on the day it was carved.