After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who Was Ancient Egypt's Most Evil Pharaoh?

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

We often think of Egyptian Pharaohs as a glamorous god-king of Ancient times, yet the truth of these people is a lot, lot darker.Who was the first Pharaoh? What shocking, violent stories surround some of these figures? How did their rule of Ancient Egypt come to an end?Joining Anthony and Maddy today is the always-fantastic Campbell Price, Egyptologist at University of Liverpool, and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to After Dark. Now, Egypt is often remembered for its great. for its golden sarcophagi, god kings, and heavenly tombs. But behind the incense and the hymns was a darker truth. Pharaohs who ruled through fear, bloodshed, and merciless displays of power.

Here's Maddie to tell us more. The sand is slick and streaked with blood. Spears snapped, chariots crashed, and men screamed as the sun beat down, pitiless and blinding. Somewhere in the chaos, a pharaoh rode through the slaughter, not cloaked in ceremony, but in dust, sweat, and the blood of his enemies. And standing amid the broken bodies of his enemies is Pharaoh Amanotep, no priestly robes, no polished throne, just a sword in his hand, and the severed head of a defeated chief at his feet. This was Amanatep, a warrior king of ancient Egypt. Not content to rule from a throne, he claimed to

have fought at the front line, seized enemy chiefs with his own hands, and cut them down where they stood. According to his own chilling inscriptions, the bodies of these vanquished leaders were stripped, mutilated, and nailed to the walls of Egypt's temples, gruesome trophies to remind gods and mortals alike who really held power. Imagine walking into a palace of worship and seeing the sun-blackened corpses of your king's enemies dangling from the pillars. This wasn't just war. It was a theatre of dominance, played out on sacred ground. Forget the pharaohs of your schoolbooks.

This is divine kingship wrapped in brutality. This is after dark, and this is ancient Egypt's darkest pharaohs. Hello, I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And this, of course, is after dark, where today we will be stepping further into the darker side of ancient Egypt, mostly because you have asked for this. This is something that we've looked at in a previous episode with Dr. Campbell Price, who is back today, and he's an Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool, and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum. And we wanted to go further into this darkness because, well, one of the things that's fascinating to me is we're very familiar with the idea of power

structures in terms of British monarchy, let's say. I know less about the power structures where pharaohs are concerned, and I have been told that therein lies a lot of room for misdeeds and darkness and all that kind of thing. So that's what we're going to. to try to establish in this episode. What I'd like to know to begin, Campbell, if you can help us with this, is where does this power structure come from? And how is it set up as a system for, is it Ferronic rule? Oh, I made that word up, I thought. It's a really good adjective, Veronica to do with Pharaohs. How was this all come about? Because you just take it for granted, don't you? You're just like, there were pharaohs. But like, somebody had to bring this to being at some

point. Sure. Well, it's such a pleasure to be back with you again. And one of the great things about being on after dark and talking to luminaries such as yourself. Luminaries. Because we each look at different aspects of human history. And the problem is your specialisms lie in the more recent past.

So when we look at 5,000 years ago, actually to be honest with you, we are imposing our own models of what we expect words like king, monarch, ruler, hierarchy to mean. So if you think how much has changed

last 3,000 years, actually, to be honest, Egyptologists don't know a lot about how to connect these really interesting, really intriguing bits of evidence. So I think what we're going to talk about just now, there is undoubtedly a darker side to this glam pharaoh, you know, all singing, all dancing, musical character, when in fact, I don't know, Egyptologists tend now to be polarised between being big fans and saying the pharaoh could do no wrong and was a god king and believing the hype, and then going the opposite way and saying they were tyrannical and they were pure evil. So the truth must be somewhere between the two. So one thing that I do know about ancient Egypt is that the pharaohs weren't in charge for the entire time of what we call

ancient Egypt as a culture, right? So when did they become a thing? Were they always a thing? Did they emerge from a different system? How did that happen? So we think around about 3,000 BCE, The system, as we know at the phoronic system, comes into being because there are two parts of Egypt, upper and lower, confusingly, lower is in the north. No, no, no, I can't have a... Why is that then? It's because of the height of the land. So, of course, the Nile is one of the only rivers that flows south to north.

We would think about it in that direction because we have a Eurocentric feeling of the world, right? Now, can I ask this, though, before we go any further? Did they call it upper and lower, or has that been put on its end? That's been put on it since. They called it narrow and wide. Let's call it that. I'm happier with narrow and wide. Yeah. And is that to do with the land or is that to do the Nile? That's to do with the Nile itself and the cultivation that's right next to the Nile. Right. So literally like a wide portion of cultivation. Because maybe more than 90% of people are living on that cultivation because they're farmers. So the Theronic system comes about because eventually the country, as we now know it, Egypt, has coal. list into northern and southern big guys. And they do seem to be men, and that's not given in ancient Egypt. And then the guy who's in charge of the south beats up the guy who's in charge of the north. And that is how you have, by Egypt's own description, the first United Kingdom. Oh. And this unitedness, unity, if you will, this is what leads to the first fair, ironic position

Yes, we think, I mean, you can apply this to lots of different aspects of human history. We have a mythical founder called Menis. So the ancient Egyptian word for establishing is men. So to be menes is mena, many means the establisher. But then there's this historical chap called Narmer, whose name means the striking catfish. Oh, why not? Don't mess with him in a nilotic culture. So he is the one who is credited with really bringing together in one violent battle

where he's doing some smiting, the northern and the southern parts of the country. But in reality, historical reality, it must have been a slower cultural gathering. It wasn't just one battle, as it really is. So, Campbell, you talk about how compared to our modern ideas of monarchy, the pharaoh system is very different, and the figure of the pharaoh is understood in different terms. And we heard in the opening of this episode that they are kind of, of considered as somewhere sitting between man and gods.

Yeah. So is that something that happens as soon as this unification takes place, that the pharaoh of this new United Kingdom is just put on a higher pedestal? Or is that a cultural thing that develops over time? And how do people then see the pharaoh? Are they a living God? Are they human? Excellent questions.

I think a lot is going on in the moments, in the years and the decades and even the centuries leading up to that key unification. and the people surrounding the pharaoh must be in some sense in all of him because when Narmer Menes, this unifier guy, does whatever he does, it's not that the idea of pharaonic rule changes, it's that the depiction of pharaonic rule becomes a thing. So that makes it visible to historians. So at this moment, he comes into being as literally supersized.

So there's a monument. I say a monument, it's like half the size of this table. a flat palette and it shows on its two sides the moments of unification so you have the king showing you know supernaturally tall so three times the size of his enemy who's crouching at his feet and he's bashing the guy in the head

not very subtle symbology no no and the ancient Egyptians generally weren't very subtle about those kind of things so you have an allusion to a battle because there is another scene of beheaded naked war with their heads between their legs, literally detached. We'll come back to that. That sounds like a threat.

Also call back to the detached penises of last episode. Well, yeah, detachment is important. But then you have, coming back to your point about, is the king thought of as a god? Yes, because he can do and can be incarnated by other beings that are not human. So the king in ancient Egypt is always in some sense hybrid. So the sphinx is a lion with a man. land's head. Here on the normant palate, he's shown, or his protector is shown as a falcon. The falcon is

constantly surveying the land. If they want to strike, they strike very quickly and they do nasty things to you. And do we know how literal that belief was of a fairer that could sort of shape shift and become these things? Or is that just a symbol? You know, the falcon is omnipresent and can see everything. And thinking about the sphinx, was there a belief that that was a real creature? Or is this just leading into this kind of strange, shape-shifting hybridity of the leaders themselves. If I could ask an ancient Egyptian, do you think a sphinx is real? To them, of course, thinking in a world that's totally stripped of all our modern assumptions, it's so difficult to imagine.

One of the other images on the normal palate is of a bull. So the bull attacks a fortification. So the pharaoh can come down and do something nasty to you as a falcon, but he can also be a bull and can, if you're resisting the pharaoh as well, he'll literally bulldoos into your city walls. But I think there is a real fundamental belief that things that you cannot see are seriously powerful. The rocks have divinity inherent in them. The river is imbued with divine power. The marshes are a place you might meet a god. So it is not beyond thinking that someone, probably because of their lineage,

and I think lineage is more important than putting a crown on someone's head, I do not believe, for most of ancient Egyptian history, there was ever really anything like we would call a coronation. You don't need to be crowned. You're just from the moment the previous king dies, in later texts much later than Norma, when a king dies, they talk about the golden falcon rising to the sun

and joining with the sun again. And then from that moment, the golden falcon is just inherent in that new king. So there's a kind of element of magical thinking going on in the same way that we discussed last time that kind of maybe not literal, but it's a different headspace that we struggle to access in our modern times, yeah, okay. We are going to talk about some of these individuals in a minute. But before we do, if you could be so kind, Campbell, to give us a periodic overview of how this progresses over the time. So I think at the start of the episode you said something about 3,000 BCEs where we're kind of hinging from. Yes. Just give us a little overview.

then we'll go into a deep dive as to how these concepts are maybe changing and progressing over the course of thousands of years. Off you go. Right, quick, two minutes, go. But I think it's important to acknowledge that, as you say, we're talking about 3,000 years. So from Narmer, around 3,000 to Cleopatra the 7th, popping her clogs, is three millennia. Yeah. And so Egyptologists often want to divide that up in various ways into periods, the old, middle, and the New Kingdom. I mean, the New Kingdom, ironically, so named because it's not that new. It was three and a half thousand years ago. What is wrong with Egyptologists? Naming things really badly. There are better systems. So maybe let's think in terms of dates and I'll try

and give the dates as we go along. Individual royal families are referred to as dynasties, as we have in more recent monarchies. But Egypt is also very big. So it's a long time. Beliefs change. And if you're living in the south of the country, you might not have the same belief as I do in the north. But one of the great successes of the phoronic system is that it convinces us that everyone did think the same. Yeah. That is why

Egyptology is so popular and I know working in a museum. Ancient Egyptian art is visually, instantly recognisable. Show someone, you know, a Mesoamerican sculpture or a Persian or even a classical work of art. I'm not quite sure. Show them an Egyptian Pharaoh. All the

clues, all the Hughes. There's a world. Are there. There's a whole world in the mask of Tutankhamun. You know it. It's well known. So I think we have to step back from that and say, that is just an illusion of the very small elite that we'll be talking about just now. And that elite were the court. They surrounded the king. But they are maybe only two or three percent of the population. What everyone else believed is pretty much inaccessible. So it lasted for a long time. 3,000 BC is the beginning. You know, the time of Jesus is the end. when Egypt ultimately is absorbed

into the Roman Empire. So let's talk about the phoronic period, which is up to the death of Cleopatra. Pretty huge span of history. So Campbell, let's talk about some of the specific pharaohs. And let's start at the beginning. So the new.

Old. Okay, the old. We're getting with the old. Okay. Okay, I see what you mean. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. That makes more sense.

That's acceptable. Okay. Okay, so let's start with the old system and the old age. And this is, I think, a ferry that we might have met before in our previous episode, and that's Kufu. Indeed, King Kufu.

If you know Kufu, well, he's one of the great builders because he is responsible for the Great Pyramid of Giza. Which was, let me get this right, and please correct me, until the 1100s and Lincoln Cathedral. I'm looking at you too.

Do you meant, oh, let's correct you? Yeah, please. You'll be waiting. Well, until Lincoln Cathedral was built, it was the tallest building in the world. Oh, wow. And then Lincoln Cathedral became the tallest thing. I did not know that. After the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And do you think they put the final stone on Lincoln Cathedral, like lads, bigger than the Tower, bigger than the Great Pyramid? Ah, okay. But he's building these things far, far, far, far before. Yes, we're talking 4,600 years ago. Wow. So, yeah, 2,600-ish BCE. So Kufu is responsible.

Quick pop culture check. if you know the 1950s film Land of the Faro's it's all about Kufu it has the scheming bitch of a queen is played by none other than the fabulous Joan Collins

If you don't know it I highly recommend it at a very formative effect on my life So in that there's an attempt to sketch a biography of this fascinating character

about which we know historically absolutely zilch so little in fact that when the one known, positively identified statuette of him, this guy built the Great Pyramid. And we only one tiny, 10 centimetre statue. And how many of those would you need to stack up to make link in the people?

Lord, that would be a fun fact. I'm going to find that out. Yeah, you need to learn that. So when a British archaeologist called William Matthew Flinders Petrie was leading excavations at the site of Abidos in Egypt, early 20th century, one of the Egyptian archaeologists working with him found the body of the body of this little statuette with the name Kufu on it, or a name of Kufu. Petri immediately thought, bloody hell.

This is the only known depiction and it didn't have a head. So they had to sift the sand for two weeks and eventually they found hands. And it is now, if you go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the old one downtown, it is pride of place. This tiny thing. This tiny thing. Guides always stop at it. Do you know, that's why I couldn't be an archaeologist, the attention to detail.

I'd be so overcome with excitement at finding the body. I'd be like, I found this, we don't need the head because I've found the depiction and it's all good, this is fine. And I wouldn't bother, not because I wouldn't care. You'd need the head. I wouldn't have the discipline. I would be too excited. I would need someone else to be like, we are now going to sift the sand for 25 years until we find. I'd need to be sifting the sands.

Would you? Yeah, for the head, yeah. That is why we're a good team. See, there you go. You're the sand shifter. But, Cam here, now I'm curious because you've said that we know very little about this person. Yes. And yet, he has.

number one in our list of potentially dark pharaohs. Now, hold on, I'm guessing now, if you're going to have to tell me, building, building megastructures, building megastructures nearly 5,000 years ago. Yes. I'm imagining health and safety. Is this why he's making his way onto this list? This is not necessarily going to be great. Yeah. I mean, to have built the biggest building in the world at the time and for the next few thousand years, you must have been a bad on. So, indeed, what happens is maybe a thousand years after his death there is a wonderful fairy tale one of a whole cycle of fairy tales

known to date to Egyptologists as papyrus Westcar after the collector that talks about a magician being brought into the royal court because the magician lives kind of preternaturally long he's very old he can eat lots and drink lots of beer and he's kind of supernatural And so he's brought into the royal court and there's a reputation that he can

reattach heads to creatures that have had their heads severed. So he's brought into the court in front of the historical Kufu and Kufu says, right, bring us a prisoner. And the court go, that is not cool. And every prisoner steps back apart from one that's gone. There's looking around. Oh, shit.

He wasn't paying attention. There's a line about, you know, humanity is the cattle of the gods. you should not sever the head of a human being, so they bring in goose instead. So just with that little, you know, that little nudge, that little illusion to there's something in this guy's character

that would, at the drop of a hat. Allowed that story to happen. Yeah, yeah. I think the reputation for Kufu is a tyrant as mean or, you know, someone not very nice comes from that. Do we have any idea of what conditions were like during the building of these things?

I don't think it's problematic to guess. that lives are being lost during this. Like, we know later that in huge building projects, they just are. So at this time, surely it's safe to assume. Yes, I think it is safe to assume. I mean, I get asked about the pyramids a lot in, you know, cocktail bars and taxi cabs. When you say you're an Egyptologist,

we don't know you're right to how the pyramids are built. Sorry. But you are also right that it can't have been a picnic. We can say it fairly positively. not imported slaves that built them. We know there were Egyptian farmers who were working in their fields and when the annual flood happened

for two or three months in the summer you'd go and work in a national project like building a pyramid. So even though there's some evidence that food, drink medical help, accommodation was provided, which is quite nice, it wouldn't necessarily

have been easy work although we do have graffiti. The only texts knowing from inside Kufus Pyramid that record the names of the people who built them as teams and there are things like the Friends of Kufu or the drunk. Isn't they like the drunken ones?

Yes. You remember that we mentioned this at a previous episode. If you can extrapolate anything from that it's that you know maybe there was a bit of levity was a bit of not entirely arduous work but not as I say not picnic. Okay so we don't know that much about

Kufu but what we do know is he was very likely tyrannical in terms of motivating people to help him build megastructures. He had high expectations. We can't say he was a tyrant. He was a perfectionist. I think we'll concierge. No, we can't answer. We don't have any contemporary sources about him as we don't, for almost every pharaoh, about their personality. We don't know. You have to extrapolate. But Herodotus, the father of history, writing for a Greek audience, does talk about Kufu and he says he sold his

daughter into prostitution. Wow. And for every client, she got a block for the pyramid. Wait, wait, wait. Oh, no. Yeah. For every client, she got a block for the pyramid. There are two and a half million blocks.

That seems impractical. It's giving Bonnie Blue. I don't have time. I don't have time for that. But I mean, this is, again, totally different context, totally different setting Herodic's writing over 2,000 years after the event. That was very quick maths, I saw you. But there's a nice little inflection in that story

that the princess also asks for an extra block from each of our clients to build her own pyramid. And there are smaller pyramids of Kufu's female relatives next to his pyramid. But it just goes to show that he was such a bad man and he was resented. You know, there's a thing about the three pyramids at Giza on the Giza plateau.

You have Kufus is the biggest. The middle is his son, Kaffrey, and then his grandson, Mencoury, is the third smallest, dwarfed on the end. Apparently, Mencoury was a really nice guy. And the big pyramids are not so nice rulers. I mean, I suppose from Herodotists, what we can take, because obviously Greek propaganda much later, but I suppose Cufu, his ambition knows no bounds, right?

Even prostituting his own daughter, I suppose that's the point of the story, isn't it? That even whether he did that or not, that there's an unstoppable hunger there for power that he doesn't respect the boundaries of normal, quote, quote, civilised things. Yes, he's so excessive. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Although, interestingly, archaeologically speaking, Kufu's father, a guy called Snefru, builds more pyramid, more kind of cubic meterage of pyramid than his son.

And he's remembered as a, you know, pleasure-loving king of Egypt. So his father was an nice guy, his son was a nice guy. What if we have totally gotten Kufu wrong? And Kufu was like, guys, I was actually really nice. He was a great dad. Didn't even have a daughter. She's just like, well, we know he did. We know he did.

We know he did. We know he did. That's kind of important. Now, we're moving from the building pharaoh. Yes. On to the warrior pharaoh. And Maddie has already mentioned a menhotep. We know a little bit more here, right?

We have a bit more detail. Tell us why he's got such a bad rep. So you're right. We've known more about him because there are lots of statues. We've got his body, his mummified body, survives. survives, which is also mind-blowing that we even have the actual people. You are really the only section of historians in the world who have that consistently, that you have the remains that are so well preserved and the whole burial site and, you know,

the tombs and all those grave goods in a way that, yes, other archaeologists, other historians find that in other time periods, but not to the same level of preservation. Like, you have a nice time of it in Egyptology, Campbell. Well, I think that emboldens Egyptologists to make sweeping statements. We're getting very full of ourselves, so let's not take that too much to heart. And it's actually only after a certain period, maybe 1,500 BCE that we have the bodies. We don't have them before them. Okay, okay.

So we do have Amunhot at the 2nd's body, and we have lots more texts compared to Kufu. We have contemporary texts where he is really, you know, having supposedly his speech recorded. So there are royal proclamations. And that's fascinating. And I should confess, I have a particular thing for Ammon Hote 2nd because in Manchester Museum we have a little alabaster stone chariot harness finial part of the royal chariot potentially that has a little inscription on it. It's the only one ancient chariot experts tell me the only one in the world with hieroglyphic inscription.

Tutankham had six chariots. None of them had an inscription. But Manchester Museum, we have one with an inscription. and it says Amunhotep's son of the sun god may he live fear of him throughout the foreign lands so even on a tiny object fear is being invoked perhaps so yeah we know more about him because of the sources and those sources spend a disproportionate amount of time i would say talking about bloody things yeah so he's a fairy who likes to get his hands dirty right he's not just sat back while someone else builds him a pyramid, he is

getting covered in blood and guts and all the rest of it. Yeah, and I think that might be to do with his upbringing. So his dad is the so-called, although I don't like the comparison, Napoleon of ancient Egypt, quite short, quite long ruling, ruled for

50-odd years, Tupmo's the third. So if your dad is that figure, it might be expected as a prince you're going to be that way inclined. So when Amunhotip the second comes to the throne, he gets involved, as you say. He goes out. He's on campaign. So Egypt is battling to the north in the Levant and to the south in Nubia. And as you said in your introduction, Maddie, warfare is brutal.

We know people are being killed in large numbers in order to count the number of dead. Certain body parts are taken. There is a story, though, recorded in Amunhot at the second's own inscriptions that he takes bodies from an area towards the area of modern Syria and he brings them back to Egypt and hangs them first on his ship, the prow of his ship. So anyone seeing the royal barge will see, oh gosh. Bodies first. Really? Yeah.

You know, and in that pre-modern way of a royal progress, you know, the king is never sitting in a palace somewhere all year round he is moving constantly to remind people to a pay their taxes and be don't mess with me because I'm constantly vigilant where does religious belief thinking about that kind of magical thinking and where religion plays into this where does that come in in terms of this particular pharaoh because I'm thinking there's so much blood and violence and a lot of transcending normal human experience even potentially for the Egyptian period that's quite brutal how religious is he? Is that an important part of his reign? And also, within that, you mentioned that mummification starts around this time, maybe just before? Is he one of the first people

to be mummified? Oh, I should clarify that mummification is consistent throughout the pharaonic period. We only have the bodies preserved by chance from a couple of hundred years before. Amunhot at the second. So previous kings are mummified. It's just that their bodies haven't survived. It's just that the kings who are ultimately buried in the valley of the kings at Thebes this great royal set of catacombs this royal cemetery

into which Amonhotep II himself was interred those bodies had at some period when most of the tombs were being robbed were gathered a concerted effort was to gather them and put them in one place that was safe and that safe place was found by modern archaeologists

and modern tomb robbers so that's just an incredible chance that we have. I mean, who knows there are maybe others of these caches, you know, these gatherings of sometimes ritual objects, sometimes actual bodies. Maybe there's others out there, but Amunhouti II survives because he was in one of these caches. I think he, like other pharaohs, would have been deeply religious because he's the intermediary between human beings and gods. So presumably the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, as other rulers in history, believe their own hype. And must have that sense.

of, if not during a coronation when your father actually dies and his father was quite long lived, right, I have got the spirit of divinity in me. And actually he talks in one of his reported speeches to a high official, the so-called King's son of Kush. So this is the highest official. I hate to say colonial official. He's often referred to as the viceroy of Kush,

but that's just interpolating British colonial ideology onto the past. So he's a high official. This guy is called Usur Saitetet. And he records, it's a very unusual exchange where the king is drinking. So there's a sense of the king gets a bit drunk and I'm paraphrasing. But he says, and another thing. You want to watch out for those Nubians, the area to the south of Egypt, the south of modern Egypt, the north of modern Sudan.

Because they'll cause you trouble and their magicians, you know. they'll do black magic on you. So there's this sense of, yes, the king is all-powerful and he's semi-divine, but he's instructing his officials that there are other types of magic out there that might actually threaten the king. And someone else later in Egyptian history, we know had black magic put upon him, there's an account of his assassination, Ramesses III,

and it involves essentially voodoodles. So yes, the king is religious. Yes, he is shown as an all-powerful semi-divine being. but he is uniquely susceptible to metaphysical attack. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Can I ask something here because often on abstract and this will apply to any history podcast and you can ask any, there's sometimes when something comes up and whatever, and you're sitting there and you're listening to the guest to talk so brilliantly and you're just like, and they'll say, well, of course you knew X, Y and Z and you'd be like, yes, but in your head you're going, never heard of this before, but I'm going to play along. You mentioned something just now, which I was like, wait, I didn't know this and maybe I'm being a little bit stupid. I didn't know that the pharaohs didn't stay in one place, that they travelled around. Very pathetic, yeah. I just assumed they had a court of some kind of thing,

which they did, it was a moving court. But like, I just thought that there was like a Buckingham Palace or whatever. But no, this is a moving thing. As you'd imagine, I guess Charles III does move about now as well. But we have evidence in the form of, and actually where I studied at the University of Liverpool, there was an example of one of these letters, where it's the steward, the kind of the palace staff,

are saying, let's get ready because the king is coming. So we need food, drink. Come on, get on it, because we need to have a party. So the idea must be, well, the wives and the children are generally stationary. Okay. So there is a hub, though. There's a hub. Okay, so it's not a constant moving thing.

So it's more like an early modern progress or something where to emboldened their power, they're visiting these places, but it's not a hubbord. constant thing of movement, right, I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you, there is a hub of Pharaoh, right? And I suppose that fits in as well, like, what you were saying, Campbell, about this idea that the Pharaoh is all powerful, but is susceptible to other forms of magic. Yes. And actually, of course, you would then need to move around in order to spread your propaganda and to really cement your power in the minds of your subject, the same minds that think

in these magical terms and would potentially want to harm you and evoke some of them. that magic against you. And if that's a system in which you exist and believe in, of course, you would need to move around and constantly sell yourself. Yeah, it makes sense. In some ways, if you're sat in one palace all the time, you're a kind of sitting duck for your enemies, but if you're moving, you know, you can't for security reasons. You just can't know where the king's going to be. And also, if you've got loads of bodies to display on a raw botch, you've got to travel around to show. Yeah, the whole point of traveling around, yeah. And they need to be seen, right? Like, that's the whole point of having,

a singular point of power is that you get to see it at times so that the power gets reinforced, or at least you get to see the representation of that power in other ways. So it does ring true to later understandings of Western kingship in that sense, from as far as we know. I want to move on to another pharaoh now, Akanaten, the heretic king, my notes say, why do my notes call him the heretic king? Oh, gosh. well, Akinaten, compared to the other two, well, maybe next to Kufu is pretty well known

because he does things very differently. He's Tutankhamen's father and he starts out life as plain old Aminhotep. Aminhotep the fourth. So we've got to number four. And then he just literally takes the rule book and rips it up and throws it in the fire. He decides he doesn't want to live in the hub. So this is actually back to your point about. there was an expectation of a royal progress, right? So there's a hub maybe at Memphis, ancient, Egyptian Memphis, not Memphis, Tennessee, but then there's a religious hub in the south at Luxor, modern Luxor, ancient Thebes. But Achanaton, as he changes his name to Akanaton, decides, no, he doesn't want to be in either

of them, he goes to completely virgin ground, he says himself, not sacred to any God or any goddess, and he plonks himself there, and he says explicitly, I will not leave the boundary I have defined to you. Nor will the queen. Nefertiti, famous for her bust in Berlin, with the big blue crown, and nor shall the queen say to me, you know, come on, we're leaving. And the children

won't leave and the officials won't leave. There is this sense of, I mean, it's maybe over-egging it slightly to say it's a complete revolution, because he does some things in a traditional way, but he changes his name, he changes his capital, he changes the style of artistic depiction of the king, where he's shown

totally different. kind of distended limbs androgynous he's shown as both male and female and in order to build a city in a few years as you said for the pyramids it's hard work and in this case we have the bodies of the people who are mainly young people and children who have horrendous injuries so we have the evidence yikes that in order to build this city it is backbreaking labor and one thing and it's again It's the sinister side of wanting to see someone who seems like a historical character. So one American egyptologist James Henry Brested calls Akanat in the first individual in human history. Because we know...

The first individual in human history. Because we know so much about him. He has all these speeches recorded. You know, he's living in the 1300s BC. So this is three and a half thousand years ago. he needs to build this new city but in order to achieve that so you have the traditional means of building

which is get a team of people to take huge blocks and construct temples or pyramids Akhenaten says no I will make the architecture in the style of three hand span wide blocks so they're called talatat because the Arabic word for three is talata

and so it's three handspans wide and it will allow one person to carry a block for efficiency. But, you know, it's basic biology. It's much better to be in a team of people dragging a big weight. Yeah. How many of those blocks are you going to carry in one day? And we have the people's broken bodies to show that they died to horrible deaths. Why is all this happening?

Why does he say, screw that to the rulebook and think, I'm going to change everything? You're not going to know, are you? I know you're not going to know. But it just seems so bizarre. People speculated why, because we have a lot more sources than for previous kings. So you have a situation where, I mean, again, I'm not a fan of historical comparisons, but Henry the 8th Reformation. Here we go. So this idea of the break with Rome and wanting to establish your own church to do your own thing.

There is a sense of that, I think, with Akanatin, because the priesthood of Amun, the chief god at Thebes, at Karnak at Luxor, they are really wealthy. and it seems quite clear that the power of the priests would equal if not overshadow the king. So if you are a new king coming to the throne of what you're going to do. Maybe you're going to say, right, we are going

to not just move to a new capital, we're going to outlaw the worship of other gods. Which in ancient Egypt with hundreds of gods is a big deal. So he goes or he sends his agents around

to efface the name of the god Amun and other gods from all monuments, which is total anathema to the vast majority of the population. So when you have scenes of Akanat and doing very weird things like kissing his wife, the king of Egypt would never be shown with his children, eating and drinking, unseen, kissing his wife and his chariot,

because there is nothing, there's no other spectacle, there is no other visual stimulus for the people who were used to gods and processions and statues. They're all outlawed. All you have is the Pharaoh and his wife. He is shown, and it strikes me as very odd, in the company of soldiers.

And it's almost like he needs a military escort to stop the disgruntled population in general from bumping him off. Wow. So that's why there is really a darker side to Akanatna, I think. it's interesting he kind of sells the royal family maybe for the first time

in a different way than it's been done before right it's very kind of thinking about the Waleses today and William and Kate having this sort of Instagram ready videos of them in like the forest

in Norfolk or wherever they go and that kind of very beautiful we're a lovely family we've got the gorgeous children and beautiful clothes and everything's wonderful and that it strikes me is that kind of slightly

intimate look actually at a human family but who are being placed above the gods is there a kind of panic that when he's effacing the marks of these other gods in temples or in these religious sites and then there's no response from the gods

do people not stop and go hold on a minute a whole belief system might need to change because the pharaoh hasn't been he's totally turned to smote they don't today right like they don't like oh well if there was a god in the world this horrendous thing wouldn't be happening elsewhere

they just kind of go oh well just get on with our daily things And I've always said this on this podcast. I'm really fascinated with the idea of not believing as opposed to the depiction of we're always shown in history as people believing. Like totally. Yeah, like of going, well, they say that, but I don't know.

There's always skeptics among that kind of thing. But it is a real sales technique in many ways. And it sounds like that they're doing this purposely, as you're kind of saying, and that Wales way and the modern British royal family kind of way where we're going, we have to sell a certain image. The unit, the family unit. So I think we've got an image here of the family.

I've never seen this in terms of Egyptology before. This is the first time I've seen this type of image. So that piece is now in Berlin, but it is by the standards of ancient Egyptian art, absolutely wacky out there. Yeah. I'll describe it for listeners. And then Campbell, you can tell me quite how wrong I am.

Because it doesn't look like how you would imagine Egyptian art. It looks very atypical, actually, of the usual style. I mean, it's carved into, sort of quite 2D figures, carved into a flat stone ground. So in that sense, and there's hieroglyphics sort of centering, you know, or framing these figures. So in that sense, it does look Egyptian. But there's what I assume is the royal family at the centre. So there are two figures, I'm guessing it's the pharaoh on the left because he's slightly bigger. Correct.

And then his wife, Nefertiti. And actually, I can recognise her headdress. Yeah, very distinctive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flat, Torp's Crone. Yeah, absolutely. So they're sat on stools or chairs facing inwards to each other. And they have at least two children.

I think there might be a third maybe on Nefertiti's shoulder. Now, these children, they're not infant-like. They are basically miniature women. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like fully developed miniature women. Giving cuttingly theories kind of thing. Oh my gosh, it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm assuming that they are their daughters. They all look female to me. Yes. And in between this couple and this beautiful family scene, we have at some kind of disc, maybe a representation of the sun with these rays coming out and the rays are falling on the faces of the pharaoh and his queen. It's very intimate.

It's very family-orientated. And we know that this idea of lineage is so important and that power exists within these genetic lines. But it also seems very human to me. And also the figures, I mean, they're quite naturalistic. compared to other forms of Egyptian art. And that's not to say that there is a naturalism in Egyptian art. But these feel very, the limbs are quite deftly created.

There's quite a lot of depth in terms of the sculpture. So you get shadows falling on them. I mean, they're not quite comparable to Greek or even Roman art. And that's not to say that's better. But there's something more classical in my Western British coded visual mind, looking at them. Tell me what this picture means. Well, I mean, that's a great description. We're not entirely sure.

That's the theme. What does this mean? Well, I'll break it down. The standard Egyptological explanation is in the absence of God. So usually you would have king may be the queen, the king's chief wife. It's not absolutely standard the queen features, actually. The relationship between the gods is you have, your god maybe with an animal head

and the king is having a relationship with that god on behalf of all of humanity here the god is the sun disk in between them and it's strange for all kinds of reasons the god is

in a sense an iconic so it's not in that standard Egyptian way of showing a human form or even a hybrid form you are seeing a a disc. You cannot make a statue of a disc. There doesn't seem to have been any attempt to make a statue of this disc. So the space left in the gap, the absence of the gods is filled by the royal

family. So the queen plays in some ways a much more prominent role as this kind of female compliment to the king. They both have a kind of androgynous appearance. But you pointed out something I've never really noticed Maddie, which is the children are like weird miniature adults and you do you do get that in other periods of Egyptian history but here because they're on they're literally clambering all over

the couple. Like little imps or something. Yeah. So you would never get the king shown or the queen shown really in the company of their children. Especially not in this naturalistic way right. I sort of imagine them being like if to depict a more in a row of sort of here's the king and then here's the king and then here's is several wives and several children. But this is a scene, there's action.

I suppose that's what I mean by the naturalism. The children are literally interacting with all the limbs are confused and the pharaoh is lifting one of the daughters up to kiss her on the mouth, I think, or on the head at least. And there's so much movement going on here. It doesn't feel very formal. It doesn't feel very formal, but this piece was part of an altar stone, basically. So it was the centre of a shrine.

So it's from a very high end, actually very formal religious, setting where the king and the queen are playing the role explicitly of a god and a goddess who are the children of the sun god so the idea is you have the sun the atten so the disc is called the aten so the name achanatin means servant or effective for the aton so this is not new

the god has existed before the name of this aspect of the sun god has existed before but what is new is the kind of relationship the absence of other gods the fact that the children are shown but I emphasise the children are female. Yeah. No male children are shown.

So Tutankhamen may be a brother or a half-brother of these girls. Oh, wow. But he is not shown. There is a ritual role played by female children towards their father, which appears at different periods. But then it seems to be unlucky almost. There's a taboo against showing a male air, because if you show a male air, they might suddenly...

Usurp. Do you in the back. So that's very against what we know of that. later Western, early modern, 18th century thing of going, show the male air, show that this is there. And girls are irrelevant. We only care about the boy. Yeah, like girls have a prominent ball. Yeah, yeah.

I suppose as well it speaks to the power of these monuments themselves, actually, in these artworks, that you're almost manifesting a coup against yourself if you show your son. Yeah. Because I suppose they're so time-consuming and expensive to create that if you are the son, you could bump your father off. Yes. And then you're already there written into history,

literally on the wall. Your legitimacy is confirmed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we know, I think I'm right in saying that throughout Egyptian history, there's a lot of, where there are difficult family dynamics and people usurping each other, they then go and destroy the image of the person they've usept or are trying to usurp, right? So there's a power in these monuments that, again, I think we don't necessarily read today. Absolutely. And Achanaten both perpetrated attack on the names of gods, even including the name of his father. So his father was called Amin Hotep, the third. And he had no qualms about attacking the name of his own dad. Get rid of him. Maybe not to get rid of him, but certainly to attack some aspect of him because

the name Amun, who he hated, was in the name of his dad. So there's some complicated psychology going on there. But then the experiment fails after about 17 years. The role of Nefertiti is intensely debated by Egyptologists. Maybe she changes her name. She rules as Pharaoh. Who knows? but then Tutankhamen comes along a boy at nine to the throne and of course there are all these senior officials trying to control his actions and he begins what must have been

in some ways difficult for him a complete proscription of Akanatten his likely father and when he's referred to Akanaten is said to be that criminal who turned his back on Egypt and who abandoned the gods and who absolutely

had every name, every image. This is one of the few things that survives. All those Talatap blocks, the three pan span wide blocks, were torn down and reused. He was left out of all the later Kings lists. He was the most embarrassing, acutely dark to an ancient Egyptian dark period. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive head first into the mud, blood,

and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History. Hit wherever you get your podcasts. What I want to know now, I suppose, is how does this come to an end then? We've talked kind of about tracing the origins, and we looked at the very beginning, but obviously this is going to have to peter out.

Where does this come and why does this come? I guess so we mentioned Cleopatra the 7th. So she is the last, in a sense, the last pharaoh. Maybe her son, Caesarian, you could say it's the last pharaoh, because then Egypt is absorbed into the Roman Empire. And the emperor of the time, Augustus, declares that he's the pharaoh and he's referred to by Egyptian names and doing things on Egyptian temple walls.

But then that starts several centuries of the pharaoh of Egypt being shown on temple walls is actually a Roman emperor and most of them never went to Egypt so there's a peering out Hadrian, the Emperor Hadrian comes along and takes an interest in Egypt, takes an interest in, well he had an interest in his boyfriend

Antinous who drowns in the Nile maybe a sacrifice who knows very mysterious but then he is declared a god Antinous the lover of Hadrian is declared a god and he's the last Egyptian god the last minted Egyptian god

is the gay lover of Hadrian which I rather love. But then after that, there's the coming of Christianity and the development of the Byzantine Empire. And that's it. It's a slow, it's a death of a thousand cuts, I guess. It's slowly, slowly, slowly. It's not one spectacular moment.

Some of the last hieroglyphic inscriptions, oh gosh, is it Diocletian? A Roman emperor is mentioned there, but then once hieroglyphic text stops being used, then the magic and the power and the representation of, ancient Egyptian rulers ceases to be. Of course, people still rule Egypt. Yes.

And some might say, you know, the president of Egypt at the moment is a pharaoh of sorts. But it's a different time and a different context. Certainly, the word pharaoh seems to first appear in the reign of Akanatham. And it's carried on used by the Roman emperors. But then when the Roman emperors cease to be shown on temple walls, if you don't have temples, temples are the kind of engine, the driver for the phoronic idea. So the word pharaoh comes in quite late then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great house. Great house. It means great house. And it's like, well, yeah, like referring to a statement by the White House or Buckingham Palace said. The Great House said as the institution rather than the person. Oh, I did not know this. Yeah, the great pharaoh means great house. Wow.

Before we wrap up Campbell, if you had to live under any pharaoh, who do you think you would survive under who's your best shot? Of all of the pharaohs are the ones we've talked about. Maybe the ones we've talked about today, unless you have a favourite who we've not discussed. Oh, do you have a favourite? I do have a favourite. Oh, give us that one. Yeah, please, let's have that one.

The female pharaoh suit is just so, I mean, she's just so dynamic and she does great things, and she seems to really captain this kind of ambitious golden age. And if she'd been male, we would have no question saying she's the best pharaoh. Anyway, I would have preferred her. I wouldn't have liked to have lived under Ackhamatin. Because I think there is the sense that if you were living in his city, you had to kind of subversively worship the old gods. So you had to, you know, totally the line officially and watch you back.

Well, thank you so much for today's episode. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot. If you have ideas for future shows, whether from the ancient world or the modern period, where do we go on to? Other history bits. What's a cutoff, Anthony? Oh, in my head, we don't go beyond 1920.

I think that's really. We've done 1960s. We've gone above, but I don't like venturing in there. Okay. If you want to make Anthony feel uncomfortable and push him into the 1960s or even the 1970s, then he will quit, but I'll be here. So you can get in touch at After Dark Historyhit.com.

Thank you.