What Was a Pharaoh? A Living God With an Enormous Bureaucracy

Egyptian kingship rested on a concept called maat, usually translated as order, truth, balance or justice, understood as the correct arrangement of the cosmos that had existed since creation and was permanently under threat from disorder. The king's function was to maintain it, and everything else followed from that. He was identified in life with the falcon god Horus and in death with Osiris, so that succession was a divine as well as a political event. He was formally the only person who could make offerings to the gods, so every temple relief across the country shows the king performing the ritual even though in practice priests did it on his behalf. Military victory, the flooding of the Nile, good harvests and the suppression of foreigners were all presented as manifestations of maat maintained, which is why temple walls depict the king smiting enemies in a pose repeated with almost no variation for three thousand years: it is a statement about cosmic function rather than a record of a battle.

Egyptian kingship is unusually legible because the symbolism is consistent and explained in the texts:

• •The double crown, combining the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown of Lower Egypt, asserting the unification that founded the state
• •The crook and the flail, held crossed on the chest, signalling the roles of shepherd and provider
• •The uraeus, a rearing cobra on the brow, representing a goddess who spits fire at the king's enemies
• •The false beard, a ceremonial attachment worn by kings including female ones, plaited and straight for the living and curved for the deceased
• •A titulary of five names taken at accession, each with its own formula, of which the throne name and the birth name are the ones written in cartouches, the oval loops that mark royal names in inscriptions and that provided the key to decipherment

Behind the theology sat one of the earliest and most effective bureaucracies in history. The vizier ran the administration, and beneath him were treasuries, granaries, a department of public works, provincial governors called nomarchs, and an enormous scribal class whose literacy in a script that took years to learn made them indispensable and privileged. The state's economic basis was the annual Nile flood, which deposited fertile silt and whose height was measured at nilometers to forecast the harvest and set taxation accordingly. Taxes were collected in grain and stored in state granaries, which functioned as famine insurance and as the currency in which labour was paid; the workers who built the pyramids were fed, housed and organised by this system, and were not enslaved, as the excavation of their settlement and their tombs beside the site has established. Records were kept obsessively, and a good proportion of surviving Egyptian writing is administrative rather than religious.

The office was male by default and the exceptions are instructive. Hatshepsut ruled for about twenty years in the fifteenth century BC, initially as regent for her stepson and then as king outright, adopting the full titulary and being depicted in male regalia including the false beard, and presiding over a prosperous reign with major building and a famous trading expedition; her images were systematically erased decades after her death, probably by her successor's administration to secure the male line rather than out of personal hostility. Akhenaten in the fourteenth century abolished the traditional pantheon in favour of a single sun disc, moved the capital to a new city, changed the artistic conventions so radically that the style is instantly identifiable, and was erased from the king lists after his death, with his city abandoned. Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of independent Egypt, was Macedonian Greek by descent, spoke Egyptian when her dynasty had not bothered for three centuries, and presented herself in Egyptian religious terms while manoeuvring between Roman factions.

A striking proportion of the state's surplus went into preparing for a king's afterlife, on the reasoning that his continued existence sustained the order everyone depended on. The pyramid form belongs to the Old Kingdom, roughly 2600 to 2100 BC, and the Great Pyramid at Giza, built for Khufu, took perhaps twenty years and remained the tallest structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years. Pyramids were abandoned as tombs afterwards because they advertised their contents, and New Kingdom rulers were buried in cut-rock tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which were robbed anyway, with one exception: the small and hastily prepared tomb of a minor young king called Tutankhamun, found nearly intact in 1922 and containing over five thousand objects, whose significance is that it shows what every other royal burial must have held. Mummification preserved the body because the spirit was thought to require it, funerary texts supplied the deceased with the knowledge needed to navigate the afterworld, and the whole apparatus supported an enormous economy of priests, craftsmen and endowed estates.

The title originally meant the palace and transferred to the ruler only after about 1400 BC. The role combined head of state, army commander and sole legitimate priest, identified with Horus in life and Osiris in death, and its function was maintaining maat, the cosmic order threatened by chaos, which is why temple reliefs show the same smiting pose for three thousand years. Behind it sat a scribal bureaucracy taxing the Nile flood in grain, the workers at Giza were paid labourers rather than slaves, and the exceptions to male rule include Hatshepsut, who took the full titulary.