PHARAOH. Egyptian Pr-ʿ (pronounced something like *pārĕṓ), literally (the) “Great House;” a later designation of the king of Egypt.
The monarch who sat on the throne of Egypt was traditionally accorded a number of names and titles encompassing his divine and terrestrial roles in the scheme of things: “Horus” (the falcon-god incarnate), “Golden Horus,” “Favorite of the Two Ladies” (i.e., the cobra and vulture, tutelary goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt), “He-of-the-Sut-plant-and-the-bee” (i.e., King of Upper and Lower Egypt), “son of Re” (the sun-god) etc. The word “Pharaoh,” however, was not initially part of his titulary. Attested from the early 3d millennium B.C. as a designation of part of the large palace complex at Memphis wherein the king and the officers of his administration lived, the term by extension came to signify the authority of the central government. During the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1560–1320 B.C.), and certainly before the reign of Thutmose III (1504–1451 B.C.), “Great House” was occasionally applied to the person of the king himself by metonymy, much as “the Porte” stood for the Turkish sultan, or the “White House” betokens the President of the U.S.A. While initially this semantic development took place within the realm of the vernacular, before the close of the New Kingdom (ca. 1070 B.C.) “Pharaoh” had become a polite circumlocution for the reigning king in official jargon, and as such from the reign of Sheshonk I (last quarter of the 10th century B.C.) is sometimes included within the king’s titulary in formal inscriptions. By the 8th century B.C. it was an integral part of the royal cartouche itself (i.e., the oval within which the king’s name was written in hieroglyphs); and from the 7th century on was nothing but a synonym of the generic “king,” the older word which it rapidly replaced. Its occurrence in the Bible in Genesis, Exodus, and 2 Kings as synonymous with “king of Egypt” conforms to the final stage of its native evolution.
The word did not escape oblivion itself. Although Ptolemaic temples (ca. 300–30 B.C.) display “Pharaoh” frequently and consistently in the context of inscriptions where it means only “king,” the termination of the monarchy by the Roman emperor Augustus rendered it obsolete. Coptic Christianity (beginning in the late 3d century A.D.) wholly misinterpreted “Pharaoh” (as definite article p-) followed by -rero, “king”—no such word exists); while classical and Islamic tradition transmogrified it into a personal name for a few individual kings (see also LÄ 4: 1021).
Bibliography
Gardiner, A. H. 1953. Egyptian Grammar. 3d ed. Oxford.
Posener, G. 1960. De la divinité de la Pharaon. Paris.
Vergote, J. 1959. Joseph en Égypte. Louvain.
DONALD B. REDFORD
Redford, D. B. (1992). Pharaoh. In D. N. Freedman (Ed.), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. 5, pp. 288–289). New York: Doubleday.