THE DIVINITY OF THE PHARAOH IN GREEK SOURCES

Abstract

It has long been known that the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as divine in Egyptian culture. He was the son of Re and the mediator between the gods and humankind. During the royal coronation, he was transformed into a manifestation of the god Horus. He could be referred to as antr(‘divine being’, ‘god’), and was regularly described in inscriptions as ‘the good god’ or ‘perfect god’ (ntr nfr). By the New Kingdom period, the king's divinity was believed to be imbued by his possession of a divine manifestation of the god Amun-Re called the ‘living royalka’, which came upon him at his coronation, and which was also renewed during the yearlyopetfestival held in the Luxor temple in Thebes. As late as the period of Persian domination over Egypt in the fifth centuryb.c., Egyptian temple texts continued to describe their foreign king Darius I as a divine being, owing to the ‘living royalka’. This hieroglyphic formula proclaiming the king's divinity continues for Alexander the Great and even in Ptolemaic temple reliefs.