Pharaoh

Publication

Pharaoh comprises a compact, substantial introduction; sixty-seven chapters; and an evocative epilogue (the latter omitted at the book's original publication, and restored in the 1950s). Like Prus' previous novels, Pharaoh debuted (1895–96) in newspaper serialization—in the Warsaw Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly). It was dedicated "To my wife, Oktawia Głowacka, née Trembińska, as a small token of esteem and affection."

Unlike the author's earlier novels, Pharaoh had first been composed in its entirety, rather than being written in chapters from issue to issue. This may account for its often being described as Prus' "best-composed novel"—indeed, "one of the best-composed Polish novels."

The original 1897 book edition and some subsequent ones divided the novel into three volumes. Later editions have presented it in two volumes or in a single one. Except in wartime, the book has never been out of print in Poland.

A 2014 edition of Faraon, in Poland, is furnished by Andrzej Niwiński, professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of Warsaw, with extensive annotations. Though Prus was not a historian and, apart from Pharaoh, wrote no other historical novel, it is regarded as superior to any other novel on ancient Egypt. From available sources, Prus drew information and authentic ancient texts and worked them, as vital elements, into his masterpiece. Regardless of occasional anachronisms, anatopisms, and errors in description of some realia, the novel has well stood the test of time. In spite of translations into many languages, however, it still remains little known in the wider world.

Plot

Pharaoh begins with one of the more memorable openings in a novel — an opening written in the style of an ancient chronicle:

In the thirty-third year of the happy reign of Ramses XII, Egypt celebrated two events that filled her loyal inhabitants with pride and joy.

In the month of Mechir, in December, there returned to Thebes laden with sumptuous gifts the god Khonsu, who had traveled three years and nine months in the land of Bukhten, restoring to health the local king's daughter named Bent-res and exorcising the evil spirit not only from the king's family but even from the fortress of Bukhten.

And in the month of Pharmouthi, in February, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, the ruler of Phoenicia and of the nine nations, Mer-amen-Ramses XII, after consulting the gods, to whom he is equal, named as his Successor to the Throne his twenty-two-year-old son Ham-sem-merer-amen-Ramses.

This choice delighted the pious priests, eminent nomarchs, valiant army, faithful people and all creatures living on Egyptian soil. For the Pharaoh's elder sons, born of the Hittite princess, had, due to spells that could not be investigated, been visited by an evil spirit. One, twenty-seven years old, had been unable to walk from his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and the third, after drinking tainted wine that he had been unwilling to give up, had gone mad and, fancying himself an ape, spent days on end in the trees.

The fourth son Ramses, however, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of High Priest Amenhotep, was strong as the Apis bull, brave as a lion and wise as the priests....

Pharaoh combines features of several literary genres: the historical novel, the political novel, the Bildungsroman, the utopian novel, the sensation novel. It also comprises a number of interbraided strands — including the plot line, Egypt's cycle of seasons, the country's geography and monuments, and ancient Egyptian practices (e.g. mummification rituals and techniques) — each of which rises to prominence at appropriate moments.

Characters

Prus took characters' names where he found them, sometimes anachronistically or anatopistically. At other times (as with Nitager, commander of the army that guards the gates of Egypt from attack by Asiatic peoples, in chapter 1 et seq.; and as with the priest Samentu, in chapter 55 et seq.) he apparently invented them. The origins of the names of some prominent characters may be of interest:

Ramses, the novel's protagonist: the name of two pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty and nine pharaohs of the 20th Dynasty.

Nikotris, Ramses' mother: semi-historic Sixth Dynasty female pharaoh Nitocris; or the identically named daughter, Nitocris, of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty king Psamtik I.

Amenhotep, high priest and Ramses' maternal grandfather: name of a number of ancient Egyptians, including four 18th Dynasty pharaohs and the High Priest of Amon under Pharaohs Ramses IX to Ramses XI (the High Priest played a key role in the civil war that ended Egypt's 20th Dynasty and, with it, the New Kingdom).

Herhor, High Priest of Amon and Ramses' principal antagonist: historic high priest Herihor.

Pentuer, scribe to Herhor: historic scribe Pentewere (Pentaur); or perhaps Pentawer, a son of Pharaoh Ramses III.

Thutmose, Ramses' cousin: a fairly common name, also the name of four pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty.

Sarah, Ramses' Jewish mistress; Taphath, Sarah's relative and servant; Gideon, Sarah's father: names drawn from those of Biblical personalities.

Patrokles, a Greek mercenary general: Patroclus, in Homer's Iliad.

Ennana, a junior military officer: Egyptian scribe-pupil's name, attached to an ancient text (cited in Pharaoh, chapter 4: Ennana's "plaint on the sore lot of a junior officer").

Themes

Pharaoh belongs to a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the 16th century and Jan Kochanowski's play, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578), and also includes Ignacy Krasicki's Fables and Parables (1779) and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz's The Return of the Deputy (1790). Pharaoh's story covers a two-year period, ending in 1085 BCE with the demise of the Egyptian Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom.

Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Pharaoh:

The daring conception of [Prus'] novel Pharaoh... is matched by its excellent artistic composition. It [may] be [described] as a novel on... mechanism[s] of state power and, as such, is probably unique in world literature of the nineteenth century.... Prus, [in] selecting the reign of 'Pharaoh Ramses XIII' [the last Ramesside was actually Ramses XI] in the eleventh century [BCE], sought a perspective that was detached from... pressures of [topicality] and censorship. Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society, he... suggest[s] an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state. [Prus] convey[s] certain views [regarding] the health and illness of civilizations.... Pharaoh... is a work worthy of Prus' intellect and [is] one of the best Polish novels.

The perspective of which Miłosz writes, enables Prus, while formulating an ostensibly objective vision of historic Egypt, simultaneously to create a satire on man and society, much as Jonathan Swift in Britain had done the previous century.

But Pharaoh is par excellence a political novel. Its young protagonist, Prince Ramses (who is 22 years old at the novel's opening), learns that those who would oppose the priesthood are vulnerable to cooptation, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation or assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses as pharaoh, is the importance, to power, of knowledge — of science.

As a political novel, Pharaoh became a favorite of Joseph Stalin's; similarities have been pointed out between it and Sergei Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

Inspirations

Pharaoh is unique in Prus' oeuvre as a historical novel. A Positivist by philosophical persuasion, Prus had long argued that historical novels must inevitably distort historic reality. He had, however, eventually come over to the view of the French Positivist critic Hippolyte Taine that the arts, including literature, may act as a second means alongside the sciences to study reality, including broad historic reality.

Prus, in the interest of making certain points, intentionally introduced some anachronisms and anatopisms into the novel.

The book's depiction of the demise of Egypt's New Kingdom three thousand years earlier, reflects the demise of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, exactly a century before Pharaoh's completion.

A preliminary sketch for Prus' only historical novel was his first historical short story, "A Legend of Old Egypt." This remarkable story shows clear parallels with the subsequent novel in setting, theme and denouement. "A Legend of Old Egypt", in its turn, had taken inspiration from contemporaneous events: the fatal 1887-88 illnesses of Germany's warlike Kaiser Wilhelm I and of his reform-minded son and successor, Friedrich III. The latter emperor would, then unbeknown to Prus, survive his ninety-year-old predecessor, but only by ninety-nine days.

In 1893 Prus' old friend Julian Ochorowicz, having returned to Warsaw from Paris, delivered several public lectures on ancient Egyptian knowledge. Ochorowicz (whom Prus had portrayed in The Doll as the scientist "Julian Ochocki," obsessed with inventing a powered flying machine, a decade and a half before the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight) may have inspired Prus to write his historical novel about ancient Egypt. Ochorowicz made available to Prus books on the subject that he had brought from Paris.

In preparation for composing Pharaoh, Prus made a painstaking study of Egyptological sources, including works by John William Draper, Ignacy Żagiell, Georg Ebers and Gaston Maspero. Prus actually incorporated ancient texts into his novel like tesserae into a mosaic; drawn from one such text was a major character, Ennana.

Accuracy

Examples of anachronism and anatopism, mentioned above, bear out that a punctilious historical accuracy was never an object with Prus in writing Pharaoh. "That's not the point", Prus' compatriot Joseph Conrad told a relative. Prus had long emphasized in his "Weekly Chronicles" articles that historical novels cannot but distort historic reality. He used ancient Egypt as a canvas on which to depict his deeply considered perspectives on man, civilization and politics.

Nevertheless, Pharaoh is remarkably accurate, even from the standpoint of present-day Egyptology. The novel does a notable job of recreating a primal ancient civilization, complete with the geography, climate, plants, animals, ethnicities, countryside, agriculture, cities, trades, commerce, social stratification, politics, religion and warfare. Prus succeeds remarkably in transporting readers back to the Egypt of thirty-one centuries ago.

The embalming and funeral scenes; the court protocol; the waking and feeding of the gods; the religious beliefs, ceremonies and processions; the concept behind the design of Pharaoh Zoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara; the descriptions of travels and of locales visited on the Nile and in the desert; Egypt's exploitation of Nubia as a source of gold — all draw upon scholarly documentation. The personalities and behaviors of the characters are keenly observed and deftly drawn, often with the aid of apt Egyptian texts.

Popularity

Pharaoh, as a "political novel", has remained perennially topical ever since it was written. The book's enduring popularity, however, has as much to do with a critical yet sympathetic view of human nature and the human condition. Prus offers a vision of mankind as rich as Shakespeare's, ranging from the sublime to the quotidian, from the tragic to the comic. The book is written in limpid prose, imbued with poetry, leavened with humor, graced with moments of transcendent beauty.

Joseph Conrad, during his 1914 visit to Poland just as World War I was breaking out, "delighted in his beloved Prus" and read Pharaoh and everything else by the ten-years-older, recently deceased author that he could get his hands on. He pronounced his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising "better than Dickens"—Dickens being a favorite author of Conrad's.

The novel has been translated into 24 languages: Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

Film

In 1966 Pharaoh was adapted as a Polish feature film directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. In 1967 the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.