by Michael Fassbender

Created on: June 28, 2008

The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as nothing less than the sole intermediary between the gods and his people. With one foot in the human sphere, and one in the divine, he moved in both circles, yet was fully a part of neither. Like an ordinary man, he was born, he lived, and he died; like a god, he exerted a metaphysical effect on the life of his nation, and after death, he was capable of joining the gods in the afterlife, even in the earliest phases of Egyptian history, when the afterlife was not necessarily generally accessible. The pharaoh stood at the heart of what "Egyptian" meant in the ancient world, and even today, we define the flow of Egyptian history by the state of its monarchy.

From the earliest attested phases of Egyptian history, the pharaoh has always been viewed as both a man and a god. The fact that he was depicted both in grander scale - physically dwarfing his subordinates and enemies - and in a variety of forms, such as that of a bull and a falcon, demonstrated the aura of divinity which was attributed to him. At the same time, no one had any illusions about his mortal nature. Indeed, the development of the mortuary cult reinforced the duality of the king. By preparing for his mortal decease, his followers emphasized what was eternal in his nature.

It was because of this dual nature that he was able to serve as the intermediary between gods and men. He could approach the gods, because he was one of them, and ask them for their blessings in the human sphere; he could even compel divine cooperation, at least in theory. Conversely, he could speak to his people with the full authority of the gods, and when the monarchy was healthy, this assertion seems to have been accepted at face value.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture that the existence of a large and powerful priesthood does not undermine the validity of these statements. The priesthood in Egypt was not a divine vocation; it was simply one aspect of the bureaucracy. Scribes often held "secular" and religious offices simultaneously, and important positions in priestly office were key stepping-stones of a scribal career. The essence of such office is the same in both contexts: the delegation of the king's authority to those capable of reading his commands and passing them down to the next in the chain of command. Scribes were empowered to serve as the pharaoh's representatives, because the king himself could not be everywhere at once, and this applied to human administration and to divine

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