This whole thing started out as a couple disjoined pages of collected images and notes. Over the years it became more refined, but like many projects, it grew beyond its initial scope. So I created this site to try to organise the sources of the names of the pharaohs, with references and hieroglyphs freely available online.
Almost all hieroglyphs presented has been verified by visual inspection of the sources mentioned. This is a hobby, I am not an Egyptologist. I add to this website when time permits. The site is primarily designed for and intended to be read on a large screen, but works fine on phones and tablets too.
For historical or general information about pharaohs, this Wikipedia page is a much better place to start. The order of succession is disputed by Egyptologists for a number of pharaohs — in some cases their very existence. This website concentrates on the actual names, not on discussions about which pharaoh should be placed where. I have tried to follow the general consensus, but this is not always easy, as progression takes years to complete and is often hidden away in obscure journals that are only available to the academic community.
There will inevitably be errors, typos, omissions and other
(hopefully minor) problems on these pages.
Always check with the original sources to ensure you are
getting the most accurate information. It is up to you which information to trust, but you should always check
the sources anyway – before repeating potentially incorrect
information. Yes, that include information from this website!
A huge problem for websites is that they inevitably disappear, this will happen to this website too. With print, there is always the possibility of finding a physical copy of a book or article. When a domain name disappears, the information is lost. Unless it has been archived somewhere, but that does not always preserve all the information that was available on the domain, and if the archive itself is discontinued, the data will still be lost.
Preserving the data behind the webpages for the future to make sure that the information is freely available in case everything goes digital. Altering digital records is too easy, while the actual printed books are much more likely to be free of manipulation. Safeguarding unbiased information in the digital era is almost impossible. Digital records (including these pages) are susceptible to manipulation and forgery, especially with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is clearly not to be trusted due to insidious manipulation by its programmers with hidden agendas.
Always try to find the actual physical source, and not a digitized version that might have been altered. Beware! Digital manipulation is extremely trivial. Use multiple sources from different locations if possible. The information presented in these pages are subject to errors and omissions which is entirely my fault. To err is human they say, and this project is no exception.
I would like to thank Bieke Mahieu for invaluable help and inspiration with the Turin king list.
All the material on the website is free to use (under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license) which means that you are free to copy and redistribute and adapt the material in any medium or format, provided that you give appropriate credit, something like:
Lundström, Peter. (2020). PHARAOH.SE Available at: https://pharaoh.se [Accessed 17 Jan. 2024].
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