The royal titulary of the Egyptian Pharaohs was the standard naming convention taken by the kings of Ancient Egypt. It symbolises their supremacy and holy might. The names were sometimes altered during the reign to mark an important event.
The knowledge to read and write hieroglyphs was lost by 450 CE, and would remain so until the 1820s, when the Rosetta Stone was deciphered, enabling the reading of the hieroglyphs again. Hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate wovels, and in modern transcriptions, an 'e' is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. Since the ancient Egyptian language has been dead for two millennia, the knowledge of how the writing was actually pronounced can only be estimated.
To be consistent, the hieroglyphic sun disc ⊙ (Gardiner sign N5) is always transliterated as Ra on these pages, despite the use of Re being more common among Egyptologists, if also arbitrarily used. (i.e. Ramesses and Neferkare both inlude the N5-sign, but one as Ra, the other as Re.)
The combined names form the royal titulary, which consisted of the Horus, Nebty, Golden Horus, Throne, and Birth names. Some pharaohs are only known by one or two of the five names, and many remain to be assigned to the correct king. All known and most unidentified names of the pharaohs can be found here.
List of the Pharaohs
The pharaohs of ancient Egypt, from predynastic times up to and including the roman emperors, who were not pharaohs as such, but are included here because some of their names were inscribed on monuments using hieroglyphs. The chronological order of the pharaohs is difficult to determine because it has been more than 2,000 years since the last one ruled. The chronology of the pharaohs is comparable to putting together a complicated Jigsaw puzzle that is missing half of its pieces and has bits from many other puzzles mixed in that might or might not belong.