Pharaoh (Prus novel)

Pharaoh Ramses XIII (center) with his principal antagonists, high priests Herhor (left) and Mefres, in Jerzy Kawalerowicz's 1966 film adaptation of Bolesław Prus' novel, Pharaoh.

Pharaoh (Polish title: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. Composed over a year's time in 1894-95, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had previously disapproved of historical novels.

Prus had as a 15-year-old fought in Poland's 1863 Uprising, directed at restoring the country's independence. In Pharaoh he transmuted his experiences and his subsequent reflections on human societies into a unique novel on politics. Pharaoh is a study of mechanisms of political power, set in the Egypt of 1087-85 BCE as the country experiences internal upheavals and external threats that will culminate in the fall of its Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom.

"Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society," writes Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, "[Prus] suggests an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state." The ancient setting also permitted Prus to evade the depredations of the Russian censor, and to achieve a distance conducive to a dispassionate analysis of man and society.

Prus immersed himself in Egyptian history, art and writings, and produced perhaps the most compelling literary depiction ever of life at every level of ancient Egyptian society. Pharaoh's abiding popularity is attested by translations into 20 languages and by a 1966 feature film.

Publication

Bolesław Prus.

Pharaoh comprises a compact but substantial introduction, 67 chapters and an evocative epilog (the latter omitted at original publication). Like Prus' previous novels, Pharaoh debuted (1895-96) in newspaper serialization. Unlike them, however, it had first been composed in its entirety rather than being written in chapters from issue to issue.

The 1897 and some subsequent book editions divided the novel's text 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.

Plot

Pharaoh begins with one of the more memorable openings to be found 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 for three years and nine months in the land of Bukhten, restoring the health of the local king's daughter called 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, the eminent nomarchs, the valiant army, the faithful people and all the 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 since his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and the third, after drinking tainted wine that he had been unwilling to forgo, had gone mad and, fancying himself an ape, spent days on end in the trees.

Pharaoh combines features of several literary genres: the historical novel, the political novel, the Bildungsroman and 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.

The fate of the novel's protagonist, the future "Ramses XIII" (historically there were only eleven Ramesside pharaohs), is known from the beginning. Prus closes his introduction with the statement that the story "relates to the eleventh century before Christ, when the Twentieth Dynasty fell and when, after the demise of the Son of the Sun the eternally living Ramses XIII, the throne was seized by, and the uraeus came to adorn the brow of, the eternally living Son of the Sun Sem-amen-Herhor, High Priest of Amon." What the novel will reveal is the elements that lead to this denouement: the character traits of the principals, the social forces in play.

Ancient Egypt at the end of its New Kingdom period is experiencing adversities. The deserts are eroding Egypt's arable land. The country's population has declined from eight to six million. Foreign peoples are entering Egypt in ever-growing numbers, undermining its unity. The chasm between the peasants and craftsmen on one hand, and the ruling classes on the other, is growing, exacerbated by the ruling classes' fondness for luxury and idleness. The country is becoming ever more deeply indebted to Phoenician merchants as imported goods destroy native industries.

The Egyptian priesthood, backbone of the bureaucracy and virtual monopolists of knowledge, have grown immensely wealthy at the expense of the pharaoh and the country. Egypt is facing prospective peril at the hands of rising powers to the north: Assyria and Persia.

Ramses II ("the Great") at the Battle of Kadesh. (Bas relief at Abu Simbel).

The 22-year-old Crown Prince Ramses, having as his father's viceroy made a careful study of Egypt and of the challenges that it faces, evolves a strategy that he hopes will arrest the decline of his own political power and of Egypt's internal viability and international standing as a world power. Ramses plans to win over or subordinate the priesthood, especially the High Priest of Amon, Herhor; obtain for the country's use the treasures that lie stored in the Labyrinth; and, emulating Ramses the Great's military exploits, wage war against Assyria.

Ramses proves himself a brilliant military commander in a victorious lightning war against the invading Libyans. On succeeding to the throne, he encounters the adamant opposition of the priestly hierarchy to his planned reforms. The broad masses of Egyptian society are instinctively drawn to him, but he must still win over or crush the priesthood and their adherents.

In the course of the political intrigue, Ramses' private life becomes hostage to the conflicting interests of the Phoenicians and the Egyptian high priests.

Ramses' ultimate downfall is caused by his underestimation of his opponents and by his impatience with priestly obscurantism: along with the chaff of the priests' myths and rituals, he has inadvertently discarded a crucial piece of scientific knowledge.

Ramses is succeeded to the throne by his arch-enemy Herhor, who paradoxically ends up raising treasure from the Labyrinth to finance the very social reforms that had been planned by Ramses.

Characters

Prus took characters' names where he found them, sometimes anachronistically or anatopistically; at other times (as with the priest Samentu in chapter 55) 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.
• Herhor, high priest of Amon and Ramses' principal antagonist: historic high priest Herihor.
• Pentuer, scribe to Herhor: historic scribe Pentaur.
• 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: Patroklos, in Homer's Iliad.
• Ennana, a junior military officer: Egyptian scribe-pupil's name, attached to an ancient text (cited in chapter 4: Ennana's "plaint on the sore lot of a junior officer").
• Queen Nikotris, Ramses' mother: historic Queen Nitocris.
• Dagon, a Phoenician merchant: a Phoenician and Philistine god of agriculture and the earth; the national god of the Philistines.
• Tamar, Dagon's wife (chapters 8, 13): Biblical daughter of David and half-sister of Absalom.

  

  All ancient Egyptian social classes, including the peasants, are represented in Pharaoh.

• Dutmose, a peasant (chapter 11): historic scribe Dhutmose, in the reign of Pharaoh Ramses XI.
• Menes (three distinct individuals: the first pharaoh; Sarah's physician; a savant and Pentuer's mentor): Menes, the first Egyptian pharaoh.
• Asarhadon, a Phoenician innkeeper: a variant of "Esarhaddon," an Assyrian king.
• Berossus, a Chaldean priest: Berossus, a Babylonian historian and astrologer who flourished about 300 BCE.
• Phut (another name used by Berossus): Phut, a descendant of Noah named in Genesis.
• Cush, a guest at Asarhadon's inn: Cush, a descendant of Noah named in Genesis.
• Hiram, a Phoenician prince: Hiram I, king of Tyre, in Phoenicia.
• Lykon, a young Greek, Ramses' look-alike and nemesis: Lycon, in the Iliad.
• Sargon, an Assyrian envoy: name of two Assyrian kings, the first being the founder of one of history's first empires.
• Seti, Ramses' infant son by Sarah: Seti I, historic pharaoh, father of Ramses II ("the Great").
• Osokhor, a priest thought (chapter 40) to have sold Egyptian priestly secrets to the Phoenicians: a Meshwesh king who ruled Egypt in the late 21st Dynasty.
• Musawasa, a Libyan prince: the Meshwesh, a Libyan tribe.
• Tehenna, Musavasa's son: "Tjehenu," a generic Egyptian term for "Libyan."
• Dion, a Greek architect: Dion, a historic name that appears in a number of contexts.
• Hebron, Ramses' last mistress: Hebron, a city in present-day Israel.

Themes

In a broad sense, Pharaoh belongs in a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the 16th century and Jan Kochanowski's The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys.

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:

File:Stalin 02.jpg

Stalin.

"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."

Kennedy.

The protagonist Ramses learns that those who would oppose the priesthood are vulnerable to cooption, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation or assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses, is the importance, to power, of knowledge or science.

At one level, Pharaoh is an extended study of the metaphor of society-as-organism that Prus had adopted from Herbert Spencer and that he memorably made explicit in the introduction to the novel. All of a society's organ systems must work together in harmony if the society is to survive and prosper.

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. The novel's English translator, Christopher Kasparek, has recounted presciently wondering, well in advance of the event, whether President John F. Kennedy would meet with a fate like that of the book's protagonist.

Inspirations

Taine.

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 French Positivist critic Hippolyte Taine's view that the arts, including literature, may act as a second means alongside the sciences to study reality, including broad historic reality. Prus did in fact, in the interest of making certain points, introduce some anachronisms and anatopisms into the novel.

Pharaoh drew from many sources for its inspiration. Depicting the demise of Egypt's New Kingdom three thousand years earlier, the book also reflects the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's demise in 1795, exactly a century before Pharaoh's completion.

Wilhelm I.

Friedrich III.

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 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") may have inspired Prus to write his historical novel about ancient Egypt, and made available to Prus books on the subject that he had brought from Paris.

Schliemann.

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.

There are as well, throughout the book, numberless echoes of the Bible (e.g., a miniature turning-of-water-to-blood) and of ancient history generally, including Troy and its recent excavation by Heinrich Schliemann.

Herodotus.

For certain of the novel's prominent features Prus, conscientious journalist and scholar that he was, seems to have insisted on having two sources, one of them being based on personal or at least contemporary experience. Thus the historical Egyptian Labyrinth had been described in the fifth century BCE in Book II of The Histories of Herodotus by the Father of History, who visited Egypt's entirely stone-built administrative center, pronounced it more impressive than the pyramids, declared it "beyond my power to describe," then proceeded to give a striking description that Prus incorporated into his novel. The Labyrinth had been made palpably real for Prus, however, by an 1878 visit he paid to the famous ancient labyrinthine salt mine at Wieliczka, near Kraków in southern Poland. According to the foremost Prus scholar, Zygmunt Szweykowski, "The power of the Labyrinth scenes stems, among other things, from the fact that they echo Prus' own experiences when visiting Wieliczka."

Writing over four decades before the construction of the United States' Fort Knox Depository, Prus pictures Egypt's Labyrinth as a perhaps flood-able Egyptian Fort Knox, a repository of gold bullion and of artistic and historic treasures. It was, he writes (chapter 56), "the greatest treasury in Egypt. [H]ere... was preserved the treasure of the Egyptian kingdom, accumulated over centuries, of which it is difficult today to have any conception."

De Lesseps.

Another dually-determined feature of the novel is the "Suez Canal" that the Phoenician Prince Hiram proposes digging. The modern Suez Canal had been completed by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1869, a quarter-century before Prus commenced writing Pharaoh. But, as Prus was aware in chapter one, it had had a predecessor in a canal connecting the Nile River with the Red Sea (during Egypt's Middle Kingdom, centuries before the period of the novel).

Columbus.

A third dually-determined feature was inspired by a solar eclipse that Prus had witnessed at Mława, a hundred kilometers north-northwest of Warsaw, on August 19, 1887, the day before his fortieth birthday. Prus likely was also aware of Christopher Columbus' manipulative use of a lunar eclipse on February 29, 1504, while marooned for a year on Jamaica, in an incident which strikingly resembles the exploitation of a solar eclipse by Ramses' chief antagonist, Herhor, high priest of Amon.

Finally, a fourth dually-determined feature relates to Egyptian beliefs about an afterlife. In 1893, the year before beginning his novel, Prus the skeptic had started taking an intense interest in Spiritualism, attending Warsaw séances which featured the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino.

The Fox sisters.

Modern Spiritualism had been initiated in 1848 in Hydeville, New York, by the Fox sisters, Katie and Margaret, aged 11 and 15, and had survived even their 1888 confession that forty years earlier they had caused the "spirits'" telegraph-like tapping sounds by snapping their toe joints. Spiritualist "mediums" in America and Europe claimed to communicate through tapping sounds with spirits of the dead, eliciting their secrets and conjuring up voices, music, noises and other antics, and occasionally working "miracles" such as levitation.

Eratosthenes.

Spiritualism inspired several of Pharaoh's most striking scenes, especially (chapter 20) the secret meeting at the Temple of Seth in Memphis between three Egyptian priests—Herhor, Mefres, Pentuer—and the Chaldean magus-priest Berossus.

Prus, a disciple of Positivist philosophy, took a strong interest in the history of science. He was aware of Eratosthenes' remarkably accurate calculation of the earth's circumference, and the invention of a steam engine by Heron of Alexandria, centuries after the period of his novel, in Alexandrian Egypt. In chapter 60, he fictitiously credits these achievements to the priest Menes, one of three individuals of the identical name who are mentioned or depicted in Pharaoh: Prus was not always fastidious about characters' names.

Accuracy

Examples of anachronism and anatopism mentioned above make it clear that punctilious historic accuracy was never an overriding object with Prus in writing Pharaoh. "That's not the point," Joseph Conrad told a relative regarding putative inaccuracies in Pharaoh. Prus had long emphasized in his "Weekly Chronicles" that historical novels cannot help but distort historic reality; he used ancient Egypt as a great canvas on which to draw his deeply-considered perspectives of man, civilization and politics.

Zoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara — metaphor, in stone, for Egypt's social stratification (discussed in Pharaoh, chapter 18).

That said, in many regards Pharaoh is remarkably accurate, even from the standpoint of present-day Egyptology; and the novel does a unique job of recreating a primal ancient civilization, complete with the country's geography, climate, plants, animals, ethnicities, countryside, cities, social stratification, politics, religion and warfare. Prus succeeds incomparably 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 locales visited on the Nile and in the desert — could hardly be bettered. The personalities and behaviors of the characters are keenly observed and deftly drawn, often incorporating appropriate ancient Egyptian texts.

Popularity

As a "political novel," Pharaoh has since 1895 gained fresh relevance with each decade. The book's undiminished popularity, however, is as much due to a critical yet sympathetic view of human nature and the human condition. Prus offers a vision of humankind 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, suffused with poetry, leavened with humor, graced with moments of transcendent beauty.

Pharaoh has been translated into twenty languages: Armenian, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Ukrainian. In 1966 it was produced as a Polish feature film, Faraon (Polish for "Pharaoh").

References

• Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, New York, Macmillan, 1969.

• Zygmunt Szweykowski, Nie tylko o Prusie: szkice (Not Only about Prus: Sketches), Poznań, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1967.

• Krystyna Tokarzówna and Stanisław Fita, Bolesław Prus, 1847-1912: Kalendarz życia i twórczości (Bolesław Prus, 1847-1912: a Calendar of [His] Life and Work), edited by Zygmunt Szweykowski, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1969.

• Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd edition, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972.

• Edward Pieścikowski, Bolesław Prus, 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985.

• Stanisław Fita, ed., Wspomnienia o Bolesławie Prusie (Reminiscences about Bolesław Prus), Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1962.

• Zdzisław Najder, Conrad under Familial Eyes, Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-521-25082-X.

• James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, New York, Bantam Books, 1967.

• Adolf Erman, ed., The Ancient Egyptians: a Sourcebook of Their Writings, translated [from the German] by Aylward M. Blackman, introduction to the Torchbook edition by William Kelly Simpson, New York, Harper & Row, 1966.

• Herodotus, The Histories, Newly translated and with an Introduction by Aubrey de Selincourt, Harmondsworth, England, Penguin Books, 1965.

• Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1955.

• Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and Curtin's Translation," The Polish Review, 1986, nos. 2-3, pp. 127-35.

• Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh: the Creation of a Historical Novel," The Polish Review, 1994, no. 1, pp. 45-50.

• Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh: Primer on Power," The Polish Review, 1995, no. 3, pp. 331-34.

• Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and the Wieliczka Salt Mine," The Polish Review, 1997, no. 3, pp. 349-55.

• Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and the Solar Eclipse," The Polish Review, 1997, no. 4, pp. 471-78.

• Bolesław Prus, Pharaoh, translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek (2nd, revised ed.), Warsaw, Polestar Publications (ISBN 83-88177-01-X), and New York, Hippocrene Books, 2001.

See also

Weighing-of-the-heart scene from Egyptian Book of the Dead (described in Pharaoh, chapter 53). Illustration from Papyrus of Ani at British Museum.

• "A Legend of Old Egypt"
• "Mold of the Earth"
• Assassinations in fiction
• Egypt in the European imagination
• Political fiction
• Politics in fiction
• Solar eclipses in fiction
• Spiritualism in fiction
• Labyrinth
• Wieliczka Salt Mine
• Look-alike
• Anatopism
• Anachronism

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