Ancient Egypt as a laboratory of state power
The Only Historical Novel of a Reluctant Historicist
Pharaoh (in Polish, Faraon) is the fourth and final major novel by Bolesław Prus, the pen name of Aleksander Głowacki, and the only historical novel he ever wrote. It was composed over the course of a year in 1894–95, serialized in the Warsaw weekly Tygodnik Ilustrowany in 1895–96, and issued in book form in 1897, dedicated to the author’s wife, Oktawia Głowacka. The choice of form was itself a reversal: Prus had long objected that historical fiction inevitably falsifies the past, and only came round to the view — borrowed from the French critic Hippolyte Taine — that literature, like science, can serve as a means of studying reality, including historical reality. Because the whole work was finished before serialization began, rather than written installment by installment like his earlier novels, it is frequently described as his best-composed novel, and as one of the best-composed Polish novels altogether.
A Fictitious Reign at the Edge of Collapse
The story unfolds in Egypt between 1087 and 1085 BCE, at the close of the Twentieth Dynasty and of the New Kingdom itself. Prus’s pharaoh, Ramses XIII, is not a historical figure but an invented one, placed in a period whose last real Ramesside was Ramses XI. The nation Prus depicts is under strain from every direction: desert sands are eating into arable land, the population has shrunk from eight million to six, foreign peoples are settling in growing numbers and eroding national unity, and the gap between peasants and craftsmen on one side and a luxury-loving ruling class on the other keeps widening. Imported goods are strangling native industry while the country sinks deeper into debt to Phoenician merchants. The priesthood, which staffs the bureaucracy and holds a virtual monopoly on learning, has grown enormously rich at the expense of both throne and nation — and to the north, Assyria and Persia are rising.
Ramses Against the Priesthood
At the novel’s opening Ramses is twenty-two, crown prince and viceroy, and has already studied his country’s ills closely enough to devise a remedy. He intends to bring the priestly hierarchy, above all the High Priest of Amon, Herhor, under his control or win it over; to open the treasures stored in the Labyrinth for the state’s use; and to emulate Ramses the Great by campaigning against Assyria. He proves a gifted commander in a swift, victorious war against invading Libyans, but once on the throne he meets the unyielding resistance of the priests to his reforms. The people are instinctively drawn to him, yet he must still master or break the hierarchy and its allies. His private life becomes a pawn in the contest between Phoenician interests and the Egyptian high priests. In the end he falls through his own miscalculation: he underestimates his opponents and, impatient with priestly obscurantism, throws out the myths and rituals together with a piece of genuine scientific knowledge that he needed. Herhor takes the throne — and then, paradoxically, draws on the Labyrinth’s treasure to fund the very reforms he had blocked, but too late to halt Egypt’s decline. As in a Greek tragedy, the outcome is disclosed from the outset: the introduction states plainly that the narrative concerns the eleventh century before Christ, when the dynasty fell and the high priest took the crown, and the novel’s task is to show what led there.
Society as a Single Organism
The intellectual spine of the book is a metaphor Prus took from the English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, and which he states outright in the introduction: in its great ages the Egyptian nation formed, as it were, one person, in which the priesthood was the mind, the pharaoh the will, the people the body, and obedience the binding cement. Every organ must work in harmony if the whole is to survive — and Pharaoh is, in this sense, an extended study of the rise and fall of civilizations. Egypt prospered while vigorous kings and wise priests cooperated for the common good. Decline set in when war and oppression thinned and drained the populace, foreign influx broke its homogeneity, and pharaoh and priesthood alike squandered their energies on luxury and then turned on each other in a contest over who would fleece the people. The result was foreign domination and the extinction of a civilization that had burned at the Nile for thousands of years.
Power, Knowledge, and the Uses of Antiquity
Czesław Miłosz described the novel as a work about the mechanisms of state power, probably unique in nineteenth-century world literature, and argued that Prus chose a distant, invented reign precisely to gain a vantage point detached from topical pressures and censorship. From that distance he could present an analysis of an ancient society that reads as an archetype of the struggle for power in any state — and could simultaneously compose a satire on man and society in the manner of Swift. The most important lesson Ramses learns, and learns too late, concerns the importance of knowledge, of science, to power. The political reading is sharpened by the fact that Prus’s vision of a civilization’s final collapse drew on his keen awareness of the destruction of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, exactly a century before he finished the book. Pharaoh‘s reputation as a political novel is also why it became Joseph Stalin’s favorite book, and critics have noted resemblances between it and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible.
Chronicle, Tragedy, and the Novel of Formation
The book is built from an introduction in the manner of an ancient chronicle, sixty-seven chapters, and an evocative epilogue — the last omitted when the novel first appeared and restored in the 1950s. It deliberately mixes genres: historical novel, political novel, bildungsroman, utopian novel and sensation novel all contribute, and several strands — the plot, Egypt’s cycle of seasons, the country’s geography and monuments, and practices such as mummification — come forward in turn as the narrative requires. The prose is clear and limpid, imbued with poetry and leavened with humor, and the book ranges from the tragic to the comic and from the everyday to moments of transcendent beauty. The epilogue turns elegiac: the priest Pentuer mourns Ramses, and the sage Menes answers his despair by sending him to look at temple walls crowded with figures, where the wise man reads the history of distant times and secrets of wisdom.
Egyptology, Spiritualism, and the Art of the Composite Scene
Prus prepared painstakingly, studying works by John William Draper, Ignacy Żagiell, Georg Ebers and Gaston Maspero, and weaving authentic ancient texts into the narrative like tesserae in a mosaic; one major character, the junior officer Ennana, was drawn from such a text. The novel recreates the geography, climate, flora and fauna, ethnicities, agriculture, trades, commerce, social stratification, politics, religion and warfare of an ancient civilization with a fidelity that still commands respect from Egyptologists — notably in its embalming and funeral scenes, court protocol, the waking and feeding of the gods, processions and beliefs, the design of Zoser’s Step Pyramid, travel on the Nile and in the desert, and Egypt’s exploitation of Nubia for gold. Prus was not a historian and deliberately introduced anachronisms and misplaced details; his aim was never punctilious accuracy but the use of ancient Egypt as a canvas for considered views on man, civilization and politics. For several prominent features he seems to have wanted two sources, one of them contemporary or personal. Spiritualism, which fascinated him in 1893, shaped the secret meeting of priests with the Chaldean magus Berossus and Ramses’ night exploration of the Temple of Hathor. A solar eclipse he witnessed at Mława in 1887, and perhaps Columbus’s exploitation of a lunar eclipse in 1504, lie behind Herhor’s culminating manipulation of an eclipse. Herodotus’s account of the Labyrinth, made vivid for Prus by a visit to the salt mine at Wieliczka, produced the novel’s floodable Egyptian treasury; the Phoenician prince Hiram’s canal proposal echoes both the modern Suez Canal and its ancient predecessor. Hypnosis, a look-alike double in the Greek Lykon, and a fictitious attribution to the priest Menes of Eratosthenes’ measurement of the earth and Heron’s steam engine all show the Positivist author’s interest in the history of science.
Enduring Reach
Pharaoh has never been out of print in Poland except in wartime, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and was adapted as a Polish feature film in 1966. Its perennial topicality as a political novel is matched, in the sources’ estimate, by a critical yet sympathetic view of human nature that gives it a broader life. Joseph Conrad, reading it during his 1914 visit to Poland, admired Prus extravagantly and rated him above Dickens. Yet despite its translations and its standing — often judged superior to any other novel about ancient Egypt — the book remains little known in the wider world. Since May 2024 a manuscript copy has been on permanent display at the Palace of the Commonwealth in Warsaw.
Aleksander Głowacki was born on 20 August 1847 and died on 19 May 1912. At 15 he joined the Polish 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia; shortly after his 16th birthday he suffered severe battle injuries, and five months later he was imprisoned. These early experiences may have precipitated the panic disorder and agoraphobia that dogged him through life, and shaped his opposition to seeking Poland’s independence by force of arms. In 1872, aged 25, he settled in Warsaw and embarked on a forty-year career as a newspaper columnist, urging Poles to study science and technology and to develop industry and commerce. He had studied mathematics and physics at Warsaw University until his studies were cut short by penury; he was spared resettlement on Russian imperial lands and was able to complete secondary school. He took the pen surname Prus from the appellation of his family’s coat of arms. Between 1886 and 1893 he wrote three novels on the “great questions of our age”: The Outpost, The Doll, and The New Woman.
The Chronicle-Style Opening
The introduction records that in the thirty-third year of Ramses XII’s reign Egypt celebrated two events. In the month of Mechir, in December, the god Khonsu returned to Thebes laden with sumptuous gifts after traveling three years and nine months in the land of Bukhten, restoring to health the local king’s daughter Bent-res and exorcising an evil spirit not only from the king’s family but even from the fortress of Bukhten. In the month of Pharmouthi, in February, Ramses XII, after consulting the gods, named as his successor his son Ham-sem-merer-amen-Ramses. The choice pleased pious priests, eminent nomarchs, the army, the people, and all creatures living on Egyptian soil. The pharaoh’s elder sons, born of the Hittite princess, had been visited by an evil spirit that could not be investigated: one, twenty-seven years old, had been unable to walk from his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and a third, after drinking tainted wine he had been unwilling to give up, had gone mad, fancied himself an ape, and spent days on end in the trees. The fourth son, Ramses, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of High Priest Amenhotep, was strong as the Apis bull, brave as a lion, and wise as the priests.
Names Assembled from Antiquity
Prus took characters’ names where he found them, sometimes anachronistically or anatopistically; in other cases he apparently invented them, as with Nitager, commander of the army that guards the gates of Egypt against attack by Asiatic peoples, and the priest Samentu. Ramses is the name of two pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty and nine pharaohs of the Twentieth. Nikotris derives from the Sixth Dynasty female pharaoh Nitocris or from the identically named daughter of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty king Psamtik I. Amenhotep was the name of a number of ancient Egyptians, including four Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs and the High Priest of Amon under Ramses IX to Ramses XI, who played a key role in the civil war that ended Egypt’s Twentieth Dynasty and, with it, the New Kingdom. Herhor derives from the historic high priest Herihor. Pentuer from the historic scribe Pentewere (Pentaur) or perhaps Pentawer, a son of Ramses III. Thutmose, Ramses’ cousin, is a fairly common name and also that of four Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs. Sarah, Taphath, and Gideon are drawn from Biblical personalities; Patrokles from Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad; Dagon from a Phoenician and Philistine god of agriculture and the earth, the national god of the Philistines; Tamar from the Biblical wife of Er and then Onan; Dutmose from the historic scribe Dhutmose in the reign of Ramses XI; Menes from Menes, the first Egyptian pharaoh; Asarhadon as a variant of Esarhaddon, an Assyrian king; Berossus from the Babylonian historian and astrologer who flourished about 300 BCE; Phut and Cush from descendants of Noah named in Genesis; Mephres from an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh evidently identical with Thutmose I; Mentesuphis from the name given by Manetho to Pharaoh Nemtyemsaf II of the Sixth Dynasty; Kama from a word in Hindu scriptures associated variously with sensuality, longing and sexuality; Lykon from Lykaon in the Iliad; Sargon from two Assyrian kings or from Sargon of Akkad, first ruler of the Semitic-speaking Akkadian Empire; Seti from several ancient Egyptians, including two pharaohs; Osochor from a Meshwesh king who ruled Egypt in the late Twenty-first Dynasty; Musawasa from the Meshwesh, a Libyan tribe; Tehenna from “Tehenu,” a generic Egyptian term for “Libyan”; Dion from a historic name appearing in a number of contexts; and Hebron from the largest city in the present-day West Bank.
A Polish Lineage and a Preliminary Sketch
Pharaoh belongs to a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the sixteenth 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). A preliminary sketch for Prus’s only historical novel was his first historical short story, “A Legend of Old Egypt,” which shows clear parallels with the subsequent novel in setting, theme and denouement; the Brill abstract describes that story as concerning Ramzes and his grandson Horus, and as the first work in which Prus used “historical costume” to comment on the present and on the human condition. “A Legend of Old Egypt” had in turn 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.
Occult Circles, Allusions, and Editions
In 1893 Prus’s 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, and made available to him books on the subject that he had brought from Paris. Prus attended Warsaw séances featuring the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino—the same medium whose Paris séances, a dozen years later, would be attended by Pierre and Marie Curie; Palladino had been brought to Warsaw from a St. Petersburg mediumistic tour by Ochorowicz. 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. Pharaoh also alludes to biblical Old Testament accounts of Moses, the plagues of Egypt, and Judith and Holofernes; and to Troy, which had recently been excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. 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. A 2014 edition of Faraon, in Poland, is furnished by Andrzej Niwiński, professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of Warsaw, with extensive annotations.
