The Mature
Pharaoh Horemheb

(Click on image to zoom in and out.)

Yes, yes, the joke is rather lame. But the most famous depiction in the popular media of the Egyptian Pharaoh Horemheb - today often rendered "Haremhab" - still remains that of Victor Mature assuming the role of the Egyptian general who wound up being king. That was in the 1954 motion picture The Egyptian.¹

Victor was arguably the most famous "beefcake" actor of the late 1930's through the 1950's. From 1939 to 1960 he appeared in over 50 motion pictures. They ranged from cowboy pictures (My Darling Clementine) to film noir (Kiss of Death), to comedies (Something for the Birds), African adventures (Safari), and musicals (No, No, Nanette). He even appeared in the Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart Broadway musical Lady in the Dark.²

But it was in the largely defunct "swords and sandals" genre that Victor is most remembered. In addition to The Egyptian, he starred in Sampson and Delilah (1949), Androcles and the Lion (1952), The Robe (1952), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), and Hannibal (1959). Eventually Victor came full circle and his last role was in a made-for-TV version of Sampson and Delilah in 1984. Of course, he didn't play Sampson but he appeared as Sampson's father, Manoah. But to fans of Ancient Egypt, Victor Mature was and always will be Horemheb of The Egyptian.

The movie was what the critics used to call an extravaganza. There was the - quote - "cast of thousands" - unquote - who appeared on elaborate (and expensive) sets and the film was replete with wide angle shots. And in the era where a typical full length movie ran 90 minutes, The Egyptian lasted a whopping two hours and twenty minutes! And with the roles filled with big name stars like Victor Mature as Horemheb, Peter Ustinov as the wily one-eyed slave Kaptah, Jean Simmons as Merit the wholesome girl next door, and one of the biggest stars and a three-time Academy Award nominee selected to play the hero, the Egyptian physician Sinuhe, The Egyptian was sure to be a blockbuster.

But suddenly the actor playing the hero - a fellow named Marlon - opted out. This sent the producers scrambling to fill the part. Ultimately they selected a relatively new actor named Edmund Purdom.

And the "box office" wasn't so hot. The movie cleared expenses and made a profit, yes, but its revenue was nowhere near that of soon-to-come epics like The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur which both ran over three hours and recovered their costs many times over.

The movie more or less follows the book, The Egyptian, which was the English translation by Naomi Walford of the Finnish novel Sinuhe egyptiläinen (Sinuhe the Egyptian) by Mika Waltari. Although the English translation was already considerably abridged from the original Finnish - it cut out what Americans would consider racier parts - the movie script compresses the action even further and simplifies both the plot and the history. For one thing, when the "heretic pharaoh" Akhenaten dies, Horemheb immediately becomes king. So the movie skips at least two other pharaohs, including the most famous of them all, the boy-king Tutankhamen.

The book, though, follows the historical chronology quite well and keeps with what was the accepted scholarship of the time and to some extent even now. We read that after Akhenaten dies - unlike in the novel the true circumstances are not known - he was followed by a young man named Smenkhkare who died almost immediately. Smenkhkare was then replaced by Tutankhamen who was pictured as a rather mercurial kid obsessed with funerals and who wanted to have a fine tomb.³

For those not well versed in Egyptian history a brief review is in order. Akhenaten was the pharaoh who came to the throne about 1350 BC. Akhenaten's father was the Pharaoh Amenhotep III - also known as Amenhotep the Great - who himself was the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Pharaoh Ahmose I. Although Ahmose is not well known by Joe and Josephine Blow on the street, in his own time he was one of the most famous pharaohs since it was he who had driven out the Hyksos.

The Hyksos were foreign invaders who had ruled Egypt starting around 1650 BC during what is called the Second Intermediate Period. They were likely a Semitic people and there is the hypothesis that the story of Joseph in the Bible is set during the time of the Hyksos. That would explain how Joseph, a Hebrew, was able to converse with the pharaoh and rise to become the #2 man in the land, the tchaty, , and now usually called the vizier.

After the Hyksos were defeated around 1550, Ahmose founded the 18th Dynasty and so began the third stage of Ancient Egyptian civilization that Egyptologists call the New Kingdom. The New Kingdom had been preceded by the Old Kingdom (2700 BC- 2200) and the Middle Kingdom (2050 BC - 1650) between which was the span of years called the First Intermediate Period.

As was often the case when a pharaoh had a lengthy reign, Amenhotep III ruled during a time of prosperity and stability. Egypt extended its influence south into the land of Kush (Ethiopia) and east into Ancient Syria, which included the areas of modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordon. But in his last few years Amenhotep may have not been in good health and when he died around 1350 BC, he was survived by his wife, Tiye, a daughter named Baketamon, and a son, Amenhotep IV. It was the son that became Akhenaten and who was either a religious visionary or a nutball depending on your point of view.

Egypt was a polytheistic society, and before the country became a unified nation (around 3000 BC), each town had its own particular deity. But worship of the other gods wasn't forbidden and unlike modern - quote - "civilized societies" - unquote - no one seemed to care if people had different beliefs.

But even after Egypt became unified, each god was still largely associated with particular towns. Memphis (modern Mit Raheena, about ten miles south of Cairo) had Ptah (the god of artists and craftsmen), Bubastis (in the Nile delta) had Bast (the cat headed goddess), Abydos (about 90 miles along the Nile north of Luxor) had Osiris and Isis (characters in one of the first resurrection stories), and Karnak (or Thebes, the modern Luxor) had Amen, "the hidden one".

And at Heliopolis (near Cairo) you had the god Ra.

Ra was a sun-god and was usually represented as a falcon headed human. When the sun rose, everyone said it was Ra sailing his boat across the heavens. Of course, people didn't see a boat. Just like us they saw a bright disk which they called the aten ().

But during the reign of Amenhotep III the sun-disk itself began assuming the status of a god. This deity was called "the Aten" or just "Aten". Amenhotep III even built a temple in Thebes called Gempaaten ("The Aten is found"), but the Aten remained associated with the worship of Ra.

During his childhood, Amenhotep IV, had become an enthusiastic follower of the Aten religion. But for reasons unknown he began to believe that Aten was the one god and should be represented only by the disk (forget the man with the falcon head). In relief sculptures, the Aten is shown with the rays emanating from the disk and ending in hands, sometimes holding the ankh symbol for life ().

At first Amenhotep IV may have taken the approach that Aten was the supreme god but he accepted or at least tolerated the others. But after he became king, he decided the other gods were false gods and he needed to convert the country to believing in the one true god - his god - Aten.

The concept of there being only one god was not something that arose out of the blue but was a general trend in the Ancient Egyptian religion. Although the theology always remained polytheistic, there was a strong trend of syncretism which is the blending of multiple religions and doctrines. As time went on some of the gods became consolidated and fused. The most famous example of this syncretism is the god Amen-Ra who was the combination of Ra of Heliopolis and Amen of Thebes.

Eventually as contact between the different parts of the country increased, so did the tendency to lump the individual deities together. But the individual gods were still worshiped and were regarded as "manifestations" of a single deity.

For instance, take three gods (please!): Ptah (from Memphis), Seker (also from Memphis), and Osiris (from Abydos). At some point, someone decided that there was actually a combination of these gods called (what else?) Ptah-Seker-Osiris and who even has a statue in the British Museum. So we started out with five gods, Ptah, Seker, Osiris, Ra, and Amen, you end up with two: Ptah-Seker-Osiris and Amun-Ra.

The ultimate outcome of syncretism is, of course, monotheism and there are in fact references in the Egyptian writings of there being only one god. But what put Akhenaten apart from promoting the usual Egyptian syncretism is that he rejected the practice of multiple worship and freedom of religion and he tried to eradicate any form of worship other than his own.⁴

After about four years of ruling from Thebes where Amun had always been the chief god, Amenhotep IV moved out and built a new town about 200 miles to the north. What prompted the move is unknown and theories range from him wanting to get away from the "impurity" of living in a town with false gods to the theory that the people of Thebes and the priests of Amen had driven him out.

But whatever the cause for the move, Amenhotep IV dubbed the new town Akhetaten - "The Horizon of Aten" (). Then for good measure he changed his name to Akhenaten. To avoid confusion of the pharaoh and the city with similar sounding names, many Egyptologists refer to the city, Akhetaten, by its modern name, Tell El-Amarna or just Amarna.

Ancient Egyptian names make meaningful phrases and how to translate the name Akhenaten - ()⁵ - has bedeviled Egyptologists since they first discovered this new pharaoh who wasn't in the official lists of the kings. At first it seemed straightforward. "Akh" () can mean "spirit" and the water sign () - the letter "n" - is a preposition meaning "of". So it seems straightforward to translate Akhenaten as "The Spirit of Aten". But as the study of the Egyptian language progressed, this translation was largely discarded and the name is rendered more like "One Who is Beneficent to the Aten", "He Who is Useful to the Aten" or "Being Profitable to the Aten". But everyone just calls him Akhenaten.

If Akhenaten had been content to sit in Akhetaten and worship Aten, there wouldn't have been many problems. But at some point he decided to "purify" the rest of the country. That meant closing the temples of the other gods and erasing their names from inscriptions. The Theban god Amen was a particular target of Akhenaten's ire and he ordered the removal of the name Amen from inscriptions even if it was part of someone's name. That included his father's name, Amenhotep.

Unfortunately, at least for Akhenaten, his religious zeal was not effective. Excavations have uncovered amulets and small statues to the old deities even in the city of Akhetaten itself.

On the other hand, public worship of the old gods seems to have ceased. Or as a later inscription stated:

The temples of the gods and goddesses, from Elephantine to the lagoons of the Delta had fallen into ruin. Their shrines had fallen into decay and had become ruins overgrown with plants. Their sanctuaries were as if they had never existed, their temples were foot paths. The land was in distress, the gods were turning away from this land.

So it seems that Akhenaten was able to shut down official worship of the traditional gods. But while he was sitting in Akhetaten on his pharaonic ⲙⲉϣⲕⲟⲗ and stopping other people from worshipping as they pleased, he was ignoring matters of state. In fact, it seems that during his reign there was a serious case of Egyptian isolationism, and excavations have unearthed correspondence from rulers in Syria complaining that their letters and requests for aid have been ignored for years.

Akhenaten may have never left Amarna once he moved there. But suddenly in the seventeenth year of his reign, he disappears from the historical record. It's assumed he died and was buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. But when the tombs were excavated in the 19th century no mummies were found.

Then in 1907 a tomb with Amarna era artifacts was discovered, not in Amarna, but 200 miles south near Luxor in the Valley of the Kings. In the tomb called KV 55 was a royal coffin, and inside was a skeleton which from the width of the pelvis and inscriptions in the tomb was identified as Akhenaten's mother, Queen Tiye. However, a closer look revealed it to be the skeleton of a man and based upon his statues where Akhenaten had a pretty wide ⲃⲓⲗⲧⲓ, the bones were immediately identified as Akhenaten. However, this identification was soon disputed and the argument whether it's Akhenaten or someone else has been going back and forth ever since. The general consensus, though, is that it isn't.

Exactly what happened in the three or four years immediately following Akhenaten's reign has been the subject of much debate and near constant revision and the various scenarios proposed can take up (and have) volumes. Originally it was believed that a young man named Smenkhkare ruled, possibly as a co-regent with Akhenaten but he died almost simultaneously with or soon after Akhenaten. Then Tutankhamen became king.

But nowadays there has been a growing consensus that a woman, probably Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti (the lady with the big hat), became pharaoh immediately after Smenkhkara and took the name Neferneferuaten. She may have even ruled as pharaoh together with Akhenaten. In such a case Nefertiti would have been Akhenaten's co-regent, that is, a fellow pharaoh.

If Nefertiti did rule as pharaoh, it was not for long, maybe three or four years, and the king in the succession of which there is definite certainty is Tutankhamen. He came to the throne when he was about nine and if not immediately after then not long after Akhenaten died. Based on an inscription that reads "the King's son of his body, his beloved, Tutankhaten (Tutankhamen's birth name)", it's clear he was the biological son of a pharaoh (which is what the "of his body" phrase means). Since the inscription was found at Amarna, the obvious king is Akhenaten and most Egyptologists accept that Tutankhamen was Akhenaten's son.

Tutankhamen's reign was short, not much more than nine or ten years, and so he died when he was about 18. Such a young death has been variously attributed to being knocked on the head, injuries in a chariot accident, malaria, or being smashed by a hippopotamus. Identifying the actual cause hasn't been easy because the archeologists who discovered Tutankhmen's tomb cut him up to get it out of the coffin.

Akhenaten's top advisor was a man named Ay who bore the title of "The God's Father" (in the novel Ay was spelled Eie and he was Nefertiti's father and so Akhenaten's father-in-law). But it is true that after Tutankhamen died, Ay became king. Against all tradition, Ay is pictured as pharaoh in Tutankhamen's tomb while carrying out the "opening of the mouth" ritual on the dead king's mummy.

How Ay became pharaoh is still a mystery. In The Egyptian, it was a deal worked out between Ay and Horemheb. Horemheb had been Akhenaten's top general, and once Ay became king, Horemheb would be allowed to marry Akhenaten's sister, Baketaten. This would give him a connection to the royal family and so he could legitimately become the pharaoh after Ay. Besides Horemheb had the hots for Baketaten.

This, though, is the scenario for the novel. Now it is true that Ay became king after Tutankhamen. He was probably elderly - in his sixties perhaps - and he ruled for about four years and then Horemheb became pharaoh. However, Horemheb's queen was not Baketaten but a lady named Mutnedjmet. Mutnedjmet was Horemheb's second wife and he had been married earlier to a lady named Amenya.

It's not clear if Horemheb really was a general under Akhenaten as in the book and movie. There was a high official at Amarna named Paatenemheb () - which means "The Aten is in festival". After Akhenaten died people began dropping the new religion like a hot sun-disk and changed their names if it had the word "Aten". So someone named Paatenemheb might have switched to another god like Horus and become "Horus is in festival" or Horemheb (). However, there are Egyptologists who think that equating Horemheb with Paatenemheb doesn't quite fit.

But one of the few facts known about the Amarna period is that the real Horemheb was a general under Tutankhamen. As head of the army he waged military campaigns in Syria and was trying to re-establish Egyptian sovereignty over the area. In particular the Hittites from Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) had been taking over the area once Akhenaten lost interest in maintaining Egyptian influence.

For a long time it was believed that Horemheb became king because he "usurped" the throne from Ay. Since he didn't have any sons, Horemheb set up an old army buddy named Parameses to be his designated heir. Because Horemheb and Parameses were not related any more than were Horemheb and Tutankhamen, it's hard to say exactly what dynasty Horemheb belongs to. Most Egyptologists put him as the last king of the 18th Dynasty and Parameses - who we remember as Rameses I and who did have a son who later became pharaoh - was the first king of the 19th Dynasty.

However, more recent study has pointed out that while it is true that Horemheb was a general under Tutankhamen, he also had the title iry-pat ( ). The iry-pat is translated as "of the great". Like many Ancient Egyptian words the actual meaning is both complex and ambiguous and changes with time. It certainly referred to a high and influential member of the court but you'll also see it listed in Ancient Egyptian dictionaries as "heir". By the New Kingdom, the iry-pat was a title of the crown prince. That is, the iry-pat was next in line to be pharaoh.

So it seems that Horemheb, far from being a usurper, was officially designated to be king after Tutankhamen. But usually the next in line to the throne was the king's eldest son, and Tutankhamen was married to Ankhesenamen (who was originally named Ankhesenpaaten and one of Akhenaten's six daughters). Since they could be expected to have children, slating a military man not in the royal family to be the heir apparent is, well, weird.

Of course, Tutankhamen was only nine years old when he became king and so he would be expected to have a "regent", that is, an older person who rules in his stead. Certainly a firm hand was needed after the mess created by Akhenaten and so who would be better than the man with the army?

All right. Horemheb was the designated heir to the throne. So how did Ay get to be pharaoh before him?

As is true of so much of the Armarna era, no one knows the answer. But right after Tutankhamen died, there was one heck of a monkey wrench thrown into the pharaonic machinery of the sucession.

There is a document from the Hittites that states the king of Egypt, Biphuria - a variant of Tutankhamun's throne name "Niphuria" - had died. His queen isn't named specifically since the name given, Dahamunzu, is simply a garbled version of the Egyptian words for ta hamat nesew, (), "the king's wife". But if Biphuria was indeed Tutankhamen his wife had to be Ankhesenamun.

Despite the vagaries in the letter, it is clear that Ankhesenamen asked the Hittite king, Shuppiluliuma, to send one of his sons to be her husband and rule over Egypt. She even offered to unify Egypt and Hatti into a single country. Otherwise she said that she might be forced to marry a "servant". Such a comment fits in with Horemheb being the designated pharaoh since from earlier inscriptions we know he was not from the royal family and in fact his parents may have been of the middle or even lower classes. In the novel, Horemheb's parents were cheese makers, and marrying a Hittite prince would be far better than that.

As you may guess, the Hittite prince was murdered on the way to Egypt, and many variations as to who did what and to whom have been postulated. In the novel, Horemheb and Ay have Sinuhe meet the prince in the desert and bump him off in a way that looked like he just fell ill. But since Horemheb was already in Syria at the time, he could have intercepted the Hittite entourage and dispatched the prince tout de suite.

Another theory is that Ay sent a group of soldiers to waylay the Hittites. Then Ay could marry Ankhesenamun and become pharaoh. As for Horemheb's iry-pat status, he could take his title and stuff it.

To support this scenario, there is a ring which is inscribed with both Ay and Ankhesenamen's. Both names are in the royal "cartouche" ), the oval which indicates the kings and queens and the two names are joined together. True, this may not mean they were married but that they just ruled together. In any case, the time of any Ay-Ankhesenamen reign must have been brief since Ankhesenamen soon disappears from history. Instead it was Ay's long time wife from Amarna, Tey, who is listed as his queen after he became pharaoh.

So it looks like it was Ay who was the "usurper" not Horemheb. And Ay's usurpation opens up another question. Why did Horemheb, as the designated successor, the iry-pat, let Ay continue as king? After all, Horemheb had the whole army on his side.

Well, the novel spins the tale that because Egypt was at war with the Hittites, Horemheb wanted Ay to catch all the flack from the people who were getting fed up with the non-stop wars Egypt had been fighting. Then as now the man at the top gets the blame when things go wrong. But some Egyptologists have postulated that when Horemheb got back from the war and found that Ay was already pharaoh, he figured there wasn't any point in pressing his matter.

An important point that may have weighed in on Horemheb's decision not make waves is that once someone was crowned pharaoh, he was considered a divine god-on-earth and the idea of openly contesting a sitting pharaoh was simply not done. So it was best for Horemheb to go along for the nonce. Besides Ay was getting old and wouldn't be around that long anyway.

Horemheb - the real Horemheb - was likely born in Herakleopolis which is about 70 miles south of modern Cairo. From his pre-pharaonic statues, we can surmise he was literate and so he would find promotion in the army fairly easy since military men who could read and write were in high demand.

Horemheb was certainly not of any royal lineage and his family was not likely of high standing even if they weren't cheesemakers. In his tomb Horemheb doesn't mention his parents, brothers, or sisters. Although in the novel and movie, Horemheb was a general for Akhenaten, there is no direct evidence for this or that he ever lived at Amarna. He had begun building a tomb in Saqqara, but that tomb was abandoned once be became king and he naturally had a new tomb dug out in the Valley of the Kings.

When Horemheb became pharaoh the country was still a mess. Realizing that many of the problems were the result of corrupt officials, he decided he was going to "straightened them out" to use a phrase beloved of the follicularly challenged in certain Quaint American locales. He issued an edict - commonsenically called "The Edict of Horemheb" - that said any officials cheating the ordinary Egyptians would be dealt with most severely.

For instance if any army officers or tax collectors were stealing from the poor, then his nose would be cut off. Anyone who took servants from other people and used them for their own work would themselves be made into slaves. Crooked judges would be killed, most likely by being impaled or burned alive on a hot slab of stone. Then if anyone went around stealing animal hides from people then they'd be given a hundred blows and have five wounds opened up. If that wasn't enough, they would then have the hides taken away.

How long did Horemheb rule? Well, that's pretty hard to tell. A number of what are called "Kings Lists" have come down from the Egyptians themselves. One of these lists was mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus and was compiled by an Ancient Egyptian priest named Manetho. The trouble is a lot of Manetho's names don't jibe that well with the actual Egyptian names and the chronology is scrambled around. But one of the most popular guesses is that Horemheb was in the list as a king that ruled 36 years.

Nowadays Horemheb seems to have been one of those pharaohs with The Incredible Shrinking Reign. In the 19th century, the consensus emerged that Horemheb ruled not for 36 years but maybe between 25 to 30. But now a modern opinion has emerged that limits Horemheb's time on the throne to 14 years.

One way to rationalize how a reign of 14 years could balloon up by more than a factor of two is that Horemheb decided to start counting his reign immediately after that of Amenhotep III. This seems to be what actually happened and in the official kings list in the mortuary temple of Seti (the father of Ramesses II) the names jump from Amenhotep right to Horemheb. That would give Horemheb close to 30 years if the years of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Nefertiti (as Neferneferuaten), Tutankhamen, and Ay, and are added to his fourteen.

So if we want to believe that Horemheb really ruled 30 years and since he did assume the years of his Amarna predecessors, then there should be some inscriptions stating that Horemheb was king for nigh on 60 years. Without such a finding, then we seem to be stuck with Horemheb ruling for 14 years, not 30.

But just when you think everything has been worked out, someone comes along and scrambles everything up! After Horemheb was pharaoh he was succeeded by his friend, Rameses I. Rameses I was followed by his son Seti I who in turn had a son, named Rameses. Rameses II - the famous Rameses the Great - ruled for at least 65 years and one of his scribes was a man named Mose.

And sure enough, in one of the inscriptions of Mose was a comment that Horemheb was king for at least 59 years. But although the record of Mose would seem to clinch the idea that the longer reign - around 30 years - is correct, more and more Egyptologists are leaning toward the lower number, fourteen, as Horemheb's last year. Their rationale is that this number is the one that is found on actual artifacts from Horemheb's time as pharaoh.

And just what were the artifacts that whittled Horemheb's reign down so convincingly? Well, they were wine jars. And just how the bibulous habits of the Ancient Egyptians would end up being an arbiter of the length of a pharaoh's reign is worthy of a moment's pause.

Egyptians, although drinking beer as a staple, enjoyed their wine. After the grapes were crushed, the fermented juice was put in clay jars which were sealed with mud stoppers. They were then labeled with the name of the bottler as well as the year. A typical label would read something like:

... or in plain English:

Year ten, wine from the estate (lit. "house") of Sehetep-Ra, vineyard supervisor Seti.

... and would kind-of maybe have been pronounced something akin to:

Renpit medju, erp per Sehetep-Ra, hery kamu Seti.

The Egyptians did not have an absolute chronology in dating the years like BC, AD, BC, or CE. Instead, they started counting from the time the current pharaoh came to power. So if a wine docket is labeled as "Year 10" (renpet medju), this meant it was the tenth year of some pharaoh. Sometimes the pharaoh might be mentioned but often they were not.

But if the pharaoh isn't mentioned, how can a wine jar be used to determine the length of the reign? We'd really like to know that.

I thought you would as Captain Mephisto said to Sidney Brand. It's very simple really.

Among the most popular offerings left in tombs was wine. And the wine would most likely be of recent vintage. So a wine jar found in, say, the tomb of Tutankhamen, could be accepted as having been bottled during his reign. And since no wine jars in his tomb have a date beyond year nine, we know that was the last year of his reign.

And the "wine dockets" that can be reliably dated from Horemheb's reign don't go above year 14. Certainly if he was on the throne about 30 years there would be some jars found that fall between year 14 and year 30. So in the absence of wine jars with higher dates, the lower number, fourteen, has been gaining steam.

Of tangential interest is the Ancient Egyptian word for wine, (). The first three characters - the reed (here representing the sound "eh"), the mouth shape (an "r" sound), and the square (a "p") - spell the actual word. The wine jar with the three strokes is a "determinative" and is simply a picture that is a guide to what the word means. The pronunciation, then, for the Egyptian word for "wine" is something like "erp". Yes, the word for wine was a hiccup.

Such onomatopoeia is not unusual in Ancient Egyptian. The word for "donkey" is and was pronounced something like "eh-ah". Or as we say, "hee-haw"

Of course, the strides of linguists and philologists notwithstanding, the pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian is still problematic since they didn't write the vowels until they scrapped the hieroglyphic system and began to write in the Greek alphabet. At this stage the language was called Coptic.

Actually Coptic properly refers to the script - the Greek alphabet supplemented by six characters derived from hieroglyphics - and was first used around 200 BC after the Greeks took over the country and established the Ptolemaic Dynasty which ended after the reign of Cleopatra. The language, though, was the latest stage of Ancient Egyptian and it was still spoken as a living language into the eighteenth century of the modern era. Of course the language changed during the thousands of years it was used (compare the English of Alfred the Great with that of William Faulkner) but some words have come down to us very nearly unchanged when they were written in hieroglyphics.

For instance, "wine" in Coptic is ⲏⲣⲡ. Those who have studied some Greek - remember this was the basic alphabet the Copts used - will recognize the letters as eta, rho, and pi. Put 'em together and you have erp which is the same as the ancient word.

Of course, given the thousands of years the Egyptian language was spoken not all words in Coptic remained unchanged from the ancient language. But sometimes the pronunciation can still be deduced. For instance, the word for "cat" in Coptic is ⲉⲙⲟⲩ and is pronounced "emou". But in the hieroglyphics the word is spelled , and the English consonants are represented by Egyptologists as myw. Fill in the obvious vowels and you get something like meeyou or even meeyow.

References

"Haremhab, Pharaoh and Conqueror: New Investigations in His Royal Tomb in the Valley of the Kings", Geoffrey Thorndike Martin, Lecture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2010.

"A Symposium on Haremhab", Lectures, Catharine Roehrig (Moderator), The Metropolitan Museum of Art May 5, 2011.

"The Pre-Royal Career of Haremhab: How and When the General Became King", Jacobus Van Dijk, Associate Professor of Egyptology, University of Groningen.

"What Does the Script Teach Us? The Dream of Haremhab", Orey Goldwasser, Professor and Chair, Egyptology Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, The Hebrew Universsity of Jerusalem.

"The Metropolitan Museum's Statue of Haremhab and the God Thoth", Dorothea Arnold, Lila Acheson Wallace Chairman, Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Musceum of Art.

"The Memphite Tomb of Haremhab: Recent Discoveries", Maarten Raven, Curator of the Egyptian Collection, National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, The Netherlands.

"Harembab As a Poltical and Military Strategist in the Easter Nile Delta", Manfred Bietak, Chairman, Vienna Institute of Archaeological Science, University of Vienna.

"The Coffin of Haremhab", Nicholas Reeves, The Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman, Memorial Fund Fellow, Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Conclusion", James P. Allen, Wilbour Professor and Chair of Egyptology, Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, Brown University.

"Haremhab, Pharaoh and Conqueror: New Investigations in His Royal Tomb in the Valley of the Kings", Lecture, Geoffrey Thorndike Martin, Edwards Professor of Egyptology and Philology Emeritus, University College London and Fellow Commoner, Christ's College University of Cambridge, (Moderator), The Metropolitan Museum of Art November 16, 2011.

Amarna Sunrise: Egypt from Golden Age to Age of Heresy, Aidan Dodson, The American University in Cairo Press, 2009.

Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation, Aidan Dodson, The American University in Cairo Press, 2009.

The Reign of Horemheb: History, Historiography, and the Dawn of the Ramesside Era, Karen Margaret (Maggie) Bryson, Doctoral Thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 2018.

""Horemheb and the Struggle for the Throne of Tutankhamun", Jacobus van Dijk, Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology, pp. 29-42, 1996.

The God's Father Ay, Otto Schaden, Doctoral Thesis, The University of Minnesota, 1977.

"Restoration Stela of Tutankhamun", Mark-Jan Nederhof, University of St. Andrews, November 4, 2006.

"The Edict of Horemheb", James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. 3, 1906.

The Tomb of Queen Tîyi - The Discovery of the Tomb, Davis, Theodore M. Davis, Gaston Maspero, Grafton Elliott Smith, Edward Russell Ayrton, London, Constable and Co., Ltd., 1907.

Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Doubleday, 1963.

Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt, Barbara Mertz, Dodd, Mead (1978).

The Wine Jars Speak: A Text Study, Eva-Lena Wahlb, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet, Uppsala University, 2012.

"Horemheb", Ancient Egypt Online.

The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna, Vol. V, Nina and Norman de Garis Davies, The Egypt Exploration Society. 1908.

Decoding the Secrets of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Bob Brier, Professor, Long Island University, Lecture Series, The Teaching Company.

The Egyptian, Mika Waltari (author), Naomi Walford (translator), Putnam, 1949.

The Egyptian, Jean Simmons (actor), Victor Mature (actor), Gene Tierney (actor), Michael Wilding (actor), Bella Darvi (actor), Peter Ustinov (actor), Edmund Purdom (actor), Michael Curtiz (director), Philip Dunne (screenplay), Casey Robinson (screenplay), Mika Waltari (novel), Daryl F. Zanuck (producer).

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