SOURCE: "Pharaoh Triumphant: The Royal Myths of Ancient Egypt," in Ancient Economy in Mythology: East and West, edited by Morris Silver, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1991, pp. 163-86.

In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Schulman recounts the central theme of the divine king in Egyptian mythology and contends that scholars need to be more critical in their study of the information contained in ancient documents in order to ground historical speculation on more objective foundations.

Pharaonic Egyptian history lasted over two-and-a-half millennia, from ca. 3200 B.C.E. until 525 B.C.E. In this chapter, emphasis will be given to the second half of the second millennium B.C.E. when Imperial Egypt was one of the superpowers of the Ancient Near Eastern world. Like every other empire in antiquity, that of Egypt came into existence as a result of Egypt's victories in war. Actually there were two Egyptian...