Pharaohs Of Extortion

O[th]erwise, may the king, my lord, send chariots to fetch u[s] lest our servants kill us.

Moreover, may the king, my lord, ask Yanhamu , his servant, about what is bein[g] done in his [l]and. The largest sub-corpus of Amarna letters is from the Rib-Haddi corpus: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Yapa-Hadda EA —See: EA —Milkilu no. Pawura EA —See: Yabitiri EA —See: Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 23 November , at 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. Pharaoh begins with one of the more memorable openings [10] 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 three years and nine months in the land of Bukhten, restoring to health the local king's daughter named 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 , eminent nomarchs , valiant army, faithful people and all 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 from his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and the third, after drinking tainted wine that he had been unwilling to give up, had gone mad and, fancying himself an ape , spent days on end in the trees. The fourth son Ramses, however, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of High Priest Amenhotep, was strong as the Apis bull, brave as a lion and wise as the priests Pharaoh combines features of several literary genres: Much as in an ancient Greek tragedy , the fate of the novel's protagonist , the future " Ramses XIII ," [13] is known from the beginning.

Prus closes his introduction with the statement that the narrative "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.

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 elites' fondness for luxury and idleness. The country is becoming ever more deeply indebted to Phoenician merchants, as imported goods destroy native industries.

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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. At the same time, Egypt is facing prospective peril at the hands of rising powers to the north — Assyria and Persia. The year-old Egyptian crown prince and viceroy Ramses, having made a careful study of his country 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.

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 on 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 Egyptian populace is instinctively drawn to Ramses, 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, and whose implementation Herhor and his allies had blocked. But it is too late to arrest the decline of the Egyptian polity and to avert the eventual fall of the Egyptian civilization. The novel closes with a poetic epilogue that reflects Prus' own path through life.

Pharaoh - Walkthrough

As Pentuer and his mentor , the sage priest Menes, listen to the song of a mendicant priest, Pentuer says:. What for, then, this sculpting for which one pays in pain and bloody tears? Menes wrapped himself in his gaberdine and replied:. But the wise man approaches these figures with reverence and, sweeping them with his eye, reads in them the history of distant times or secrets of wisdom. Prus took characters' names where he found them, sometimes anachronistically or anatopistically. At other times as with Nitager , commander of the army that guards the gates of Egypt from attack by Asiatic peoples, in chapter 1 et seq.

Pharaoh belongs to a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the 16th century and Jan Kochanowski 's play, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys , and also includes Ignacy Krasicki 's Fables and Parables and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz 's The Return of the Deputy The daring conception of [Prus'] novel Pharaoh It [may] be [described] as a novel on But Pharaoh is par excellence a political novel.

Its young protagonist, Prince Ramses who is 22 years old at the novel's opening , learns that those who would oppose the priesthood are vulnerable to cooptation, seduction , subornation, defamation , intimidation or assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses as pharaoh, is the importance, to power, of knowledge — of science. As a political novel, Pharaoh became a favorite of Joseph Stalin 's; [24] similarities have been pointed out between it and Sergei Eisenstein 's film Ivan the Terrible , produced under Stalin's tutelage.

Pharaoh (novel) - Wikipedia

Kennedy would meet with a fate like that of the book's protagonist. Pharaoh is, in a sense, an extended study of the metaphor of society -as- organism that Prus had adopted from English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer , and that Prus makes explicit in the introduction to the novel: Pharaoh is a study of factors that affect the rise and fall of civilizations.

Egypt developed as long as a homogeneous nation, energetic kings and wise priests worked together for the common good. But there came a time when the populace declined in number in the aftermath of wars and lost their vitality under oppression and extortion, while the influx of foreigners undermined their racial unity. When, in addition, the energy of the pharaohs and the wisdom of the priests were dissipated in a flood of Asian profligacy and these two forces began between them a struggle over the monopoly of fleecing the people, Egypt fell under the power of foreigners, and the light of civilization that had burned for several thousand years at the Nile expired.

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 view of the French Positivist critic Hippolyte Taine that the arts, including literature, may act as a second means alongside the sciences to study reality, including broad historic reality.

Prus, in the interest of making certain points, intentionally introduced some anachronisms and anatopisms into the novel. The book's depiction of the demise of Egypt 's New Kingdom three thousand years earlier, reflects the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in , exactly a century before Pharaoh' s completion. A preliminary sketch for Prus' only historical novel was his first historical short story , " A Legend of Old Egypt. In Prus' old friend Julian Ochorowicz , having returned to Warsaw from Paris, delivered several public lectures on ancient Egyptian knowledge.

Ochorowicz made available to Prus books on the subject that he had brought from Paris. Pharaoh also alludes to biblical Old Testament accounts of Moses chapter 7 , the plagues of Egypt chapter 64 , and Judith and Holofernes chapter 7 ; and to Troy , which had recently been excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. For certain of the novel's prominent features, Prus, the conscientious journalist and scholar, seems to have insisted on having two sources, one of them based on personal or at least contemporary experience.