The First Pharaoh
AKHENATEN
If, as Sir Alan Gardiner wrote, there is a letter from the Amarna archives attesting that Akhenaten was referred to as Pharaoh as a personal form of address, that letter is extremely significant on at least two accounts. First, for setting a semantic precedent and, secondly, because it provides a verifiable chronological point of reference. However, until I see a specimen of that letter with my own eyes, the actual orthography attached to Gardiner’s rendering of Pharaoh will remain problematic. According to Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, p. 75, it was written Pr-ꜥꜣ ꜥnḫ wḏꜣ snb* ‘Pharaoh, life, prosperity, health, the master’. Since Gardiner has inserted hieroglyphs as well, I must presume that it was communicated by one Egyptian to another.
Who Was The First Egyptian King To Be Formally Addressed as Pharaoh? Akhenaten! This Fact Lends A More Accurate Perspective On The Activities Of The HISTORICAL Hebrews Of Antiquity.
The problem arises when I compare Gardiner’s version to an Assyrian variation of the salutation which is given as Pi-ir-u-u Musri, i.e., ‘Pharaoh, king of Misrim’ (or so I’ve been told). I can see how Pi-ir could be transcribed as Per (house), leaving the u-u with the conventional Egyptian value of a-a for ‘great’. But how does one account for the fact that Pharaoh, as it has come down to us via the Hebrews (?), contains an ‘h’, while the two examples given here do not? As informed students of Egyptian theology know, ‘Oh’ can mean something quite different from ‘Aa’, though they may both refer to That which is great!
