You're an ancient Egypt enthusiast and you think you know more than average about Tutankhamun and the 18th Dynasty, because the pyramids, the Nile, the gods and the crocodiles have had you hooked since childhood... And one day, while reading the second book of the Histories, along comes some pharaoh called Rhampsinitus (Who?). Then a Pheros. A Proteus and an Asychis. And unless you're an Egyptologist with a degree from Cairo University, you have no damn idea who these people are, or whether they even existed. Don't feel bad: even the Egyptian priests who told Herodotus all this back in the 5th century BC had already lost half the list to the passage of time. So here's the complete decoder of who's who, with one golden rule I intend to keep without cheating: what's certain I label as certain, and what's conjecture (however plausible) I label as conjecture. No padding.
Why he calls them that
Before the table, it helps to understand the mechanism, because it clearly explains all the distortions these names underwent over the centuries.
Herodotus visits Egypt, then under Persian rule —the Achaemenid Twenty-seventh Dynasty, the "First Satrapy," governed first by Cambyses II and later by Darius I and Artaxerxes I— around 450 BC, and asks his questions to priests in Memphis, Heliopolis and Thebes. Those priests spoke a very late form of the Egyptian language; he spoke Ionian Greek. In between there were, inevitably, interpreters of Greek and Egyptian. And the real names of the kings, correctly written in hieroglyphs on the walls, reached his ears orally, eroded and distorted by centuries of popular pronunciation.
The result: Khufu, short for Khnum-khufu, meaning the god Khnum protects me, gets shortened to Cheops. Khafra, short for Kha-ef-Ra, he appears like Ra, becomes Chephren. And Menkaura, short for Men-Ka-u-Ra, enduring are the Kas of Ra, becomes Mycerinus. And that's just naming the pharaohs who own the three most famous pyramids, the ones at Giza.
Because to these we must add, at the very least, figures as important as Senusret, Sesostris. Psamtik, Psammetichus. Ahmose, Amasis. None of these distortions is a deliberate error, nor a wish to intentionally deceive the audience: they're simply honest phonetic transcriptions of what a 5th-century Greek traveler heard spoken in the streets of Memphis or Thebes.
And now, let's put this in real perspective, because this is the kind of fact that pins you to your chair. When Herodotus visits Egypt and asks about Cheops, the Great Pyramid had already been standing on the Giza plateau for about two thousand one hundred years. And we, today, are two thousand four hundred years from Herodotus. A total of more than four thousand five hundred years - 4,586 to be precise.
Read that again: when Herodotus travelled through Egypt, he was already more than 2,100 years away from Cheops. Which means that when they told him about the pyramids, they were telling him about an ultra-remote past shrouded in the mists of time. It's no wonder the royal lists he read came full of gaps, omissions and errors. What's strange is that anything at all reached him. And that something also reached us, well, that's another story entirely.
The ten certainties
The pharaohs below admit no debate. The equivalence is clearly established by phonetics, chronology, buildings, documentary citations, deeds and wars carried out, and dynastic position. Nobody disputes this list today.
- Cheops = Khufu, 4th Dynasty
- Chephren = Khafra, 4th Dynasty
- Mycerinus = Menkaura, 4th Dynasty
- Sabacos = Shabaka, 25th Dynasty, Nubian
- Psammetichus = Psamtik I, 26th Dynasty
- Necos = Necho II, 26th Dynasty
- Psammis = Psamtik II, 26th Dynasty
- Apries = Wahibre Apries, 26th Dynasty
- Amasis = Ahmose II, 26th Dynasty
- Psammenitus = Psamtik III, 26th Dynasty, the last
Notice the pattern, because it tells us a lot: the closer to his own time, the more reliable Herodotus becomes. The whole 26th Dynasty, for instance, the Saite kings who ruled the century before his visit, comes through flawless, in order, with recognizable names. There's no legend there: there's living memory from people whose grandparents had lived through it and known those pharaohs almost in person.
The plausible ones: they fit, but they're not proven
Here we enter territory where Egyptology proposes answers but nobody can close the case.
Rhampsinitus is Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty, the pharaoh who was assassinated by one of his wives, a fact I discuss in another article on this blog. The Greek name is a fusion of "Ramesses" with the name of the goddess Neith. It also fits something Herodotus mentions in passing: that his successors were much poorer and less powerful. And that's exactly what happened: the later Ramessides ruled an Egypt in accelerating decline and progressive impoverishment.
Moeris is Amenemhat III of the 12th Dynasty. Herodotus's "great Lake Moeris," built on this pharaoh's orders, is in fact today's Lake Qarun in the Faiyum oasis, and all the major hydraulic works carried out in the Faiyum belong to Amenemhat III. The identification, then, comes from the works, not from the name.
Pheros is Merneptah of the 19th Dynasty. Here it must be said plainly: "Pheros" isn't really a name at all, it's the Greek distortion of the Egyptian word per-aa, "the great house," which is literally the word our own term "pharaoh" comes from. Herodotus is telling the story of a king called King. The identification with Merneptah rests solely on position: he's the son and successor of Ramesses II, whom Herodotus mistakenly calls Sesostris.
Menes, identified by later tradition with Narmer or with Hor-Aha —father and son, first and second pharaoh of the 1st Dynasty—. They were the first unifiers of Upper and Lower Egypt under a single crown. It's still not entirely clear, however, whether they were really two distinct people or just one person under two different coronation names. Which of the two archaic kings was exactly the "Min" Herodotus speaks of has been disputed for a century.
Proteus, in all likelihood, didn't belong to the same dynasty as Sesostris and Pheros, but founded a new one: the best-fitting candidate is Setnakhte, founder of the 20th Dynasty. Herodotus explicitly says Proteus came to the throne from Memphis, something Egyptology reads as the sign of a dynastic break. And the identification gains strength from a lovely detail: the king Herodotus places right after Proteus is Rhampsinitus —already identified above as Ramesses III— and Ramesses III was, in historical reality, the son of Setnakhte. For once, Herodotus's sequence and the real Egyptian genealogy line up. Be that as it may, this pharaoh was, according to Herodotus, the one who took in Helen of Troy when a storm blew her ship off course, after she had fled Sparta with her lover Paris, causing the outbreak of the famous Trojan War.
The Sesostris case: one pharaoh who's actually three
This one deserves its own section, because it's the most instructive of all.
Herodotus devotes nine chapters to a king called Sesostris who conquers Asia, reaches as far as Scythia and Thrace, leaves colonists by the river Phasis in modern-day Georgia, sows the known world with commemorative stone stelae —some, he recounts with relish, carved with men bearing female genitals wherever a conquered people had surrendered to him without a fight, public humiliation carved in rock for posterity—, returns home laden with loot, survives an assassination attempt by his own brother, and organizes the first land survey of Egypt.
The problem is that no single man who did all these things together ever existed. And the problem is bigger than it looks at first glance: it's not two pharaohs merged into one, here there are at least three, spread across three different dynasties and nearly a thousand years apart.
The name is real: "Sesostris" is the exact Greek transcription of Senusret, and there was a Senusret III, fifth king of the 12th Dynasty, about eight hundred years before Herodotus. The stelae really are his: the genuine ones, the ones he had raised at Semna, by the second cataract, with an inscription warning his successors that whoever failed to defend that frontier with his life "was not his son." That still exists, you can visit it today, and it's exactly the kind of gesture Herodotus turned into legend.
What doesn't exist, as of today —because perhaps those conquered peoples later destroyed them, or they simply haven't yet been found at any site— are stelae of men with female genitals carved to humiliate the defeated: that graphic detail currently has no confirmation, though this author doesn't rule out that sooner or later some proof will surface to confirm it, as has already happened with other claims of Herodotus that once looked like pure fantasy.
The military campaign that truly reached far into the Middle East and Asia isn't Senusret/Sesostris III's —his was a minor foray, barely a raid as far as Shechem, in the modern West Bank— but that of the so-called "warrior pharaoh" Thutmose III, two dynasties and several centuries later: a total of seventeen military campaigns, the crossing of the Euphrates river near Carchemish, in modern-day Syria, and a humiliating incursion into the very territory of the powerful enemy kingdom of Mitanni. He is, by far, the greatest conqueror Egypt ever had, and yet his name almost entirely vanished from popular memory in favor of Sesostris.
Scythia and Thrace, regions a good deal further north, as far as we know to date, were never set foot in by anyone from Egypt: that final stretch of Herodotus's account, the one that carries the pharaohs' conquest all the way to modern Kazakhstan, is (at least for now) pure Greek fantasy with no real Egyptian army behind it. At least until some archaeologist pulls a stone stela, a papyrus, a helmet, a sword or a burial out of those lands that proves an Egyptian presence there.
And then there's the stone. The monumental work that sowed the entire Nile valley with temples, palaces and colossal statues like those at Abu Simbel, the political propaganda carved into walls and columns and repeated —the same account of the same Battle of Kadesh sculpted half a dozen times in half a dozen temples— on a scale no previous pharaoh had even imagined: that, without any doubt, is the work of Ramesses II. A sixty-seven-year reign buys you a great deal of marble.
Of the assassination attempt at his brother's hands, and of whoever invented the first land survey of Egypt, there is no trace whatsoever in the history of any known pharaoh. There, Herodotus —or whoever told him the story— hands us information that's still impossible to verify.
Which is to say that fifth-century-BC Egypt, already a century into Persian rule and in need of a glorious past to hold on to, didn't take one king and inflate him: it took the three best —the border-founder, the forgotten great conqueror and the great builder— spread across a thousand years, and fused them into a single national hero, adding whatever it needed from its own imagination to round out and inflate the legend. And that, dear readers, isn't an error of Herodotus's: it's a first-rate ethnographic fact. It's telling us exactly how the Egyptians remembered themselves.
The ones that remain nameless
And then there are the orphans, on whom there's no consensus at all, nor anything close to it.
Asychis, to whom Herodotus attributes a law allowing you to pledge your own father's corpse as collateral for a loan —the most sinister detail in the whole book— and a now-vanished brick pyramid. Shepseskaf has been proposed as a candidate, but it's a shot in the dark.
Anysis, the blind king who fled to the marshes before a Nubian invasion and recovered his sight thanks to the urine of a wife who had never been unfaithful to her husband. Unidentified.
Sethos, a priest of Ptah turned king, in whose reign field mice gnaw through the bowstrings of an Assyrian army by night and save Egypt without a battle being fought. Unidentified, though the story bears an unmistakable resemblance to the biblical account of Sennacherib's army.
Nitocris, the queen who supposedly drowned her brother's murderers in an underground banqueting hall by inviting them to a feast and then opening the sluices of a nearby canal. Some Egyptologists suspect she wasn't even a woman: she may be a feminized distortion of the name of a male 6th Dynasty king.
Why this matters more than it seems
It's tempting to read this table as a list of Herodotus's mistakes. That would be a mistake, and a big one.
A chronicler who had merely copied exact royal lists would have left us a correct, dead document: names, order, years. Herodotus did something else. He recorded what the Egyptians told about their own kings in the 5th century BC, with the names as they sounded in the street, deeds mixed together, kings merged, and legends attached to the monuments still standing to be seen.
Thanks to that we know what past they had built for themselves. We know they remembered Cheops as a hated tyrant —two thousand years later— while the official monuments say only kind things about him. We know they had forgotten almost the entire 18th Dynasty, the one of Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun, as if it had never existed —Thutmose III himself included, absorbed nameless into the Sesostris legend. And we know they had invented a superhero called Sesostris out of pieces of three different kings.
The walls give us the official version. Herodotus gives us the rumor. And to understand a people, rumor is worth just as much as stone.
All of this —the real names, the distortions, what holds up and what doesn't— I worked through pharaoh by pharaoh while translating and rewriting Book II in The Book of the Muse Euterpe, because there's no way to enjoy Herodotus if every three pages you stumble over a king you don't even know existed.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra.
Ibiza, September 2026
