William Durand-Poole

Keir Starmer could do with that now, couldn't he?

Of course, we have some.

Some leaders who believe that they may well be gods, you know.

I can't think who you are indicating here.

It's a really strange one because, of course, the Egyptians saw their rulers become old.

and forgetful and decrepit and, you know, losing teeth and hair, and yet still maintain that they are living gods.

And eventually they die, of course.

So the way in which this was kind of used in Egyptian theology was to suggest that

The kingship, the pharaoh himself, is forever.

The individual may change, but the institution of the pharaoh goes on and on and on.

So as one pharaoh dies, he becomes the new Osiris, and his son or heir becomes the new Horus.

So there's this constant cycle of life and death, life and death, life and death.

But

For most people in Egypt, they really did believe that the pharaoh was a god.

And that's very different from the kind of things we get in Mesopotamia, for instance, where kings like Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, this kind, they were the viceroy of god.

So they were charged with things, you know, by God.

But here in Egypt, we have a mortal man who is also at the same time an immortal God.

And in the iconography, you see the kind of closeness between Pharaoh and the gods.

They often hug him.

They'll kiss him on the lips.