William Durand-Poole

He's depicted at the same size as the gods, you know.

I think there's a lot in that, Anita, I really do.

The kind of mystique of monarchy is held up by that, isn't it?

The very invisibility of the monarch, I think, is very important within all of this.

And, you know, the pharaohs of Egypt did not go around pressing the flesh in the manner of sort of modern European monarchs at all.

They didn't do their balcony presentations, this kind of thing.

There was a mystery around them because they were sacrosanct after all.

Absolutely.

And it's a huge leap between the two of them.

It's a big difference.

It really is a huge difference there.

So that's the world we're in.

In Pharaonic Egypt, we've got a divine pharaoh.

We have no indication of this whatsoever because our sources are completely silent on the man who would be Akhenaten.

until he appears as Akhenaten.

And that's because generally in the New Kingdom, princes didn't get much of a run-in publicly at all.

He wasn't the eldest son.

No, no, he wasn't.

There was somebody else, a prince called Thutmose, who seems to have pre-deceased his brother.

We get no knowledge of him.