Pharaohs and Playwrights between Fiction and Reality: Controversies in the Egyptian Cultural Field

Going through the controversies involving pharaohs as fictive characters, this article focuses on the life and works of four Egyptian playwrights (Yaʿqūb Ṣanūʿ, ʿAlī Aḥmad Bākaṯīr, Alfred Faraǧ and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm). Deeply engaged in the politics of their time, playwrights’ experiences with ‘pharaohs’ are studied here with the aim of highlighting the different perceptions of the character of the pharaoh in Egypt and in the West, retracing the implications of the common pairing of pharaohs with presidents, as well as showing how literature can affect politics and how the collocation of pharaohs in the Egyptian cultural field remains problematic, but is changing.