Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthorne.

What did the word Pharaoh mean?

How did you become an ancient Egyptian king?

And what was that beard all about?

In this episode,

Joyce Tildesley, Professor of Egyptology at the University of

Manchester, answers some of the big questions about ancient Egyptian pharaohs. As always,

without everything you wanted to know, series, our questions are drawn from a mixture of popular

internet search queries and ones that you've submitted via Facebook,

Instagram and Twitter. Putting the questions to Joyce was podcast editorial assistant Emily

Briffitt. Hello and welcome to you Joyce. It's lovely to have you for here.

Oh thank you for inviting me. So today we're going to be talking about ancient

Egyptian pharaohs. With that, I guess the best

place to start would be with this question from Hannah Laura Ridgley from Instagram, which is,

what does the word pharaoh mean? And I guess, sort of to tie in with that, where does the title come

from? When was it first used? And was it just an ancient Egyptian thing? Well it comes from the ancient

Egyptian meaning great house but what it actually means is king and it's a word that we use a lot

to describe the king of Egypt but the Egyptians themselves didn't necessarily use it. It's a bit like

I think say in the UK we might say Buckingham Palace when we mean the court or, you know, the royal family in general. But it's somehow, in our minds, it's become the title that we give to the King of Egypt. But actually what I always tell my students, because Pharaoh is quite a difficult word to spell. I always say you can use the word king just as easily as you can use the word Pharaoh, and it means exactly same thing. We do find it used in ancient Egypt, but not all the time and not by all kings.

When did the official time of the Egyptian pharaohs start? Yes. The first person, I think,

that we can really say ruled all of Egypt was about 3,100 BCE. Before that, Egypt obviously was there,

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