The royal titulary or royal protocol is the standard naming convention taken by the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It symbolised worldly power and holy might, also acting as a sort of mission statement for the duration of a monarch's reign (although sometimes it even changed during the reign).
The full titulary, consisting of five names, did not come into standard usage until the Middle Kingdom but remained in use as late as the Roman Empire.
Pharaoh was a title of the monarch of ancient Egypt used from the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards. The title was subsequently added to all the previous kings of Egypt. Before this Pharaoh was a term that meant more of the kings' administration. The earliest confirmed instance of the title used contemporaneously for a ruler is a letter to Akhenaten (reigned c. 1353–1336 BCE), possibly preceded by an inscription referring to Thutmose III (c. 1479–1425 BCE). Although the title only came into use in the Eighteenth Dynasty during the New Kingdom, scholars today use it for all the rulers of Egypt from the First Dynasty (c. 3150 BCE) until the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Republic in 30 BCE.
In the early dynasties, ancient Egyptian kings had as many as three titles: the Horus, the Sedge and Bee (nswt-bjtj), and the Two Ladies or Nebty (nbtj) name. The Golden Horus and the nomen titles were added later.
Mentuhotep II (Ancient Egyptian: Mn-ṯw-ḥtp, meaning "Mentu is satisfied"), also known under his prenomen Nebhepetre (Ancient Egyptian: Nb-ḥpt-Rˁ, meaning "The Lord of the rudder is Ra"; died c. 2009 BC), was an ancient Egyptian King, the sixth ruler of the 11th Dynasty. He is credited with reuniting Egypt, thus ending the turbulent First Intermediate Period and becoming the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. He reigned for 51 years, according to the Turin King List. Mentuhotep II succeeded his father Intef III on the throne and was in turn succeeded by his son Mentuhotep III.
Mentuhotep II ascended Egypt's throne in the Upper Egyptian city of Thebes during the First Intermediate Period. Egypt was not unified during this time, and the 10th Dynasty, rival to Mentuhotep's 11th, ruled Lower Egypt from Herakleopolis. After the Herakleopolitan kings desecrated the sacred ancient royal necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt in the fourteenth year of Mentuhotep's reign, Pharaoh Mentuhotep II dispatched his armies north to conquer Lower Egypt. Continuing his father Intef III's conquests, Mentuhotep succeeded in unifying his country, probably shortly before his 39th year on the throne. Following and in recognition of the unification, in regnal year 39, he changed his titulary to Sematawy (Ancient Egyptian: Smȝ-tȝ.w(j), meaning "He who unifies the two lands").
The Horus name is the oldest known and used crest of ancient Egyptian rulers. It belongs to the "great five names" of an Egyptian pharaoh. However, modern Egyptologists and linguists are starting to prefer the more neutral term "serekh name". This is because not every pharaoh placed the falcon, which symbolizes the deity Horus, atop his (or in some cases, her) serekh.
The prenomen, also called cartouche name or throne name (Ancient Egyptian: 𓆥 nswt-bjtj "of the Sedge and Bee") of ancient Egypt, was one of the five royal names of pharaohs. The first pharaoh to have a Sedge and Bee name was Den during the First Dynasty.
Most Egyptologists believe that the prenomen was a regnal name.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche (/kɑːrˈtuːʃ/ kar-TOOSH) is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the feature did not come into common use until the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, if it makes the name fit better it can be horizontal, with a vertical line at the end (in the direction of reading). The ancient Egyptian word for cartouche was shenu (compare with Coptic ϣⲛⲉ šne yielding eventual sound changes), and the cartouche was essentially an expanded shen ring. Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.
Of the five royal titularies it was the prenomen (the throne name), and the "Son of Ra" titulary (the so-called nomen name given at birth), which were enclosed by a cartouche.
Hatshepsut (/hɑːtˈʃɛpsʊt/ haht-SHEPP-sut; c. 1505–1458 BC) was the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, ruling first as regent, then as queen regnant from c. 1479 BC until c. 1458 BC (Low Chronology) and the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Thutmose II. She was Egypt's second confirmed woman who ruled in her own right, the first being Sobekneferu/Neferusobek in the Twelfth Dynasty.
Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I and Great Royal Wife, Ahmose. Upon the death of her husband and half-brother Thutmose II, she had initially ruled as regent to her stepson, Thutmose III, who inherited the throne at the age of two. Several years into her regency, Hatshepsut assumed the position of pharaoh and adopted the full royal titulary, making her a co-ruler alongside Thutmose III. In order to establish herself in the Egyptian patriarchy, she took on traditionally male roles and was depicted as a male pharaoh, with physically masculine traits and traditionally male garb. She emphasized both the qualities of men and women to convey the idea that she was both a mother and father to the realm. Hatshepsut's reign was a period of great prosperity and general peace. One of the most prolific builders in Ancient Egypt, she oversaw large-scale construction projects such as the Karnak Temple Complex, the Red Chapel, the Speos Artemidos and most famously, the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari.
The Roman pharaohs, rarely referred to as ancient Egypt's Thirty-fourth Dynasty, were the Roman emperors in their capacity as rulers of Egypt, especially in Egyptology. After Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Republic in 30 BC by Octavian, the people and especially the priesthood of the country continued to recognize the Roman emperors as pharaohs, according them traditional pharaonic titularies and depicting them with traditional pharaonic garb, engaging in traditional pharaonic activities, in artwork and at temples throughout Egypt.
Though the Egyptians themselves considered the Romans to be their pharaohs and the legitimate successors of the ancient pharaohs, the emperors themselves never adopted any pharaonic titles or traditions outside of Egypt, as these would have been hard to justify in the Roman world at large. Most emperors probably gave the status accorded to them by the Egyptians little care and rarely visited the province more than once in their lifetime. Their role as god-kings was only ever officially acknowledged by the Egyptians themselves. This was a sharp contrast to the preceding dynasty of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom, who had spent the majority of their lives in Egypt. Pharaohs before Egypt's incorporation into the Achaemenid Empire in the Late Period had also all ruled the country from within Egypt. Egypt was, however, governed differently from other Roman provinces, with emperors hand-picking governors for the region and often treating it more like a personal possession than a province. Though not all emperors were recognized as pharaohs, Egyptian religion demanded the presence of a pharaoh to act as the intermediate between humanity and the gods. The emperors filling this role proved to be the most simple solution, and was similar to how the Persians had been regarded as pharaohs centuries prior (constituting the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-first dynasties).