"[2] Pharaoh is set in the Egypt of 1087–85 BCE as that country experiences internal stresses and external threats that will culminate in the fall of its Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom.

Prus' vision of the fall of an ancient civilization derives some of its power from the author's keen awareness of the final demise of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, a century before the completion of the novel.

In the course of telling his story of power, personality, and the fates of nations, he produced a compelling literary depiction of life at every level of ancient Egyptian society.

[7][8] Pharaoh comprises a compact, substantial introduction; sixty-seven chapters; and an evocative epilogue (the latter omitted at the book's original publication, and restored in the 1950s).

[15] And in the month of Pharmouthi, in February, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, the ruler of Phoenicia and of the nine nations, Mer-amen-Ramses XII, after consulting the gods, to whom he is equal, named as his Successor to the Throne his twenty-two-year-old son Ham-sem-merer-amen-Ramses.

This choice delighted the pious priests, eminent nomarchs, valiant army, faithful people and all creatures living on Egyptian soil.

One, twenty-seven years old, had been unable to walk from his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and the third, after drinking tainted wine that he had been unwilling to give up, had gone mad and, fancying himself an ape, spent days on end in the trees.

[16] It also comprises a number of interbraided strands — including the plot line, Egypt's cycle of seasons, the country's geography and monuments, and ancient Egyptian practices (e.g. mummification rituals and techniques) — each of which rises to prominence at appropriate moments.

Menes wrapped himself in his gaberdine and replied: "Whenever such thoughts assail you, go to one of our temples and look at its walls crammed with pictures of men, animals, trees, rivers, stars—just like the world we live in.

[21] The origins of the names of some prominent characters may be of interest: Pharaoh belongs to a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the 16th century and Jan Kochanowski's play, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578), and also includes Ignacy Krasicki's Fables and Parables (1779) and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz's The Return of the Deputy (1790).

[26]The perspective of which Miłosz writes, enables Prus, while formulating an ostensibly objective vision of historic Egypt, simultaneously to create a satire on man and society, much as Jonathan Swift in Britain had done the previous century.

Its young protagonist, Prince Ramses (who is 22 years old at the novel's opening), learns that those who would oppose the priesthood are vulnerable to cooptation, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation or assassination.

[29] The novel's English translator has recounted wondering, well in advance of the event, whether President John F. Kennedy would meet with a fate like that of the book's protagonist.

But there came a time when the populace declined in number in the aftermath of wars and lost their vitality under oppression and extortion, while the influx of foreigners undermined their racial unity.

When, in addition, the energy of the pharaohs and the wisdom of the priests were dissipated in a flood of Asian profligacy and these two forces began between them a struggle over the monopoly of fleecing the people, Egypt fell under the power of foreigners, and the light of civilization that had burned for several thousand years at the Nile expired.

"A Legend of Old Egypt", in its turn, had taken inspiration from contemporaneous events: the fatal 1887-88 illnesses of Germany's warlike Kaiser Wilhelm I and of his reform-minded son and successor, Friedrich III.

[36] In preparation for composing Pharaoh, Prus made a painstaking study of Egyptological sources, including works by John William Draper, Ignacy Żagiell, Georg Ebers and Gaston Maspero.

[40] Modern Spiritualism had been initiated in 1848 in Hydeville, New York, by the Fox sisters, Katie and Margaret, aged 11 and 15, and had survived even their 1888 confession that forty years earlier they had caused the "spirits'" telegraph-like tapping sounds by snapping their toe joints.

Spiritualist "mediums" in America and Europe claimed to communicate through tapping sounds with spirits of the dead, eliciting their secrets and conjuring up voices, music, noises and other antics, and occasionally working "miracles" such as levitation.

[42][43][44] A third dually determined feature of Pharaoh is the historical Egyptian Labyrinth, which had been described in the fifth century BCE in Book II of The Histories of Herodotus.

The Father of History had visited Egypt's entirely stone-built administrative center, pronounced it more impressive than the pyramids, declared it "beyond my power to describe"—then proceeded to give a striking description[45] that Prus incorporated into his novel.

[46][47] The Labyrinth had, however, been made palpably real for Prus by an 1878 visit that he had paid to the famous ancient labyrinthine salt mine at Wieliczka, near Kraków in southern Poland.

Finally, a fourth dually determined feature was inspired by a solar eclipse that Prus had witnessed at Mława, a hundred kilometers north-northwest of Warsaw, on 19 August 1887, the day before his fortieth birthday.

Prus probably also was aware of Christopher Columbus' manipulative use of a lunar eclipse on 29 February 1504, while marooned for a year on Jamaica, to extort provisions from the Arawak natives.

The latter incident strikingly resembles the exploitation of a solar eclipse by Ramses' chief adversary, Herhor, high priest of Amon, in a culminating scene of the novel.

He was aware of Eratosthenes' remarkably accurate calculation of Earth's circumference, and the invention of a steam engine by Heron of Alexandria, centuries after the period of his novel, in Alexandrian Egypt.

The novel does a notable job of recreating a primal ancient civilization, complete with the geography, climate, plants, animals, ethnicities, countryside, agriculture, cities, trades, commerce, social stratification, politics, religion and warfare.

[55] The embalming and funeral scenes; the court protocol; the waking and feeding of the gods; the religious beliefs, ceremonies and processions; the concept behind the design of Pharaoh Zoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara; the descriptions of travels and of locales visited on the Nile and in the desert; Egypt's exploitation of Nubia as a source of gold — all draw upon scholarly documentation.

[56] Joseph Conrad, during his 1914 visit to Poland just as World War I was breaking out, "delighted in his beloved Prus" and read Pharaoh and everything else by the ten-years-older, recently deceased author that he could get his hands on.

[58] The novel has been translated into twenty-three languages: Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Ukrainian.