Roman pharaoh

This was a sharp contrast to the preceding dynasty of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom, who had spent the majority of their lives in Egypt.

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).

Although Octavian made a point of not taking the Pharaonic crown when he conquered Egypt, which would have been difficult to justify to the wider empire considering the vast amount of propaganda which he had spread about the "exotic" behavior of Cleopatra and Antony,[4] the native population of Egypt regarded him as the pharaoh succeeding Cleopatra and Caesarion.

Depictions of Octavian, now called Augustus, in traditional pharaonic garbs (wearing different crowns and the traditional kilt) and sacrificing goods to various Egyptian gods were made as early as around 15 BC and they are present in the Temple of Dendur, built by Gaius Petronius, the Roman governor of Egypt.

[9] As pharaonic precedent demanded, Vespasian demonstrated his divine election by the traditional methods of spitting on and trampling a blind and crippled man, thereby miraculously healing him.

The abstract nature of the role of these "Roman pharaohs" ensured that the priests of Egypt could demonstrate their loyalty both to their traditional ways and to the new foreign ruler.

[12] As Christianity became more and more accepted within the empire, eventually becoming the state religion, emperors no longer found it possible to accept the traditional implications of being pharaoh (a position firmly rooted in the Egyptian religion) and by the early 4th century, Alexandria itself, the capital of Egypt since the time of Alexander the Great, had become a major center of Christianity.

The decipherment of names of emperors, and in particular the Egyptian renditions of titles like Caesar and autokrator, were a highly important part of the process.

[17] His subsequent realization, at some point later in 1822 or in 1823, that hieroglyphic writing was often a combination of phonetic and ideographic (i.e. symbols of words or ideas) laid the groundwork for future successful decipherment efforts[18] and led Champollion to begin focusing on not only deciphering the symbols but also to translate the underlying language.