Leading roles were played by Edmund Purdom, Bella Darvi, Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Gene Tierney, Peter Ustinov, and Michael Wilding.

The grateful Akhnaton makes Sinuhe court physician and gives Horemheb a post in the Royal Guard, a career previously denied to him by low birth.

This faith rejects Egypt's traditional gods in favor of monolatristic worship of the sun, referred to as Aten.

Akhnaton intends to promote Atenism throughout Egypt, which earns him the hatred of the country's corrupt and politically active traditional priesthood.

Life in court drags Sinuhe away from his previous ambition of helping the poor, and he falls obsessively in love with Babylonian courtesan Nefer.

Lacking a tomb in which to put his parents' mummies, Sinuhe buries them in the sand amid the lavish funerary complexes of the Valley of the Kings.

Tavern maid Merit finds him there and warns him that Akhnaton has condemned him to death; one of the pharaoh's daughters fell ill and died while Sinuhe was working as an embalmer, and the tragedy is being blamed on his desertion of the court.

After saving enough money from his fees to return home, Sinuhe buys his way back into the favor of the court with a piece of military intelligence he learned abroad, informing Horemheb (now commander of the Egyptian army) that the barbarian Hittites plan to attack the country with iron weapons.

Meanwhile, the priests of the old gods have been fomenting hate crimes against the Aten's devotees, and now urge Sinuhe to help them kill Akhnaton and put Horemheb on the throne instead.

The physician is given extra inducement by the princess Baketamun; she reveals that he is actually the son of the previous pharaoh by a concubine, discarded at birth because of the jealousy of the old queen and raised by foster parents.

Sinuhe is still reluctant to perform this deed until the Egyptian army mounts a full attack on worshipers of the Aten.

Enlightened by Akhnaton's dying words, Sinuhe warns Horemheb that his wine is also poisoned, thus allowing him to marry the Princess and become Pharaoh.

Later, Sinuhe is brought before his old friend for preaching the ideals Akhnaton believed in and is sentenced to be exiled to the shores of the Red Sea, where he spends his remaining days writing down his life story, in the hope that it may be found by Thoth or his descendants.

The use of the "Cross of Life" ankh to represent Akhnaton's "new" religion reflects a popular and esoteric belief in the 1950s that monolatristic Atenism was a sort of proto-Christianity.

Dunne says Brando read the part "absolutely beautifully" but then Curtiz said "How can I with all my genius make you play this man who is one minute hero the next moment villain?"

As the events in that story take place seventy years after those in The Egyptian, this re-use creates an unintended sense of continuity.

Only three actors, Mimi Gibson, Michael Ansara and John Carradine, and a handful of extras, appeared in both pictures.

Legitimate HD releases have appeared in America (Twilight Time), France (Sidonis Calysta), Denmark (Soul Media), and Japan (Mermaid Films).

The region 0 US disc's 2010 transfer has a drastically revised color scheme, which afflicted numerous Fox restorations carried out at the same time.