On the Origins of Naqraus, the Legendary First Antediluvian King of Egypt

​For well over a decade now, I’ve had a special interest in the medieval Arabic-language legends of ancient Egypt, particularly their mysterious origins. While the particular story of Sūrīd and his building of the Great Pyramid has received more scholarly attention than the rest, for the most part, it is not a subject that attracts a lot of deep analysis. I was surprised to discover an old 1903 analysis that provided me with an interesting insight into one of the odder parts of the story, at least in a somewhat roundabout way.

​It is widely assumed that the history of Egypt preserved in such texts as the Akhbār al-zamān and al-Maqrizi’s Description of Egypt originated in a lost Greek-language Christian account of Egypt, specific details are difficult to pin down since the text as we have it is quite difficult to analyze. Most surviving Greek texts follow the list of kings given by Manetho in the third century BCE, beginning with the gods who ruled Egypt, under their Greek names, starting with Hephaestus and Helios. (See, e.g., Eusebius’ Chronicle, John Malalas’ Chronicle, the Excerpta Latina Barbari, etc.) Scholars have tried, and often failed, to suggest plausible Greek origins for the names of the pharaohs given in the Arabic texts. The final part of the list of kings is self-evidently a corrupt but still recognizable copy of Manetho’s list of kings, from the twentieth dynasty on down. Those names are easy enough to trace back. M. A. Murray provided a list in 1924.
 
The trouble is the earlier kings, who bear no obvious connection either to Manetho or to reality. (Manetho’s mythical pharaohs before Menes were often removed from Christian summaries as fictitious.) In 1903, Ahmed Kamal, then the curator of the Egyptian Museum, and the first major native-born Egyptologist, published a rambling article in which he attempted to show that the earlier kings were correctly transcribed from cartouches on Egyptian monuments or from Greek lists of kings. Some of his efforts to find correspondences were a stretch. He tries to assert, for instance, that Queen Charoba (as Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf calls her) or Hūriā (as the Akhbār calls her), daughter of the evil Ṭūṭīs was really Hatshepsut, daughter of Thutmose I, though their lives have no real similarities other than their femaleness. He ends up quoting her story from Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf to compare the two, but this is one rare case where the texts vary wildly, and the version in the much earlier Akhbār bears but scant resemblance to the similarities Kamal claimed to see in Murtaḍā’s text. (The later texts were apparently rewritten to reassert male primacy and recast Hūriā as more submissive to men.) Kamal, citing Murtaḍā, compares the next monarch, Dalic, to Thutmose III and purports to see many similarities. However, “Dalic” was a rewrite of the original Dulaīfah, as given in the Akhbār two centuries earlier, and acknowledged by Murtaḍā; she was a woman, so obviously not Thutmose III.
 
That’s not to say Ṭūṭīs isn’t an Arabic version of a Greek corruption of Thutmose or Thoth or something similar, a common enough name. But the stories just don’t support the preservation of the lost history of Hatshepsut, otherwise unattested from her own time down to its modern recovery in the nineteenth century.
 
Where Kamal is right, it tends to be because he quoting from Gaston Maspero, the French archaeologist who explored some of these questions a few years earlier. Kamal’s discussion of the first of the (imaginary) kings of Egypt is one such example: “NAQRĀŪS, or simply Craos, according to Murtaḍā, is the first king of Egypt, named Nαραχώ = Naracho among the Byzantines.” There is a lot in that sentence, but for now, let us note that it comes from Maspero, who in 1899 decided that he had found the origin of Naqrāūs: “[T]he name of Naqrāūs is of Egyptian-Greek origin, Nachēros, Nachôr, Narachos. A Nachēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses, and a Nachor or Naracho is indicated by the Christian chronographic histories (Chronicon Paschale [p. 86], Cedrenus 1.47, etc.) as the successor of Sesostris.”
 
Now, both men are partly wrong, not because they have the completely wrongheaded idea but because they didn’t trace things quite far enough.
 
First, let us dispense with the Greek chronographers. The seventh-century Chronicon Paschale gives “Nachor” and George Cedernus, writing three centuries later, gives Narecho. (Other variants include Maracho and Karacho.) Both texts are copying from the sixth-century work of John Malalas, who claimed that Naracho was the successor of an otherwise unknown Assyrian king named “Sostris”: “The emperor Sostris reached Egypt after his victory and died. After him Pharaoh, also called Naracho, reigned over the land of the Egyptians, and successors from his family reigned over the Egyptians” (Chronicle 2.6, trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys, and Scott). Naracho was an Assyrian by birth, from the tribe of Shem, and lived at the same time as the patriarch Abraham. He was emperor of Assyria before becoming king of Egypt. Some have suggested that Naracho is a corruption of a pharaoh from Manetho’s list, known as Necherocheus from the Excerpta Latina Barbari, where the text is corrupt, or Necherophes in Eusebius.
 
Malalas himself (Chron. 3.6) attributes information about Naracho not to Manetho’s list but to Theophilus, a chronographer, who was probably the Theophilus of Antioch who wrote Ad Autolycus (where he discusses, e.g., Manetho). However, Malalas almost certainly knew of Theophilus only through secondary sources. It is possible that Naracho was a character from the so-called Picus-Zeus narrative, attributed to the writer Bruttius, which featured a fantastical history of Egypt, particularly likely if the fourth-century Bruttius named the second-century Theophilus as a source, thus accounting for Malalas’s citations. But this can only be speculation.
 
All that being said, even with the popularity of John Malalas’s Chronicle in Byzantine circles, there is no good evidence that the Arab writers used his work in creating their own, particularly since none of the other names in the list seem to follow Malalas’s text. (They share only Misraim/Mestraim and Hermes in common.) Indeed, while Malalas says Naracho was the first “emperor from the tribe of Shem,” he does not call him the first king of Egypt, nor is he antediluvian in Malalas’s text. Malalas makes “Mestre” (Mestraim) from the tribe of Ham the first king and places him after the Flood. Naracho has in common with Naqrāūs only a foreign origin among Shem’s progeny—which turns out to be an interesting lead.
 
Maspero mentioned that “a Nachēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses,” but I admit that I had no idea what that was meant to refer to. It turns out that Maspero was referencing the fragments of the second-century BCE writer Artapanus, a Hellenized Jew who wrote a book about Jewish patriarchs in Egyptian history with some rather wild legends about the patriarchs apparently meant as a rejoinder to Ptolemaic works like Manetho’s. Aratapanus, whose work only survives in excerpts quoted by Eusebius, claimed that Moses “appointed Nacheros superintendent of the building” of the temples of Karnak and Luxor in Thebes (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.27.11). 
 
Now, that is as far as Maspero and Kamal took it, with little more than a note about the similarity in sounds. However, because I hadn’t heard of Aratapanus before this, I started to do some reading about him, most of which was useless speculation. But Louis Ginzberg, the rabbi who wrote The Legends of the Jews (1913), noted in passing when retelling Aratapanus’s legend of Moses that “Nacheros” might have originated in the Hebrew word nekar, which means “foreigner.” He did not elaborate.
 
However, when I stopped to think about it, this makes perfect sense. I could easily see an original legend or text in Hebrew that said that “Moses appointed a foreigner to oversee the building” and that a Greek (or even Arabic) translator with a shaky command of Hebrew mistook the descriptor for a proper name, turning “nekar” into “Nekaros” or “Nacheros” (the “ch” is a chi in the Greek text). This reading would not be without precedent, for the Pharaoh of Joseph appointed a foreigner, Joseph, to oversee Egypt, and thus having Moses do the same would be an obvious parallel. And the Greeks were notoriously bad at translation, often corrupting words in bizarre ways. For instance, they misheard the Persian fire-altars known as ayazana as “Jasonia,” mistakenly thinking the name referenced the hero Jason. The Arabic writers had the same problem. Al-Maqrizi, for instance, used a source that misunderstood one of the dynasties of “Diospolitan” (Theban) kings in Manetho as a single king named Diosqūlita. At any rate, both Greek Christians and especially Arabic writers were known to use Jewish sources in their works.
 
While it is doubtful that the Arabic writers used Aratapanus specifically—his book was apparently of very little interest outside of a couple of Christian clerics—it is entirely possible that the underlying Greek chronicle adapted by the Arab authors had made a similar error and had adapted Nacheros as the first king by mistranslating a Jewish text or legend about Egypt similar to those known to have existed, like those of Aratapanus, Abenephius, etc., in which the first king is described as a foreigner to the land of Egypt. This is one of the only points on which every legend agrees. In a completely different tradition, the historian Al-Tabari, writing in 915, called the first pharaoh Sinan, said he was a foreigner from Yemen, and placed him in the time of Abraham (the same time as Naracho). Al-Tabari said he came (again, like Naracho) from the tribe of Shem. According to the later Arabic legend, Naqrāūs grew up in the Holy Land, was one of the Nephilim-giants, and traveled to the Nile to found a new country when the wicked descendants of Cain took control of the land (Akhbār 2.2).
 
It's not even particularly unusual that a character with a relatively lowly position in an early legend is raised to kingly status in medieval myth. Sūrīd, for instance, first appears as a philosopher in ibn Wahshiyya’s Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham (863 CE) before being assimilated to Manetho’s Suphis (Khufu) and being presented as a king in the Akhbār al-zamān.
 
Can we prove any of this with certainty? No, we cannot—not without the discovery of earlier texts that might offer more insight. There are other possibilities, too. The first Greek settlement in Egypt was called Naucratis, which became el-Niqrash in Arabic, a name that bears a certain similarity to Naqrāūs (Naqrāūsh in al-Maqrizi). But it’s certainly interesting that so many similar names clustered around the same idea of early foreign arrivals.