Who Was "Phanophis"? Unearthing Bar Hebraeus's First King of Egypt

This is a weird little rabbit hole I found myself in this weekend, and I hope that you find it interesting, too. I have been working with a number of medieval Arabic histories of Ancient Egypt, and for a change of pace, I thought I would look at the medieval Syriac histories of Egypt to see how they differ. I translated the sections of Gregory Bar Hebraeus’s Chronography (c. 1284 CE) on Egypt (since the standard translation is under copyright until January), and this raised a question. Bar Hebraeus gave the name of the first king of Egypt as “Phanophis,” which was otherwise unknown to me, and scholarly analysis in the literature on Bar Hebraeus was about as useless as you would expect. Very little had ever been done, most of it old, little of it extending beyond Bar Hebraeus and his immediate source, and a lot of it obviously wrong. So where did this name come from? Little did I know how hard it would be to find out.

​It was easy enough to dispense with the scholarly opinions. Franz Joseph Lauth, a nineteenth century German scholar, proposed that it was a corruption of a phrase meaning “the man from Thinis.” This made very little sense. Andreas Su-Min Ri, a French scholar of Syriac, proposed in 2000 that the word was a corruption of Panopolis, the alchemical center of Egypt in Late Antiquity. This also seemed wrong because I knew that Bar Hebraeus was not the only writer to have used some version of this name.
 
Bar Hebraeus’s account is unfortunately very brief: “And in his [Peleg’s] one hundred and first year, the first king of Egypt, Phanophis, reigned for 68 years.”
 
Bar Hebraeus took his list of pharaohs from one appearing in the earlier Chronicle of Michael the Syrian (c. 1184 CE) where the name is given in a list as Panouphis and his reign as 68 years, but with no story attached and no explanation. He, in turn, drew on a number of earlier sources, including the same ones used by Agapius of Hierapolis for his Kitāb al-ʿunwān (c. 942) where the same name is given as Manouphis. Agapius, fortunately, offered a narrative: “In the year 101 of Ar’u, the Egyptians, following the example of the Babylonians, appointed a king for themselves, whose name was Manouphis; he reigned over them for sixty-eight years. He was called Mesraim, after the name of Mesraim, their forefather. It is certain that it is from the name Mesraim that [Egypt] came to be called Misr.”
 
Now this was helpful. Two centuries earlier, there was a full story about this guy, and it was clearly connected to the biblical figure Mizraim (Mesraim), the namesake of Misr, the traditional name for Egypt.
 
Agapius, a Christian, wrote in Arabic which helps to explain what is going on. An earlier text called The Cave of Treasures, from the sixth century, was composed in Syriac and translated into Arabic sometime before Agapius wrote. I don’t have access to the surviving Arabic versions, but it was adapted and translated into Ge’ez in medieval times as The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan and this was translated into English by S. C. Malan. The close copy of the Arabic makes plain where the name came from: “And in those days Ragu was one hundred and eighty years old, and in his one hundred and fortieth year, Yanuf reigned over the land of Egypt. He is the first king that reigned over it; and he built the city of Memphis, and named it after his own name. That is whose name is rendered Masrin.”
 
Now, the names are a little wonky after so many translations, but given the obvious way the author states that the king shared his name with Memphis, it’s clear that the original version said Manf—the Arabic word for Memphis—built Memphis, named it for himself, and was known as Mizraim.
 
Manf solves the puzzle, being a clear origin point of Manouphis and the rest of the descendant names.
 
The story even has a genuine Classical pedigree, being an Arabic adaption of legend of Menes, the Greek name for the first king, who built the country’s first capital, Memphis. “Menes” and “Memphis” share an etymological root (the word for “endures”) and in Antiquity it was assumed Memphis got its name from Menes.
 
It’s hard, though, to trace the origins of this back much farther. The Ge’ez text’s lines about Yanuf/Manf do not appear in the underlying Syriac original, where the name is completely different. In the Cave of Treasures, we read: “And in the days of Reu the Mesrâyê, who are the Egyptians, appointed their first king; his name was Puntos, and he reigned over them sixty-eight years” (trans. E. A. Wallis Budge).
 
“Puntos” is hard to square with “Manf” in any form. It is possible that the name is a reflex of either the land of Punt, associated with Egyptian trade and wealth, or with Put, Mizraim’s brother, but it is not clear. The slightly later Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (3.6), which was written around 692 CE, drew on the Cave of Treasures and gives the same story, but the name is all over the place. The near-contemporary Greek translation gives it as Pontipos and the Latin as Pontipus, while the Syriac original has seven different variants in the critical edition, all circling around the name Papinos. However, Pseudo-Methodius (3.7) identifies the king as the son of Ham, suggesting that the author thought of him as Put, following the Septuagint, which identified Put with Libya and its people as the helpers of Egypt (Nahum 3:9).
 
The German scholars W. J. Aerts and G. A. A. Kortekaas same to a somewhat similar conclusion in their 1998 critical edition of Pseudo-Methodius, which I translate here:

Greek and Latin agree on the name Pontipos. Yet it is difficult to imagine how this name could have arisen as a corruption of the Syriac Papînôs (for the Syriac variants, see Reinink II, ad 3,7 note 2). It is possible that the name-form pwpynws found in Syriac manuscript V should be taken as the starting point. From this, first, a metathesis to pwnypws could have occurred, and second, an association with the Greek word πόντος may have led to the Greek form of the name. The name Pôntôs, the first king of the Egyptians in the Cave of Treasures (CT XXXV (1)), may also have played a role.

​Ri, on the other hand, considers the names to be “close” enough not to need explanation. Clearly, none of this would yield Manf, so regardless of where Pontos and Papinos came from, the origin of the later branch of names is the Arabic translation. The change from “M” to “P” at the beginning of the name may reflect influence from this older branch in the name’s family tree.
 
The best conclusion scholars have for where Pseudo-Methodius got “Papinos”—and here I think Ri is probably right—is that he was adapting the Greek mythological figure Epapus, who was a son of Zeus, king of Egypt, and husband of … wait for it … Memphis, daughter of Nilus. In Greek myth, Epapus and Memphis founded the city of Memphis and served as Egypt’s first monarchs (Hyginus, Fabula 149-150, 275).
 
Whichever way we look, the story, in all of its guises, largely remains the same: The first king of Egypt was the founder of Memphis, the ancient capital. The particular name used in each story reflects a cascading accumulation of corruptions as writers copied and transformed the original claim, sometimes without understanding exactly what they were adapting.