Irene Cordón: "Ramesses II and Donald Trump have a lot in common"

BarcelonaOne day, Irene Cordón Solà-Sagalés (Barcelona, ​​1972), a doctor in archaeology and ancient history, with a master's degree in Egyptology and a law degree, had had enough. She was fed up with the idealized vision that novelists, historians, and Hollywood all came from the pharaohs. She wrote the book Pharaohs of Silicon Valley (Capsule), where he pours out some of this rage and argues why we shouldn't idolize the rulers of Ancient Egypt and why they are not so different from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu.

What exactly is a pharaoh?

— I wanted to talk about the pharaohs because they've been overly mythologized. We tend to project our parameters back into the past. He was a leader of the Ancient Egyptian civilization, who held all powers in his hands: executive, legislative, judicial, religious, and military. He was considered a god.

At what point did you get tired of the pharaohs and decide to demystify them?

— When I'd studied them in depth. I'm fascinated by ancient history, especially the Mediterranean, because if we don't know our origins, we can't understand who we are. Egypt is fascinating, but when you dig deeper, you realize that history isn't like what movies or novels portray. The pharaohs aren't a mix of Charlton Heston, Moses, and James Bond. Not everything should revolve around the pharaohs. They had unbridled egos and absolute power, and that should be frightening. It's enough to have them on a pedestal or portray them as visionaries and great heroes. What is admirable is that they were able to rule for 3,000 years.

And how did they do it?

— Creating stories and narratives. From the beginning, the pharaohs were clear that reality is not what it is, but what people believe it to be. They maintained power thanks to narratives created in the minds of the masses, stories that allowed them to exert control and influence. The creation of myths is essential to establishing and maintaining power. They weren't invulnerable, but they created that illusion. Now there are leaders who do the same. They use the same dynamics; absolutely nothing has changed. It's mostly technocrats who haven't even been elected.

The myth has persisted long after its era ended. Why does it continue to fascinate?

— We love to idolize, which I find horrifying. You can admire, but you can't idolize. The pharaohs were human, and they made mistakes. Everything we know about them was written at court, because 99% of the population was illiterate. Why is there no talk of internal purges, family betrayals, state crimes, conspiracies...?

They had all the power, but did they rule?

— A pharaoh is not a man, he is not a person, no matter who he is. He is an institution. In our society, we look at what outfit the queen wears or what her daughters do. We like to do laundry, and we care about who they are. In Ancient Egypt, it wasn't like that. The pharaoh was represented as a young, handsome, athletic man, regardless of who he actually was. It didn't matter if he was a child, an old man, or, exceptionally, a woman. The important thing was that the pharaoh existed, a semi-divine being who acted as an intermediary between the divine world and humans. It was a deeply religious society. The pharaoh had to exist, because he was the balance; he made everything work.

There were five women who became pharaoh.

— Yes, pharaoh women. No. pharaohs because the term Pharaoh It's a concept. Specifically, over 3,000 years of history, we have documented that five women became pharaohs. There were probably more. They were exceptional cases. They were surely terribly intelligent and psychologically very strong. They rose to power and deserve my admiration, but they didn't use it to change anything. They continued to govern with bureaucrats who were all men. Perhaps they didn't want to change anything, and if so, they were selfish. They had all the power to do so.

Was there no counterpower?

— Below the bureaucrats were the priests. Too little is said about them, and we have the image, thanks to movies, of a scheming, gray, and greedy group. It was important for them to be a countervailing power. It was a patriarchal society, but there were priests and priestesses. There were high priestesses in the temples devoted to the goddesses. Polytheistic systems are wonderful because the gods and goddesses are of equal standing. In contrast, in monotheistic systems, although they say the image of divinity cannot be represented, I doubt very much that anyone would imagine that God is a woman. In Ancient Egypt, there were extremely powerful goddesses. The clergy could curb some of the pharaohs' pretensions. Akhenaten (1335 BC) wanted to impose a single god; it is the first documented form of monotheism in human history. He wanted to abolish the power of the priests. When he died, he wanted to erase the memory of their existence. His name disappeared from everywhere. It wasn't until the 19th century that we learned of his existence thanks to archaeology.

Why did they want to erase him from history?

— He wanted to impose monotheism, and monotheists are exclusive. They're intolerant. There is only one god, and he's good. It was a very bold statement in a society like Ancient Egypt. In fact, he started a civil war within a country. He was a bad pharaoh, no matter how you look at it. He inherited a very prosperous Egypt and wanted to turn it all upside down. When he died, the country was deeply in debt. Even so, today he's one of the most admired pharaohs because we come from a monotheistic Judeo-Christian society, and he's seen as a man ahead of his time, a visionary, a genius that no one understood. We should be somewhat critical... What if he was perfidious, a despot, a dictator? Why does everyone want to see him as a man ahead of his time, if even his people couldn't stand him? When he died, people wanted to forget him because during his reign many people died, temples closed, buildings burned, he confronted the Egyptians... And yet, there are those who today want to idolize him.

What do Ramses II and Donald Trump have in common?

— They have a lot in common. They both know that reality is what you have to make people believe. They create a narrative, they seek to be idolized, to be perceived as visionaries, saviors, heroes... If enough people believe in it, and also in their cause, they've already won everything. The difference is that Trump went to the polls and Ramses II didn't. Power can take different forms, but it's the same. In Ancient Egypt, 99% of the population couldn't write and, therefore, believed those who claimed to have all the knowledge. Now, technocrats do something similar... Elon Musk does it, for example.