Headscratchers / Joseph: King of Dreams

• Who is the pharaoh that appears in this movie? In The Prince of Egypt we are given to understand that the pharaohs of that movie are Seti I and Ramses II, however in Joseph king of dreams the identity of the pharaoh who made Joseph governor of the Nile is never revealed.
  • The film doesn't say. However, if the genealogies of Genesis are accurate, then Joseph lived to 110, and died 64 years before Moses was born. Joseph was 30 years old when he entered Pharaoh's service (Gen. 41:45), so this would happen 144 years before Moses' birth. If Moses was born during the reign of Seti I, then Joseph would come to power somewhere between 1370 and 1359 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. However, there are two other, contradictory, ways we could calculate things.
    • First, Prince of Egypt plays rather loosely with the biblical timeline: according to Exodus, Moses was 80 by the time he confronted Pharaoh. If he faced Rameses II then he would have been born some decades earlier than the reign of Seti I. So maybe we should count back 144+80 years from the reign of Rameses II instead. If we do that, we'll get a date of between 1503 and 1437BC. There are quite a few Pharoahs during that period, but only two who could be the one in King of Dreams: Thutmose II or Thutmose III. (The others were either too short lived, or - in the case of Hatshepsut - female!)
    • Second, the Bible itself seems to indicate something is missing from the genealogies, since it says that the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years. That would mean that 350 years passed from their arrival until the exodus. Counting back 350 years from Rameses, we get a date between 1629 and 1563BC. Unfortunately, we don't have a proper record of the Pharaohs of that era - it could be basically anyone in the Seventeenth Dynasty.
    • There's a final observation which you may find relevant, although it might fit better in WMG. Amenhotep III's son was Akhenaten, an odd pharaoh who somehow came to believe there was only one true god. He enforced this religion on the rest of Egypt, and made himself unpopular by doing so - when he died, his own son had him removed from the histories, and we only found out about him because of a chance archaeological discovery. From a narrative perspective, he's easily the best candidate for Joseph's pharaoh in this (or, in fact, any) time period, and he's just a few years too late. If we assume they're compressing the Biblical timeline slightly like they did with Moses, and we count back from Moses' birth, then we find that Joseph takes power early in the reign of Akhenaten.
  • In WMG you can find the theory that Akhenaten is the pharaoh of Joseph king of dreams and it makes a lot of sense that he was. If you look closely, you will realize that the design of the character of the Egyptian king is very similar to that of the representative statues of Akhenaten.