

No film about him has appeared, nor of his usurping predecessor, history's first great female ruler Hatschepsut. Egypt's greatest Pharoah was Thutmose III, who conquered most of the known middle east of the era of 1470 B.C.E. While the second "Ten Commandments" discusses Ramses the Great (Pharoah Ramses II - Yul Brynner) and his father Seti I (Cedric Hardwicke), and the films on Cleopatra deal with her, few other names of ancient Egypt crop up in film. If there are 20 films about ancient Egypt it's is tremendous. "Land Of The Pharoahs", "The Egyptian", "The Ten Commandments" (both De Mille versions), "Moses", "Holy Moses!", "Cleopatra", "The Mummy" (all versions), "The Scorpion King". The number of movies that deal with ancient Egypt are very small. One can chalk up this as an example of Zanuck trying something different. "The Egyptian" was a best seller in the early 1950s, and Darryl Zanuck decided to take a chance making it: yes he wanted a showcase for his girlfriend Bella Darvi as Nefer, as well as the rest of the cast (Victor Mature, Edmund Purdom, Peter Ustinov, Michael Wilding, and Gene Tierney), but he was aware that these films rarely made large box office. It is from this work (actually a fragment, that we don't know the ending of) that the novel "The Egyptian" came from. The Egyptians produced many poems, but there main addition was a tale of adventure of a traveler and physician called "The Story Of Sinuhe". The summit of the former were the religious poetry and "The Epic Of Gilgamesh".

Besides the literary remains that are in the "Old Testament" of the Jews, there were considerable works from Mesopotamia and Egypt. Few people realize it, but there was world literature in the ancient world before the Greeks came on the scene.
