the timeline for visual grandeur. By the New Kingdom, pyramids had been long since replaced as royal funerary monuments by the less conspicuous rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings (Ramesses II was buried in KV 7). Additionally, pyramids were never incorporated into cities of the living, typically built on the east banks of the river, but developed a ‘pyramid town’ of their own of priests and caretakers of the pyramid complexes.

While Moses is learning the skills of a shepherd from the Midianites, Ramesses spends his years as king focusing on the construction of his new capital city, Pithom. Pithom, probably from the Egyptian words Per-Atum, meaning “House of Atum,” is a presumed Delta site, the location of which is still much debated (perhaps located at themodern sites of Tell el-Maskhuta or Tell el-Retabeh). Tanis was for many decades misidentified as the new Ramesside capital due to the wealth of stones inscribed with Ramesses’ name. Contrarily, archaeologists actually identified the city of Per-Ramesses, also known as Qantir, as the city built by Ramesses II. Both Pithom and Per-Ramesses appear in the Biblical story as the “store-houses” of Pharaoh, although for the film they were seemingly merged into one royal city built by Hebrew slave-labour.

Slave-labour has often been proposed to account for the large number of persons needed to build the pyramids during the Old Kingdom. In this context, the word slave brings up Classical notions of persons in the complete ownership of another human being, but for Egypt attestations for slavery are very scanty