Cracker Barrel Could Have Learned Something About Branding from the Ancient Egyptians

Irene Banks
Aug 28
13 min read

Vignette from Chapters 15 and 16 of the Papyris of Ani at the British Museum. Photo credit: Buchsweiler,CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Book Information

A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid (#ad)

John Romer

Thomas Dunne Books, New York

ISBN: 978-1-250-03011-5

And

A History of Ancient Egypt Volume Two From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom (#ad)

John Romer

Penguin Books, New York

ISBN: 978-0-141-39972-0

We’ve all seen the headlines about Cracker Barrel’s failed branding refresh. The restaurateur’s marketing department could have learned a lesson or two about the importance of brand strategy and logos from what might seem to be an odd source: the ancient Egyptians and their Book of the Dead. For, as we shall see, their hieroglyphic imagery (think logos on steroids) evolved to represent the very highest power in society – the state and its religion. This imagery took thousands of years to skillfully perfect and everyone in society knew what it meant.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead opens with a hymn to the sun-god who is simply named Re. A summary of the hymn’s opening:

Ani says: Hail Re!

You have risen as the morning sun.

You rise in the sky as the supreme god.

The sky-goddess Nut is your mother.

The western mountain, Manu, receives you in peace.

The goddess of order and truth, Maat, embraces you.

You grant power and might through vindication.

After I have died,

please let my ka (soul) come forth as a living soul

so that I can see Harakthy, the noonday sun.[i]

Map of Ancient Egypt Photo Credit: Jeff Dahl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1250 BCE, an upper middle-class scribe named Ani, purchased a personalized papyrus of a text called The Book of Coming Forth by Day. We call this same text The Egyptian Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Ani. Ani was preparing for his eventual death and funeral. He wanted the papyrus so it could be buried with him and guide his journey in the afterlife. Ramesses II, Dynasty Nineteen, was king – whose title in ancient Egypt was pharaoh. Ramesses II wasn't the nineteenth pharaoh; he was of the nineteenth pharaonic dynasty. By this time, the title of pharaoh had existed for at least one thousand, seven hundred fifty years. To put that length of time into perspective, if we were to go back 1,750 years from the year 2025 CE, we would be in the year 275 CE. The major western power would be the Roman Empire, Jesus Christ would be long-dead, Christianity would be considered a Jewish sect and would be illegal. By 1250 BCE and the rule of Ramesses II, the Egyptian state and its state religion was ancient and highly developed. Its rites, rituals, and gods were complex and intertwined.

For example, the sun-god who is praised by Ani has many attributes. Re is Khepri (the sun at dawn); he is the creator of the gods; he is the king of the gods; he is a vindicator (redeemer); he is lord of the sky; he is the slayer of the evil serpent; he is reborn each day; and he travels by boat. Later in the hymn, Ani asks him for things when he dies. This suggests that Re has the power to grant the dead: the ability to see the sun and moon each day; the ability for the ka to move about at will; assurance that the deceased’s name won't be forgotten; assurance family members will continue to make offerings; allowance to ride on Re’s solar boat each day; and assurance that the deceased will be received into the god Osiris's presence to be vindicated in the afterlife.

I'll admit it - when I first read this, I had no idea what it all meant. Because of my lack of knowledge, Ani’s hymn, along with the rest of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, seemed mysterious and, frankly, about as closed-looped as reading about a brick. Unlike The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Mesopotamian literature, I saw little opportunity for interpretation, and I didn’t look forward to reading more.

Then, I did what Mortimer J. Adler suggested in How to Read a Book: I went to work on The Book of the Dead. (Adler and Van Doren 7) In the process, I learned about the gods, especially Re, and how they visually represented the pharaonic state - that ancient culture that existed from 3000 BCE all the way to 30 BCE and the time of the Roman Empire. John Romer, archaeologist and Egyptologist, was my primary guide. I read his three-volume History of Ancient Egypt. Romer has been active in Egypt since the 1960s. He had the benefit of learning archaeology directly from the founders of the field of study that would be called Egyptology. And, he has the benefit of practicing at a time when those founders were dying off and a more emotionally intelligent and sensitive field of Egyptology was evolving. Romer respects Egypt, its people and its cultural traditions, and, unlike the traditional archaeologists, doesn't believe ancient ‘treasures’ are his to plunder from a ‘primitive’ people. He dispels the notion of the ‘mysteries’ of ancient Egypt and brings his reader to the ground-level of archaeological reality. One learns that the so-called ‘mysteries of ancient Egypt’ is a lazy and prejudiced way of thinking that relegates a sophisticated people to caricature.

While John Romer's focus is on archaeology and not on religious or literary history, he provides enough archaeological evidence that suggests how the state religion developed. Because Ani starts The Book of Coming Forth by Day with a hymn to Re, I will discuss Romer’s views of how this most visually powerful god developed, including his symbology (or logo).

Re, as the head god, represented pharaoh, who represented Kemet, the ancient Egyptian name for the land we call Egypt. The name Egypt is a Roman creation. People worshipped Re even before the pharaonic age, so he is a prehistoric god. His origins aren’t fully understood, however there is enough archaeological evidence, including literary inscriptions, that archaeologists are able to make educated guesses as to how Re evolved from prehistory to the pinnacle of the pharaonic state.

Merimda Head at the Cairo Museum. Photo Credit: Prof. Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It all started with a sculpture of a human head that looks like a potato. Sometime around 3700 BCE, a farmer-sculptor from Merimda, a settlement in the western Nile delta, made the oldest known image of a human to have been found in Egypt. Turns out that this type of sculpture wasn't Egyptian. Head sculptures like this were common throughout the southern Mediterranean in Neolithic times and many were found in structures that we might call shrines. According to John Romer, their significance is yet unknown to us. We can’t be sure if they served any sort of purpose, including spiritual, because we simply don't know what people at that time ‘believed’. (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid 29) What we do know is that there was a sculpture of a human head that was placed in a built structure. This archaeological fact will resonate once we get to Re.

Painting in tomb T100, Hierakonpolis. Fragment in the Cairo Egyptian Museum. Photo Credit: Francesco Raffaele, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Around the same time that the Merimda farmer-sculptor made Mr. Potato Head and put him in a built-enclosure, hundreds of miles upstream (the Nile flows south to north), people in a settlement called Naqada were making boats. These weren't just any boats; they were wood-planked vessels large and strong enough to hold decks, cabins, crews, and passengers. John Romer describes them as being as revolutionary to Egyptian history as the railroad was to American history. Not only did they enable the movement of people and goods, “. . . they were also a tangible exemplar of how the Nile-side settlements might be joined together as a single entity, for images of their swinging hulls and other accoutrements came to embody some of the earliest aspects of pharaonic government.” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid 94) The development of a brand strategy had begun.

Egyptian Museum Cairo: Narmer Palette, polished siltstone, Hierakonpolis, ca. 3200–3000 BC. Photo credit: Djehouty, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

While the Merimdans had their Mr. Potato Head, the Naqadans had not only their boats, but something more ancient - their images of the hawk. Prehistoric Naqadan pottery depicts hawks patiently perched on boats as they glide through the waters of the Nile. Once the Naqadans built their stronger and larger boats, they could sail up and down the Nile, even all the way to the delta. The hawk was named Horus and he sailed from the land of the Naqadans to a site now called Edfu. There, a perch was installed in a mound called ‘Horus Elevation’ and, around it, a shrine was built. But that wasn't Horus’s only shrine. His shrines were built up and down the long Nile and the most significant was built at Heliopolis (near modern-day Cairo). Here, the ancients wrote that “’Horus of the Eastern Horizon’ leaves its perch and takes wing every day, to rise in glorious confabulation with the sun god Re, as Re-Harakhty, Re the Horus.” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid 152-153)

By way of their strong boats and voyages under the watchful eye of Horus, the early Naqadans first defined what would become pharaoh’s realm. According to John Romer, “. . . the physical extent of what would later be known as pharaoh’s Egypt was first defined by Naqadan settlement and the communication networks that were established at that time, all along the lower Nile. (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid 162) Reading about the imagery of Horus and his syncretization with Re grabbed my attention and things about ancient Egypt and its ‘mysterious’ religion were starting to make sense. I imaged people up and down the Nile sharing a common understanding of the watchful hawk and his rising with the sun-god each day whether they lived in the delta near the Mediterranean or hundreds of miles upstream in a valley near the Eastern desert. The Horus shrines visually represented the physical existence of those crucial communication networks, without which the pharaonic state would not have existed. Horus, it seems, was pharaoh’s first logo.

Shen amulet of Reniseneb. Photo Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The ancient Egyptians didn't have a marketing department, so pharaonic branding took a long time to develop. At first, there was no sign representing pharaoh or Re, for that matter. It wasn't until some five hundred years after Mr. Potato Head was deposited in his structure and Horus set sail on a Naqadan boat, that a sign was developed to mark the number of years of pharaoh’s rule. The shen hieroglyph would evolve to represent much more: “. . . [it would] serve as the determining image for the phrase signifying the endless circuit of the sun; later still, it would be stretched into the so-called ‘cartouche’ that holds the name of kings.” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume One From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid 271) Over time, the sign for pharaoh and the sign for Re became associated with one another. Without the shen sign’s underline, the pure circle represented Re as the disk of the sun. He retained this symbol from his earliest prehistoric inception until the demise of the pharaonic state some three-thousand years later. It is, perhaps, the most successful logo in history.

The sun was a big deal in Egypt not only for the obvious reasons of light and heat, but also because the ancient Egyptians were one of the first cultures to adopt a solar calendar. This calendar regulated the pharaonic state and control of it was one of pharaoh’s sources of power. An early twentieth-century archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, in his book Man Makes Himself, explains further: “Farming in the Nile Valley is entirely dependent upon the annual flood; the latter's advent is the signal for the whole cycle of agricultural operations to start. . . The flood is a function of the annual movement of the earth round the sun - actually it depends upon the south-west monsoon breaking upon the mountains of Abyssinia [present-day Ethiopia]. It will normally reach any given place at the same point in each of the earth's journeys around the sun - that is, on the same day in each solar year. All that is necessary, therefore, is to know the length of the solar year and reckon such a year from one observed flood as starting-point to the next. [Most calendars until this point had been lunar.] . . .But no fixed number of lunar months (lunations) corresponds exactly to a solar year. To be able to predict the flood, therefore, the Egyptians had to determine the length of the solar year in days and devise an artificial calendar to reconcile solar and lunar years. Now it happened that just about the time when the flood should reach Cairo, the last star to appear on the horizon, before dawn obscures all stars, was Sirius, the Egyptians’ Sothis. The heliacal rising of Sirius was thus a naturally fixed point in the solar year. It was found that this event recurred roughly every 365 days, and it was then taken as the starting-point of an artificial State year of that length. . . .[T]he calendar was introduced either in 4236 BC, [at the time of the Naqadans], or . . .2776 BC, [during Dynasty Two]. . . .Now historical kings in Egypt, as in Babylonia and elsewhere, were intimately connected with the regulation of the calendar. It is suggested that they owed their authority in part at least to the prehistoric genius who determined the solar year with the aid of Sirius.” (Childe 136-137)

Ancient Egyptian wooden stela depicting Lady Djedkhonsuiwesankh giving offerings of food, drink, and flowers to Re-Horakhty. Photo Credit: Photograph by Oriental Institute, the University of Chicago; painter unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A few centuries later, during Dynasty Four, 2625-2500 BCE, and the time of the great pyramids of Giza, pharaoh was granted a new and lasting epithet: ‘Son of Re’. Re was depicted as a human male with the head of a hawk. By Dynasty Five, 2500-2350 BCE, Re and Horus were syncretized officially into the state deity named Re-Harakhty. Re’s logo underwent a successful rebranding – his sun disk was merged with the wings of a hawk. (Romer 120-121)

Centuries later, scribes would write that Re was “. . . a life creator and sustainer, whilst the daily progress of his disk through the sky made him a measurer of time. So as sons of Re, the living kings were similarly identified as the creators and sustainers of the state and, like the sun god, they too ordered human time. Without Re and his earthly sun, therefore, the order and the very time in which the royal court existed would cease, and thus the valley of the lower Nile would no longer sustain the order of pharaonic culture.” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2 From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom 121) In other words, life as the Egyptians knew it would come to a screeching halt.

John Romer argues that pharaoh did not maintain order through general aggression or violence. Instead, to find the source of order, we must return to the now-ancient and vast Nile-side communication networks first established by the Naqadans and later expanded by generations of the pharaonic court. Just like the old shrines to Horus, shrines to Re were at the center of this sophisticated system. Legend has it that his first shrine, called Iunu, was located at Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. Within the shrine stood the Benben, an obelisk sheathed in gold which served as a monument to Re. Both Iunu and the Benben are long gone, however descriptions of them survive in ancient texts. The Benben was one of the many obelisks dedicated to Re that dotted the west bank of the Nile, some within sight of the great pyramids at Giza. Re’s sun temples became the central nervous system of the early pharaonic state. Recovered papyri have shown that, “. . . they played a vital role within the system of tithing, offering, and distribution in those times; the processes which defined and sustained that state. . .” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2 From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom 120-124) For the sun temples were not independent structures like we would think of a lone church, synagogue, or mosque. They were complexes with material handling areas, slaughterhouses, breweries, bakeries, storerooms, and cemeteries. They symbolized the spots where, under the guise of pharaoh and his watchful god Re-Harakhty, the movement of goods and building materials all along the Nile occurred. It seems to be a large corporate state, with a corresponding corporate religion, all synthesized visually with stylized and exceptionally effective branding.

For the next four-hundred years or so, Re persisted until the Middle Kingdom, 2140-1780 BCE, when he underwent a far more successful and long-lived rebranding campaign than the present-day Cracker Barrel fiasco. It was in the new center of pharaonic culture at Thebes that Re changed in an even more dramatic fashion than his syncretism with Horus the Hawk. He became Amun-Re, an entirely new god. Amun, by himself, was little-known outside of Thebes. Local gods were common in ancient Egypt however this local deity served a far greater purpose than to be worshipped solely by the people of Thebes. He was “. . . the creation of a new reality. Combining the greatest god of the northern pharaohs with a previously little-known deity and housing this novel synthesis in the deep south of the country revitalized the ancient kingdom.” (Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2 From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom 329) By the Middle Kingdom, the pharaonic age was almost one-thousand years old, and the center almost did not hold. By the New Kingdom, 1550-1185 BCE, Amun-Re became the powerful state god, with only Osiris as his primary competition, and he had the all-encompassing attributes and powers described by Ani in his famous papyrus. It was the most successful brand re-launch in all history. Cracker Barrel should take notes.

[i] Summarized by Irene Banks from the English translation of the Introductory Hymn to the Sun-God Re: Worship of Re when he rises in the eastern horizon of the sky by Ani by Dr. Raymond O. Faulkner.