Historians don’t agree on one exact number, but most modern scholarly estimates put the total number of Egyptian pharaohs (kings of unified Egypt, up to Cleopatra) at roughly around 170–220 individuals, depending on how you count disputed and overlapping rulers.

Why there’s no single exact number

Several factors make the question “how many pharaohs were there?” tricky to answer.

  • Ancient king lists are incomplete or damaged (for example, the Turin King List is broken and missing names).
  • Some rulers reigned at the same time in different parts of Egypt, especially in chaotic periods, so historians debate whether to count them all as full pharaohs.
  • A few kings are known only from tiny fragments, possible name duplicates, or very short and disputed reigns.
  • Greek and later sources (like those used by the Ptolemies) sometimes count or name rulers differently than native Egyptian lists.

An influential papyrus list, the Turin King List, preserves 207 kings up to a certain point, and scholars reconstruct that it probably listed at least about 250 rulers once complete, up to early Ramesside times. When you then add later dynasties (Libyan, Nubian, Saite, Persian, Ptolemaic) up to Cleopatra VII, you land in the broad ballpark of around two hundred or slightly more rulers who could be called “pharaohs.”

First and last pharaohs (for context)

  • Many Egyptologists identify Narmer (sometimes equated with Menes) as the first ruler of a unified Egypt and thus the first historical “pharaoh” in common usage.
  • Cleopatra VII is usually regarded as the last pharaoh, ruling before Egypt became a Roman province after 30 BCE.

So, while you’ll see different exact counts in books and online, a good, careful answer is: there were on the order of a couple of hundred pharaohs, not a neat fixed number, because our sources are incomplete and scholars count some rulers differently.