Who was Mesdahoma? The name is mentioned on Wikipedia as a legendary Egyptian pharaoh.?

Question

His name comes up on this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharaohs

He was a legendary Egyptian ruler who became pharaoh at age 17 and was supposedly the greatest of the legendary pharoahs. Since he was the greatest, I sort of figured that I could find a list of his supposed accomplishments somewhere, but so far all I can find on Yahoo and Google is that same one liner in Wikipedia and a handful of other websites which seem to plagiarize Wikipedia.

There is a citation in Wikipedia, but it leads to another website where Mesdahoma's name is not mentioned once, so obviously there is some kind of mistake there.

I would also be interested in knowing why Mesdahoma is believed to be legendary. Is he supposed to have lived longer than humanly possible, or is it just a guess because of lack of documentation? In what era is he supposed to have lived? Who were his family members? Is there a book where I can find more info? Which book? Is he the ancestor of later rulers?

Answer 1

There is no citation after the statement that he was "the greatest pharaoh of them all," and since the name does not have its own link, it is probably false information that has been added in.  If he was so legendary, there would be more about him on the Internet.

There may not be political motives, but anyone, including a 10 year old, could edit a Wikipedia page for any reason--or none.  I was in a Library Science class and we edited a page together as an experiment, adding one sentence of false information to see when it would be edited, and it wasn't corrected until 2 weeks later.  While Wikipedia usually is quite accurate due to loyal editors, it reflects a likely error when something is not cited.

Answer 2

As people have been pointing out, Mesadahoma is a fiction of someone's imagination.  

The truth is, we don't know the names of the pre-dynasty kings of Egypt although we do have some interesting clues about them.  For example, the scorpion king - of movie fame - was probably a real king, and we have found inscriptions about him.  http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/...

The period we're talking about started about 7 thousand years ago, and lasted about 2 thousand years.  That's a long long time.  If you're interested in what we do know about that it, here is a great website:  http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/...

Cheers

Answer 3

Wikipedia is garbage.

Anybody could write anything on there and you could believe its true.

That's why a lot of schools, including mine, don't allow you to use it as a source on projects or as a research tool.

And don't believe everything people say on here either. It could be garbage also.

Answer 4

take everything you read on Wikipedia (and here) with a grain of salt