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Renu maa

The tide of the Lethe recedes, and the breath of a once-forgotten world touches you through the screen.

A thousand hours of research.
Historical settlement names.
Historical province names.
Historical faction names.
Historical unit names.
Historical immersion.

Instead of imaginary factions like Hetch and time-traveling realms like Ancyra, engage in trade and war with actually attested players of the era, from relatively obscure polities such as Hapalla to lost major kingdoms such as Yenoam – all summoned from the deserts of oblivion for your enjoyment.

In the raw official version of the game, most of Hittite and Canaanite territory consists of settlements that are either misplaced, have a name that is not accurate for the era, or are from the wrong time period (mostly Classical), while most of Egypt consists of settlements and administrative divisions that either literally altogether never existed or roughly overlap with something real but have got made-up gibberish names; almost all the provinces consist of an arbitrary array of settlements and even when their territories roughly overlap with real historical provinces, their names are simply taken from their main in-game city, while our knowledge about the real political geography of the era is mostly ignored.

In Renu maʽa, all fictional factions, provinces and settlements in the original gameplay area of Pharaoh (Egypt, Hattusa, Canaan) are renamed either to real settlements that existed in the vicinity of the fictional settlements, or to names of attested but undiscovered locations. Imaginary states such as Manyan Phrygia, and locations that are only first attested in the Iron Age, such as Ancyra, are done away with – their places rightfully taken by actually attested polities and settlements such as Bebrukes, that are oddly absent in the raw official version the game. For Classical settlements, names of as of today undiscovered Bronze Age settlements with closest approximate locations have been used.

In some cases, Coptic place-names have been employed, but not bluntly so, as they appear in the game in their probable New Kingdom forms thanks to the magic of linguistic reconstruction.

In addition to more accurate faction names, incorrectly placed settlements, such as Hazor and Shechem, have been renamed to settlements closest in physical and temporal proximity to their locations on the in-game map.



The fictional Egyptian political geography of the game has been overhauled, with every province and every faction in every province having its correct historical name. For areas that Egyptians never colonised but refer to in literature, the Egyptian names have been used. Just like with the other areas of the game world, wherever the precise name is not known, I have used an attested but unidentified toponym from the general area.

The new gameplay area added in Dynasties is also partly affected: realms, sea regions, some of the provinces, factions in the provinces, settlements they occupy and even units they field have received either real 1205 BC names or, where direct sources for this specific date are unavailable, closest attested names of tribes and places that are either known to had existed or supposedly existed around the time and place.

There is a single Easter egg settlement for the Egyptologists out there to discover. ;)

I’ve also corrected some grammatical and orthographical errors.

The full list of changes is so extensive that it physically does not fit in this description; some highlights can be found on the changelog page.

I’ve left Sofia’s naming in some problematic cases such as Iunu, which is actually closer to Per-Bast than to Iunu, but is also the capital of the province where Qes is, and has even got a road leading there, all like in real life, so in general it is more accurate than if I changed Iunu to Per-Bast purely based on the city’s location in the game world.



The Egyptian expression ‘renu maʽa’ translates word-for-word to ‘names true’, but in Egyptian, depending on context, can mean everything from ‘real identities’ to ‘authentic nomenclature’ to anything in between. Considering how everything this Workshop item does falls into that realm, I decided to just go with an Egyptian name that encompasses all of it.

All of Pillars of Civilisation nomenclature has been reverted to Egyptian religious terminology: Maʽat for Prosperity, Seha for Crisis, Isfet for Collapse, Iun-Maʽat for Pillar of Civilisation. I am not using the word reverted coincidentally, as, peculiarly, the game actually refers to the Pillars of Civilisation mechanic as Maʽat in the code, but to the end user (without Renu maʽa’s intervention), the sentence ‘Pillars of Civilisation’ and associated terms are displayed.

There is much more to do; no doubt, the temporal relationships between some of the settlements should be reinterpreted and even more fitting names should be assigned to them, in order for the in-game experience to become as close as possible to an experience of traversing the Late Bronze Age Middle East, so that all the places, all the routes from place to place, all the peoples you encounter would be entirely familiar to an actual 1205 BC Egyptian who sat down to play this game, and he would find nothing to complain about. Perhaps some of the controversial features could be forked out of the main package in order to make the experience more customisable for instance for the player who wishes to leave the Egyptian unit names in English. Unfortunately, my explanations for the changes are as incomplete as the changes themselves due to the temporal constraints I’m acting under. But even at this rudimentary stage, this historically informed augmentation to the fictional and inaccurate representation of Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean found in the unenhanced game will already make your Pharaoh experience drastically more historically authentic – and therefore, immersive.

The baked starting position file is not affected.

Compatibility with submissions by other players is theoretically near perfect, but still has to be tested on a case by case basis.

Special thanks to Anglo-Saxophone for collaboration, and Pharaoh, Iskar and Korstrynn for assistance with the description.