Seqenenre Tao

Seqenenre Tao ruled over the Theban region during the Seventeenth Dynasty, in an age when Egypt had fractured and local kingdoms were all that remained of the old unified state. He governed during the Second Intermediate Period, when the country's sovereignty had collapsed and native control shrank to a handful of territories. His reign left him with the name "the Brave," though the source of that title — whether battlefield, defiance, or something else — went unrecorded. What survives is a fragment: a man who held the line when there was almost nothing left to hold.