One thing that isn’t being discussed about the White Pharaoh is where on Earth the image came from.
“Oh, it’s just from an online slots game”
BUT THATS THE THING!!! IM NOT SURE ABOUT THAT!!! CAUSE WHEN YOU LOOK CLOSER:
THE BACKGROUND AND COLORS ARE DIFFERENT. Noticeably so, too, the first one has more muted colors and a realistic background while the second is incredibly saturated with an obviously drawn background. This would make genuinely no sense to have two pieces of advertising for the game be so different if this was made for the slots game.
My proposed theory: white pharaoh is a piece of stock artwork / imagery, explaining the artistic differences between the two pictures.
But this can only be solved by either
A. Finding the origin of picture 1
B. Finding the source of the stock artwork
Those willing, please help my search.
If You Seek Him you Might Find Him
Ok, according to Know Your Meme the slots thing came first in 2014, and the image that became the meme was an edit made in 2017.
I found a GIF of the original ad:
The edit we all use was specifically created to look more like a historical reconstruction, and it was used as part of a bunch of memes that existed to satirise American History Textbooks and racist ideologies/memes (but because the internet is a godforsaken shithole of course it was also at times used to directly express those ideologies/be a part of those memes). All our funny “White Pharoh is forcing me to build pyramids in Idao” posting is just a modern take on a meme that started in 2017.
