A reverse image search shows it being used for the Pharaoh's Fire Slots game in Oct of 2021....
But the oldest usage of this image found was from 2017.
At which point it's already been edited into a meme.
Unfortunately, if you try to follow the link to twitter it doesn't work, so that's a dead end.
It seems like a lot of the art for the Pharaoh's Fire Slots game came from an artist named Michael Gruber, but he does not appear to have made the Pharaoh himself, which I think supports the idea the original logo was put together by someone using premade assets.
But if the white pharaoh was a stock image, the reverse image search would have found that. Instead it seems to be circulating mainly on Imgur, Tumblr, and Twitter, primarily in meme form.
It really was made for Pharaoh's Fire Slots. Boring answer, but Occam's Razor.
Some kind of religious propaganda. Maybe a children's book? But it looks more promotional than illustrative. Or an older computer game (guessing because of the cg pyramids behind him)? If it's this, it's probably Mormons.
Racist propaganda connected to Nordicism/Aryanism/Nazis/ historical revisionists who believe nothing important has ever happened on earth without a white person at the center of it.
Or potentially conspiracy material of the Hyperborea/Blavatsky line, which is just as racist but pretends that's not the point.
There's also the possibility it's reused art from an older and now defunct slot game.
I do some not super thorough trawling of LDS and Christian PC games and don't turn up much except a 2016 game that marketed itself as the "first book of mormon game," when the first was actually Nephi's Quest in 1990, and also there were a ton of others in between those as well.
But it does lead me to finding someone else had also done a tineye search and turned up an older result than me, proving it was being used for Pharaoh's Fire Slots as early as 2015. The game was released in 2014 so it's probably fair to assume it was being used then as well.
If you look closely at the icon though, it's the same background as the later Pharaoh's Fire Slots art, not the weird cg rendered pyramids in the meme version.
Someone had also already discovered it's oldest known meme usage, a post on Imgur from November 2017, where its been edited to include the phrase "we are kings," likely a reference to a racist /pol joke mocking afrocenterism.
Maybe the original creator of the meme edited the white pharaoh out of the slot game logo and onto a stock background? For some reason?
I downloaded the version from 2017 and used it to search on tineye, and it pulled up a version from a month earlier, in October 2017.
But of course the twitter link doesn't fucking work.
So our oldest usage is still Pharaoh's Fire in 2015.
So I decided to investigate the mobile game company that made it, Cervo Media. And there he is, lurking ominously on their front page.
Along with a few other distinctly vanilla flavored Egyptians.
I found nothing on their actual page, so I found them on Linkedin, which forced me to sign up to even see their employees, and then refused to give me their names. So I know they have a character/prop designer and illustrator on staff, but I can't follow that thread any further, at least right now, since I've got to be somewhere in an hour.
If anyone else figures out anything new, let me know.
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