Constantly, throughout the book of Exodus, whenever the ruler of Egypt is mentioned, he's called "Pharaoh", and not "the pharaoh" or something like that. I grew curious about this and checked the Hebrew. In Hebrew, the letter ה as a prefix signifies a definite article, so if in the Hebrew he was referred to as "the Pharaoh", the text would read הפרעה. However, in the examples I saw, it's simply פרעה.
I understand that Exodus is viewed with a degree of suspicion due to the lack of solid evidence for an Israelite captivity in Egypt. However, I don't think that's relevant to my question, so I want to look past that. Could the author of Exodus, ostensibly Moses, have understood Pharaoh to be a personal name? Was Pharaoh used without the definite article in Egyptian (if Egyptian even has a definite article)?
It was common to refer to the current king as simply "Pharaoh" (Pr-aA / Per-aa), "his majesty" (Hm=f / Hem-ef), or the "king" (nsw / nesew) by the latter part of the New Kingdom, both in fictional tales and everyday writings.
The Egyptians themselves could and did refer to the king without an article. (While ancient Egyptian originally lacked definite articles, they were present in Late Egyptian. The masculine definite article pA is seldom seen in conjunction with Pharaoh.)
As a tag-along-question, is this similar (or possibly related) to the use of the word Caesar?