I do not believe the pharoahs were bloody tyrants for the most part.
The argument can be made vis-a-vis the Pharohs. They may not have been the bloody murderers of the Hitler/Stalin-esque type (and I did not mean to make that implication), but they did have the power of life and death over their subjects (often at whim), did command huge slave-based economies, and the majority of the output of the Eqyptian economy of the era was tied up in either their self-aggrandizement (the building of huge monuments and tombs to their glory) or in maintaining their personal power on a level that no absolute monarch of Europe could ever dream of, prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The difference between Ancient Egypt and 20th centruy Europe is that Ancient Egypt is (for the most part) an isolated, closed society, with little to fear from it's neighbors until the dawn of the Iron Age. The evidence for the attendent "problems" of later European politics (anti-Semitism, Socialism and Communism, the rise Nation-State and concomitant rise and proliferation of racial theory), do not exist in the Egypt of the Pharoahs.
In this regard, Egypt under the Pharoahs is every bit as powerful, every bit as pernicious and every bit as pervasive as the Soviet machine complete with Stalin and the KGB, only the figurehead is a God and his priests have the police state powers.
But then again, I'm applying Western (really Greek) notions of freedom and personal rights to a non-Western, pre-industrial society that did not live under the same circumstances as we (the collective "We") did c. 1939-45.