For more information, suggestions, comments, contact Bill Alford
Last modified 28 October 2001.
Warning: this page is under construction
The dates for events in Ancient Egyptian history that follow are only approximate and problematic. When the Greeks began to rule Egypt after the conquest of Alexander the Great, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (b. 308BC, Cos - d. 246BC, king of Egypt 285-246BC), hoping to acquaint the new ruling class with the history of the conquered country, commissioned Manetho, an Egyptian priest from Sebennytus, to write a history of Egypt in the Greek language. Manetho's prime sources were earlier Egyptian king lists, the organization of which he imitated. The most significant preserved example of a king list is the Turin Canon, a fragmentary papyrus in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, which originally listed all kings of the 1st through the 17th dynasty, preceded by a mythical dynasty of gods and one of the "spirits, followers of Horus". The Turin Canon gave reign lengths for individual kings, as well as totals for some dynasties and longer periods. As Manetho had access to the ancient annals, he added some of their entries to his list of kings and reigns, especially during the first dynasties. The more he progressed in time, the more he added semihistorical traditions and stories as they were composed by the Egyptian priests to discuss moral problems in the disguise of a historical "novel". There had been, undoubtedly, fewer historical facts in Manetho's history than one might expect. But Manetho's work, known as the Aigyptiaka (or Aegyptiaca), is lost except for some fragments of narrative in Flavius Josephus' (b. 37/38AD, Jerusalem - d. c. 100AD, Rome) treatise Against Apion (c. 90AD) and tables of dynasties, kings, and lengths of reigns in the works of Sextus Julius Africanus (b. c. 180AD, Jerusalem - d. c. 250AD) and Eusebius of Caesarea (fourth century AD, b. Caesarea Palestinae, Palestine). These, in turn, represented the material used in part by George The Syncellus (b. eighth century AD - d. after 810AD) in the late eighth century AD. During copying and recopying, Manetho's text clearly suffered many changes, unintentionally or on purpose. The figures of the reigns, especially of the older dynasties, for instance, were enlarged when some of the early Christian historians tried to equate King Menes (the first king of dynastic Egypt and founder of the Egyptian state, c. 3150BC - 3050BC) with Adam. In addition, the excerpts were done carelessly. If we were to go by Manetho, as related by the Christian writers, we would put the first Pharaoh at about 5800BC - nearly three thousand years earlier than where Egyptologists now put him. Further, Manetho wrote in Greek and used the Pharaoh's secular name, whereas other sources were written in Egyptian and used their religious names. Therefore, Manetho's work, as handed down to us, is short of useless. Nevertheless, Manetho's work taken together with the king's lists carved in stone at Abydos, Saqqara and Karnak, fragments of the annals like the Palmero Stone and the king list of Turin, have enabled a framework of Egyptian chronology to be created. The division into dynasties was taken over from Manetho. Below is the List of Kings in the temple of Sethos I at Abydos.
In order to achieve a continuous history of Egypt and to bridge the gaps left by the fragmentary state of the extant chronological material, scholars must turn to other means, particularly astronomical references found in dated texts. Radiocarbon and other scientific dating of samples from Egyptian sites have not improved on, or convincingly contested, dates found by other means. Recent work on radiocarbon dates from Egypt does, however, yield results encouragingly close to dates found by other means.
This page accessed times since 28 October 2001 (plus the times when this graphics file was not loaded by a browser).
For more information, suggestions, comments, contact
Bill Alford
Last modified 28 October 2001.