Chronology

The following chronological table is intended to provide a means of orientation for the non-expert, and no attempt has been made to create an illusion of certainty where none exists. No dates should be treated as exact before 664 bc because the means to establish such precision are not available. As a result, Egyptologists have long preferred to date Egyptian history using a system of dynasties which has been preserved to us in the remains of the Aigyptiaka, (Egyptian History) produced by the Egyptian priest Ma-netho in the third century bc. He divided Egypt’s past into thirty dynasties which were regarded as following each other in a lineal sequence, and a thirty-first dynasty was subsequently added by another hand. This system has many faults, but its convenience has guaranteed its survival and its universal use in modern scholarship. Therefore, it features prominently in all Egyptological literature, including the current volumes, and it is the basis of the chronological scheme presented here. In modern literature these dynasties have been combined into larger periods mainly based on perceptions of changes in political structure. The three major periods of centralized control under one king are known in the English-speaking world as Kingdoms, and these alternate with three Intermediate periods where political control was decentralized, and several independent polities existed in the country, though such fragmentation should not be equated with weak local administration or radical cultural decline. After the Third Intermediate Period subdivisions are based either on pure chronological location (Late period) or on the ethnic origins of foreign rulers (Persian period).

The dates provided in this table for the period before 664 should be treated as tentative only, and for all periods two dates are given to reinforce the point (G = Grimal, 1992, and S = Shaw 2000), though, if any reader were to consult other discussions of Egyptian history, further differences would certainly emerge. They represent the generally current view of where the dates ought approximately to lie, though it will emerge that the views of some authors of chapters in these volumes differ significantly. Where such divergences exist and form an organic part of an author’s argument, I have not edited them out because they reflect expert views on the subject which may yet prove correct. In the case of individual rulers of the

Pharaonic period I have usually added Shaw’s dates for the reader’s convenience with the exception of the Early Dynastic period for which I regard the data as being too defective to justify such insertions.