Like Berossus, Manetho was a priest, residing at Heliopolis in the Delta of Egypt during the period of Ptolemy I Soter (ruled 304-283 bce) and Ptolemy II Phila-delphus (285-246 bce). Plutarch states that Manetho and the Eleusinian exegete Timotheus helped to establish the cult of Sarapis under Soter (FGrHist 609 T 3), suggesting that he was an important member of the early Ptolemaic court - a significant detail since the ‘‘friends’’ of Hellenistic kings normally did not come from the native elite but were fellow Macedonians or Greeks (Dillery 1999: 109 n. 54). Manetho, writing in Greek, claimed he was translating native Egyptian sacred texts; what is more, he apparently took issue frequently with Herodotus’ account of Egypt in his own narrative (T 7).
Although it treated a civilization that had existed for millennia, Manetho’s history, like Berossus’, was divided into a mere three books. Two distinct features emerge from the remaining fragments: lengthy narratives (preserved chiefly by Josephus) and a massive king list transmitted as an epitome preserved in Syncellus and an Armenian translation of Eusebius. The list is of tremendous importance, for in addition to recording all the kings of Egypt, from primordial times to the native rulers who followed the end of the first Persian domination, the mortal kings are also divided into dynasties, and the years of each dynasty are tallied after the last pharaoh of the group. This organization has formed the cornerstone of the historical study of Egypt to the present day (Helck 1956). But while Manetho’s list of kings is clearly related to a documentary tradition represented by texts such as the Palermo Stone, the Turin canon, and the Tables of Abydos and Sakkara (ancient Memphis), he departs from this tradition: the Epitome provides more a regnal chronicle than mere list of kings’ names, with a few exceptional happenings recorded under some rulers (e. g., strange natural events, the first appearance of important sacred animals, notable achievements and discoveries), and a distinct majority of these notices being found under the earlier pharaohs.
This last point is worth stressing because the notices, exiguous though they are, may well provide us with a clue where the longer narratives of the Aegyptiaca belonged. For example, for the pharaoh Bocchoris (XXIV Dynasty, Saite period), we find the following entry: ‘‘Bocchoris of Sais, [ruled] for 44 years; in his reign a lamb spoke’’ (FF 2-3c). It so happens that quite independent of the transmission of Manetho’s king list there exists a Demotic text, ‘‘the Prophecy of the Lamb’’ or the ‘‘Lamb of Bocchoris,’’ in which a lamb prophesies that Egypt will undergo great hardships 900 years in the future (Zauzich 1983; Thissen 2002). Although the actual composition of this papyrus is dated to the thirty-fourth year of the reign of the emperor Augustus (4-5 ce), its antecedents are no doubt much older (sometime in the period between the two Persian occupations of Egypt, i. e., between 404 and 343 bce). Because of the survival of this text and the notice about the ‘‘talking lamb’’ under Bocchoris in the king list, and because ofreferences to the same prophetic lamb in later Greek sources that could not have known the Demotic text, it seems a reasonable conclusion that under the entry for Bocchoris in Manetho’s original work, some form of the prophecy was actually included. corresponding to the few lengthy narratives of Manetho preserved in Josephus are brief narrative ‘‘tags’’ in the epitome of the king list (cf. Fraser 1972: II.734-735 n. 124; Dillery 1999: 95). Hence, if the epitome is any guide to the entire Aegyptiaca, the resulting picture is one of a history built around a list of pharaohs and their years of rule, followed in many cases by brief descriptions of important events in their reign; at several points the entry under a given monarch would expand to incorporate a very large narrative panel derived from preexisting Egyptian literature.
Down to the time of Manetho Egyptian literature possessed no narrative history of the sort found in the Greek world from Herodotus onward, but that does not mean that there were no texts with an actual or potential historiographic orientation. Manetho ‘‘slotted’’ preexisting narratives - prophetic and oracular texts such as the ‘‘Prophecy of the Lamb,’’ royal biography and instruction texts (‘‘Testaments’’), and the ‘‘prophetic’’ royal biography or ‘‘king’s story’’ (Koenen 2002: 173; Dillery 2005: 390 and n. 16) - into suitable places in his king list, and so united two traditional historiographic Egyptian forms. Manetho was not the first to construct a history of Egypt from king lists and narratives; Herodotus clearly knew both the main indigenous historiographic forms, if imperfectly (list: Hdt. 2.100.1; KOnigsnovelle: 2.137-141), and Hecataeus of Abdera even wrote a history of Egypt that included a chronological framework based on a king list as well as narratives such as the story of the Hyksos (Murray 1970; Burstein 1992). Since Hecataeus and Manetho were ‘‘friends’’ of Ptolemy Soter and very likely knew one another, Manetho’s combination of list and legend may have come from Hecataeus.
Easily the most substantial of the surviving narratives from Manetho concern (1) the Hyksos period (F 8) and (2) related events from the New Kingdom that deal with the reigns of the pharaohs ‘‘Sethos/Ramesses’’ and ‘‘Amenophis’’ (FF 9-10). These texts show very clearly how Manetho fit his narratives into his chronological frame, confirming what we suggested concerning the ‘‘Prophecy of the Lamb.’’ The invasion and rule of Egypt by the Hyksos was a defining epoch for pharaonic Egypt (cf. Assmann 2002: 197-201, 248-250), the first time the land of the Nile was ruled by outsiders. The Hyksos period became the template and master narrative for Egypt’s subsequent periods of turmoil and foreign domination. crucially, though modern investigation reveals that the Hyksos only ruled Egypt for little more than a century (1650-1540 bce), Manetho gives them six kings who altogether rule Egypt for 517 years. This distortion alone suggests the ‘‘scarring’’ effect the period had on Egyptian memory (Assmann 2002:197-198), felt even by Manetho writing some 1,350 years later. According to Josephus, Manetho introduced the invasion of the Hyksos as follows:
Toutimaios. In his reign, for what cause I know not, god blew against [Egypt] (theos antepneusen); and unexpectedly, from the regions of the East, invaders of obscure race
Marched in confidence of victory (katatharsesantes) against the land. By main force they easily (rhaidiOOs) seized it without striking a blow (amachUti); and having overpowered the rulers of the land, they then burned the cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of the gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others. Finally, they appointed as king one of their number whose name was Salitis...(F 8 = Waddell 1940: F 42; his trans. with modifications)
There are several details worth noting here. First, the narrative has been slotted in under the entry for ‘‘Toutimaios,’’ precisely what we should expect. Secondly, since Manetho is working from a list, the list itself provides a structure, and consequently he does not need to construct a narrative motivation for this momentous turning point in Egyptian history (as Greek historiography would): ‘‘in his [Toutimaios’] reign, for what cause I know not, god blew against Egypt.’’ A Greek historian, I think, would want to know why the invasion happened, and furthermore, why the invaders had such an easy time of it (they have ‘‘confidence’’ in their victory which, it seems, was uncontested). But these are questions in which Manetho has no interest, not because he is a bad ‘‘Greek’’ historian, but because he is an Egyptian priest-historian writing in Greek, and his language allows us to appreciate this difference in orientation and purpose (Dillery 1999: 98-99 and n. 19). A divine ‘‘blast’’ from the east had a very specific meaning to an Egyptian: the god of chaos and storm in Egypt was Seth (in Greek Typhon), the enemy of Osiris/Horus, the god associated with the pharaoh and legitimate kingship (cf. Assmann 2002: 389-393). The eastern part of the Delta in particular, around Pelusium and ancient Avaris, the Hyksos capital, was likewise associated with Seth (Plutarch knows of the region as the ‘‘blasts of Typhon’’: Ant. 3.6). Further, the description of the invaders as ‘‘confident,’’ and the invasion itself as achieved ‘‘without a fight,’’ can be explained within the Egyptian thought-world as a result of the will of the gods. As in the Old Testament, nothing happens to Egypt that is not divinely ordained (cf. Assmann 2002: 242-244, 271), even hardship or calamity. In our case, Manetho assumes the invasion of the Hyksos was successful and bloodless because it was supposed to happen.
And since other conquests of Egypt had been divinely ordained, it follows that the rule of the Ptolemies contemporary with Manetho himself had to be as well. This view has important consequences for Manetho’s understanding of Egyptian history. First, it enables him to present an Egypt that had freed itself from foreign domination before. This might be a warning to the new rulers of Egypt: so long as the Ptolemies ruled as lawful pharaohs, listening especially to the native elite - men like Manetho - all would be well; but if not, their rule would end in the same way as did that of the Hyksos. Second, this implicit warning against unlawful rule would presumably be a solace to the Egyptians themselves regarding their future. When the domination of the Ptolemies became unbearable, their ancient records showed them that the gods of Egypt would see to the restoration of Ma’at - the proper ordering of the cosmos in which the typhonic forces of Seth (illegitimate rule) would be cast out and lawful rule reinstalled (note Demotic Chronicle II.24-III.1). Indeed, it would no doubt be discovered that the Ptolemaic rule of Egypt had been predicted to last for a specified period of time, precisely the view that shapes the other narratives of Manetho that come to us from Josephus. In the longest and most important (F 10), Manetho says that a pharaoh, Amenophis, desired to view the gods and asked a namesake, the prophet Amenophis, how to achieve this; the seer tells him, but also predicts a period of foreign rule over Egypt by a people who are obviously the Hebrews of the Exodus (their leader is an Egyptian called Osarseph who later changes his name to Moses, F 10 [§250]). Deciding he must ‘‘not fight against the gods’’ by trying to resist these outsiders and their Egyptian allies, Amenophis retreats to Ethiopia to wait out the period of foreign rule. These people govern Egypt for the period of time predicted by the seer, and are then driven out by Amenophis and his son Rampses.
What Manetho has done, of course, is to take what were originally prophetic texts that explained ex eventu the foreign domination of Egypt and ‘‘historicized’’ them by placing them in his chronological framework derived from the king lists. The final result must have been very striking indeed, for if much of Egypt’s recent and not so recent past was in fact replaying over and over again the struggle against the minions of Seth - the Hyksos, the Hebrews, the Persians, the Macedonians and Greeks - then in essence at the core of Manetho’s history was stasis, and change was to be measured by how the most recent actors in this timeless drama altered subtly the master narrative or template (cf. Sahlins 1981, 1991).
World History
