Chronology

As Egyptian historical and archaeological data have expanded and diversified, it has become apparent that Manetho’s system—simple, durable, and convenient though it is—often strains to contain the many new chronological trends and currents that can be perceived outside the simple passing of the throne from one group of individuals to another. Some of the new work shows that at many points in time Egypt was far less culturally unified and centralized than was previously assumed, with cultural and political changes taking place at different speeds in the various regions. Other analyses show that short-term political events, which have often tended to be regarded as the paramount factors in history, may often be less historically significant than the gradual processes of socio-economic change that can transform the cultural landscape more overwhelmingly in the long term. Just as the long ‘pre-Dynastic’ periods of Egyptian prehistory are commonly understood as sequences of cultural rather than political developments, so the Dynastic Period (as well as the Ptolemaic and Roman periods) has begun to be understood not only in terms of the traditional sequence of individual kings and ruling families but also in terms of such factors as the types of fabric being used for pottery, and the painted decoration applied to wooden coffins.

Modem Egyptologists’ chronologies of ancient Egypt combine three basic approaches. First, there are ‘relative’ dating methods, such as stratigraphic excavation, or the ‘sequence dating’ of artefacts, which was invented by Flinders Petrie in 1899. In the late twentieth century, as archaeologists have developed a more subtle understanding of the ways in which the materials and design of different types of Egyptian artefacts (particularly ceramics) changed over time, it has become possible to apply forms of seriation to many different types of object. Thus Harco Willems’s seriation of Middle Kingdom coffins, for instance, has provided a better understanding of cultural changes in the various provinces of iith-i3th-Dynasty Egypt, complementing the information already available about national political change during the same period.

Secondly, there are so-called absolute chronologies, based on calen-drical and astronomical records obtained from ancient texts. Thirdly, there are ‘radiometric’ methods (the most commonly used examples of which are radiocarbon dating and thermoluminescence), by means of which particular types of artefacts or organic remains can be assigned dates based on the measurement of radioactive decay or accumulation.