Apart from the Palermo Stone, the basic sources used by Egyptologists to construct the traditional chronology of political change in Egypt are Manetho’s history (which, unfortunately, has survived only in the form of excerpts compiled by the later authors Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius, and George Syncellus), the so-called king-lists, dated records of astronomical observations, textual and artistic documents (such as reliefs and stelae) bearing descriptions apparently referring to historical events, genealogical information, and synchronisms with nonEgyptian sources, such as the Assyrian king-lists. For the 28th~30th Dynasties, the Demotic Chronicle (Papyrus 215 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) serves as a unique early Ptolemaic source concerning Political events in this last phase of the Late Period, compensating to some extent for the dearth of historical information provided by the papyri and monuments of this date (as well as the fact that Manetho gives only the names and reign lengths of the kings). Wilhelm Spiegel-berg and Janet Johnson have shown that careful translation and interpretion of the ‘oracular statements’ in this pseudo-prophetic document can shed new light not only on the events of the period (such as the suspected co-regency between Nectanebo I and his son Tachos) but also on the ideological and political context of the fourth century BC.
Like most other ancient peoples, the ancient Egyptians dated important political and religious events not according to the number of years that had elapsed since a single fixed point in history (such as the birth of Christ in the modern Western calendar), but in terms of the years since the accession of each current king (regnal years). Dates were, therefore, recorded in the following typical format: ‘day 2 of the first month of the season peret in the fifth year of Nebmaatra (Amenhotep III)’. It is important to be aware of the fact that, for the Egyptians, the reign of each new king represented a new beginning, not merely philosophically but practically, given the fact that dates were expressed in such terms. ’This means that there would probably have been a psychological tendency to regard each new reign as a fresh point of origin: every king was, therefore, essentially reworking the same universal myths of kingship within the events of his own time.
One important aspect of the Egyptian kingship throughout the pharaonic period was the existence of a number of different names for each individual ruler. By the Middle Kingdom, each king held five names (the so-called fivefold titulary), each of which encapsulated a particular aspect of the kingship: three of them stressed his role as a god, while the other two emphasized the supposed division of Egypt into two unified lands. ’The birth name (or nomcn), such as Rameses or Mentuhotep, introduced by the title ‘son of Ra’, was the only one to be given to the pharaoh as soon as he was born. It was also usually the last name given in inscriptions identifying the king by his whole sequence of names and titles. ’The other four names—Homs, nebty (‘he of the two ladies’), (Homs of) Gold, and nesu-bit (‘he of the sedge and the bee’)— were given to him at the time of his installation on the throne, and their components may sometimes convey something of the ideology or intentions of the king in question. As far as the mlers of Dynasty o and the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period were concerned, we know only their ‘Homs names’, typically written inside a serekh frame (a kind of diagram of the palace gateway), upon which a Horus-falcon was perched. It was the late ist-Dynasty ruler Den (c.2900 BC) who was the first to hold a nesu-bit name (Khasty), but it was not until the reign of Sneferu, 2613-2589 BC, in the 4th Dynasty, that this name was first framed by the familiar cartouche shape (an encircling loop that perhaps signified the infinite extent of the royal domain).
The title nesu-bit has often been translated as ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’, but it actually has a much more complex and significant meaning. Nesu seems to be intended to refer to the unchanging divine king (almost the kingship itself), while the word bit describes the current ephemeral holder of the kingship: the one individual king in power at a specific point in time. Each king was, therefore, a combination of the divine and the mortal, the nesu and the bit, in the same way that the living king was linked with Horns, and the dead kings, the royal ancestors, were associated with Homs’ father Osiris. It was primarily because of the Egyptians’ sense of each of their kings as incarnations of Homs and Osiris that the tradition of the worship of divine royal ancestors developed. This convention, whereby the current mler made obeisance to his predecessors, is the reason for the creation of the so-called king-lists, which were lists of royal names mainly recorded on the walls of tombs and temples (most notably the 19th-Dynasty temples of Sety I and Rameses II at Abydos), but also in the form of papyri, only one example of which survives (the so-called Turin Canon), or remote desert rock carvings, as with the list at the Wadi Hammamat siltstone quarries in the Eastern Desert. The continuity and stability of the kingship were preserved by making offerings to all those kings of the past who were regarded as legitimate mlers, just as we see Sety I doing in his cult temple at Abydos. It is usually presumed that king-lists were among the sources used by Manetho in compiling his history.
The Turin Canon, a Ramessid papyms dating to the thirteenth century BC, is the most informative of the Egyptian king-lists. From the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 bc), it stretched back with reasonable accuracy to the reign of the ist-Dynasty mler Menes (c.3000 bc), and even beyond that into a mythical prehistoric time when the gods ruled over Egypt. Each king’s reign was recorded in terms of years, months, and days. It also provides some support for Manetho’s system of dynasties by incorporating a break at the end of the 5th Dynasty (see Chapter 5).
The king-lists were not concerned so much with history as with ancestor worship: the past is presented as a combination of the general and the individual, and the constancy and universality of the kingship are celebrated through the listing of specific individual holders of the royal titulary. In his commentary on Herodotus Book II, Alan Uoyd writes, ‘Since all historical study involves general and particular, attempting to place particular phenomena against a background of general principle or law, there is always a tension between the two, and this tension is resolved in Egypt overwhelmingly in favour of the latter.’ The conflict between the general and the particular is undoubtedly an important factor in ancient Egyptian chronology and history. The texts and artefacts that form the basis of Egyptian history usually convey information that is either general (mythological or ritualistic) or particular (historical), and the trick in constructing a historical narrative is to distinguish as clearly as possible between these types of information, taking into account the Egyptians’ tendency to blur the boundaries between the two.
The Swiss Egyptologist Erik Hornung describes Egyptian history as a kind of‘celebration’ of both continuity and change. Just as the living king could be regarded as synonymous with the falcon-god Horns, so his individual subjects (from at least the First Intermediate Period onwards) eventually came to identify themselves with the god Osiris after their deaths. In other words, the Egyptians were used to the idea of portraying human individuals as combinations of the general and the particular. Their own sense of history therefore comprised both the specific and the imiversal in equal measure.
World History
