Calculation of pharaonic chronology is dependent on knowledge of the methods the ancient Egyptians used to reckon time and record years. Their year had 360 days. Five days “above the year” were added on to make a 365-day year, representing approximately the annual solar cycle. This is called the Egyptian civil calendar because it was used for purposes of the state, such as tax collection and recording the years of a king’s reign. In this calendar, however, there was no calculation of a “leap year” day added on every four years. As a result, the civil calendar moved slowly forward through the real cycle of the year.
An older calendar based on the cycles of the moon had three seasons of four months each (of 29-30 days). The lunar calendar was connected to an important sidereal event, the observation in the east just before dawn of the dog-star Sirius (personified by the Egyptian goddess Sopdet/Sothis), after it was hidden for a period of 70 days. This was New Year’s Day in the lunar calendar, at the same time of year as the annual Nile inundation. Although the civil calendar was used by the state, the lunar calendar was used for determining the dates of some religious festivals and rituals.
In the Egyptian civil calendar years were not fixed from one set point in history as in our own calendar, but were numbered by the regnal year of the reigning king.
When they have survived, dates on documents are given by the regnal year of a king, the number of the month of the season, and the number of the day; for example, “Year 6, month 3 of the season of inundation, day 5 (of King X).” The king’s name is often omitted because it was obvious to the writer and user of the document.
Several king lists that have survived into modern times, as well as Manetho’s History of Egypt, are the basis for converting regnal years of Egyptian kings into years bc. The earliest relevant document is the Palermo Stone, so called because the largest of several fragments of this inscribed stone is now in a museum in Palermo, Sicily. The Palermo Stone was probably carved in the mid-5*h Dynasty. It records the semimythical and/or unknown Predynastic kings, who cannot be verified from archaeological evidence, as well as kings from the 1s* to 5*h Dynasties. Beginning in the 4*h Dynasty, the years recorded on the Palermo Stone are numbered in relation to a biennial (and sometimes annual) cattle census conducted for purposes of taxation during the reign of each king, not the number of years of a king’s reign, which were not used until late in the Old Kingdom.
Although not very legible, another Old Kingdom king list has been identified on a basalt slab that was recycled to make the lid of the sarcophagus of Queen Ankhenespepy III, a wife of Pepy II. The lid was found at South Saqqara during Gustave Jequier’s excavations in 1931-32, but the king list was not recognized until 1993, during a visit to the Cairo Museum by French Egyptologists Michel Baud and Vassil Dobrev. Inscribed on this stone is a king list from the reign of the 6th-Dynasty king Merenra, who preceded his brother Pepy II on the throne.
Probably the most important later king list is the Turin Canon, a fragmentary 19th-Dynasty papyrus now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. One side of the papyrus records tax receipts, and the king list is on the back, listing kings from the beginning of the Dynastic period (as well as reigns of the gods and “spirits” in a mythical past) through the Second Intermediate Period. Also from the 19th Dynasty is Sety I’s king list carved on his temple at Abydos (see Figure 2.5). Many kings of the First and Second Intermediate Periods are absent from Sety I’s list, as are rulers who were considered illegitimate (Queen Hatshepsut, and the late 18th-Dynasty kings of the Amarna Period). Carved on the walls of temples, such king lists should not be considered as a historical record, but as a form of ancestor veneration by the living king, who traced his legitimacy back through a very long line of predecessors.
Shorter king lists are known in other royal inscriptions, ritual papyri from temples, and some private tomb chapels. Analyses of the king lists along with dated monuments and documents have helped Egyptologists devise chronologies in years bc, but no exact dates before the 26th Dynasty are agreed on by all scholars, hence the variations in published chronologies of pharaonic Egypt. During the Middle and New Kingdoms there were some co-regencies during which a young king ruled for several years with his father, and this practice creates problems for assessing the number of years a king ruled alone. There are also many inherent problems in lists of kings for the intermediate periods as well as discrepancies between the different king lists, compounded by a few kings known from archaeological evidence not being listed at all. In the Late Period and Greco-Roman times Egyptian chronology becomes more accurate, since historical information and/or
Figure 2.5 Sety I’s king list from his Abydos temple. © Griffith Institute, Oxford
King lists from kingdoms and empires in Assyria, Babylonia, Achaemenid Persia, Greece, and Rome can be synchronized with Egyptian ones.
Some Egyptian texts also contain information that can be synchronized with astronomical events of known dates, such as the heliacal rising of Sirius, which were mentioned in the Middle and New Kingdoms on documents dated to the year, season, month, and day of a king’s reign. Because the Egyptian civil calendar of 365 days moved one day through the solar year every four years (the so-called “wandering year”), the heliacal rising of Sirius coincided precisely with the beginning of the solar new year once every 1,456 years. This event was recorded as happening in ad 139 during the reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, and it is possible to work back from that date. In this way, specific datings of astronomical events can be used to calculate exact years bc of the reigns of kings known from king lists. It is uncertain, however, where these astronomical observations were made in Egypt, and year dates vary depending on whether the observation was made in southern or northern Egypt.
Further general corroboration of dates bc is also provided by calibrated radiocarbon dates obtained from organic samples (preferably charcoal) from archaeological sites in Egypt (see Box 4-B). But more exact dating to specific years of a king’s reign can only be obtained through textual evidence when that is available.
World History
