What is Egyptian Chronology?

The creation of a reliable Chronology of Ancient Egypt is a task fraught with problems. While the overwhelming majority of Egyptologists agree on the outline and many of the details of a common chronology, disagreements either individually or in groups have resulted in a variety of dates offered for rulers and events. This variation begins with only a few years in the Late Period, gradually growing to a decade at the beginning of the New Kingdom, and eventually to as much as a century by the start of the Old Kingdom. The reader is advised to include this factor of uncertainty with any date offered either in Wikipedia or any history of Ancient Egypt. A "Conventional Egyptian chronology" is available, which centralizes the several possible dates or whole possibilities of various schemes.

Counting regnal years

The first problem the student of Egyptian chronology faces is that they used no single system of dating: they had no concept of an Era similar to Anno Domini, Anno Hajirae — or even the concept of named years like limmu used in Mesopotamia. As a result, the chronologer is forced to compile a list of pharaohs, determine the length of their reigns, and adjust for any interregnums or coregencies. This leads to other problems:

• All king lists are either comprehensive but have significant gaps in their text (for example, the Turin King List), or textually complete but fail to provide a complete list of rulers, even for a short period of Egyptian history.
• There is conflicting information on the same regnal period from different versions of the same text; the Egyptian historian Manetho's history of Egypt is only known by extensive references to it made by subsequent writers, such as Eusebius and Sextus Julius Africanus. Unfortunately the dates for the same pharaoh often vary substantially depending on the referring source.
• For almost all kings of Egypt, we lack an accurate count for the length of their reigns.
• Religious bias due to the Bible. This was most pervasive before the 1850s, when the figures preserved in Manetho conflicted with:

# The age of the Earth as believed at the time, and

# The date of the Biblical Flood.

Synchronisms

A useful way to work around these gaps in knowledge is to find chronological synchronisms. Over the past decades a number of these have been found, of varying degrees of usefulness and reliability.

• Synchronisms with other chronologies. The most important of these is with the Assyrian and Babylonian chronologies, although synchronisms with the Hittites, ancient Palestine, and in the final period with ancient Greece are also used. The earliest such synchronisms appear in the 15th century BC, during the Amarna Period, when we have a considerable quantity of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian Kings Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, and various Near Eastern monarchs. (See Chronology of the Ancient Near East.)
• Synchronisms with inscriptions relating to the burial of Apis bulls begin as early as the reign of Amenhotep III and continue into Ptolemaic times, but there is a significant gap in the record between Ramesses XI and the 23rd year of Osorkon II. The poor documentation of these finds in the Serapeum also compounds the difficulties in using these records.
• Astronomical synchronisms. The best known of these is the Sothic cycle, and careful study of this led Richard A. Parker to argue that the dates of the Twelfth dynasty could be fixed with absolute precision.^[1] More recent research has eroded this confidence, questioning many of the assumptions used with the Sothic Cycle, and as a result experts have moved away from relying on this Cycle.^[2] For example, Donald B. Redford, in attempting to fix the date of the end of Eighteenth dynasty, almost completely ignores the Sothic evidence, relying on synchronicities between Egypt and Assyria (by way of the Hittites), and help from astronomical observations.^[3]

* Kate Spence, "Ancient Egyptian chronology and the astronomical orientation of pyramids", Nature, 408 (2000), pp. 320-324. She offers, based on orientation of the Great Pyramid with circumpolar stars, for a date of that structure precise within 5 years.

• Radiocarbon dating (also called Carbon-14 or C-14 dating). In archeological excavations, the remains of once-living things contain decreasing percentages of Carbon-14 relative to the how long ago they died (thus ceasing to take in fresh Carbon-14). These radioactive Carbon-14 atoms decay, becoming Nitrogen-14. The less C-14 there is, the older it is. To determine dates, this method recalibrates the results due to demonstrated uneven absorption of carbon in organic matter.^[4]

The attraction of alternative chronologies

Although Professor Heinrich Otten has called the current scholarly consensus a "rubber chronology" that could be stretched or shrunk, by arbitrarily established lengths of co-regencies between rulers and even overlapping dynasties, the outlines and dates have not fluctuated very much in the last 100 years. This can be seen by comparing the dates when Egypt's 30 dynasties began and ended from two different Egyptologists: the first writing in 1906, the second in 2000. (All dates are in BC).^[5]

Egyptian dynasty	J. H. Breasted's dates	Ian Shaw's dates
1st & 2nd dynasties	3400 – 2980	c.3000 – 2686
3rd dynasty	2980 – 2900	2686 – 2613
4th dynasty	2900 – 2750	2613 – 2494
5th dynasty	2750 – 2625	2494 – 2345
6th dynasty	2623 – 2475	2345 – 2181
7th & 8th dynasties	2475 – 2445	2181 – 2160
9th & 10th dynasties	2445 – 2160	2160 – 2025
11th dynasty	2160 – 2000	2125 – 1985
12th dynasty	2000 – 1788	1985 – 1773
13th to 17th dynasties	1780 – 1580	1773 – 1550
18th dynasty	1580 – 1350	1550 – 1295
19th dynasty	1350 – 1205	1295 – 1186
20th dynasty	1200 – 1090	1186 – 1069
21st dynasty	1090 – 945	1069 – 945
22nd dynasty	945 – 745	945 – 715
23rd dynasty	745 – 718	818 – 715
24th dynasty	718 – 712	727 – 715
25th dynasty	712 – 663	747 – 656
26th dynasty	663 – 525	664 – 525

All of the differences can be explained as the result of increased knowledge and refined understanding of the material. For example, Breasted adds a ruler in the Twentieth dynasty that further research showed did not exist. Breasted also believed all the dynasties were sequential, whereas it is now known that several existed at the same time. And of these revisions, the most important difference is that dates in the Old Kingdom are now placed 300 years later.

Notes

See also

• Ancient Egypt
• Biblical chronology
• Chronology
• Chronology of the Ancient Near East
• Dating methodology (archaeology)
• History of ancient Egypt
• List of Egypt-related topics
• List of Pharaohs

External links

• Scientific tool for converting calendar dates mentioned in Greek and Demotic Papyri from Egypt into Julian dates

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