• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 609 0

century B.C. “Possess” is a misleading term, for we do not have the text of Manetho’s history. What we have are quotations and synopses made by later historians of Roman times. The quotations come mainly from Josephus, a Jewish historian who was trying to make a case for the antiquity of his people; the superior attitude of his Greek fellow scholars had riled him. Josephus is a biased source; he had an ax to grind, and even if he was too honest to misquote consciously, his bias would probably affect his choice of material.

The other sources merely summarize Manetho, giving lists of kings and sometimes a sentence of description. The copies do not always agree with one another, and they garble names and dates most horribly. How much of the error is due to the copyist, and how much to Manetho himself—who was, after all, a long way in time from the beginnings of Egyptian history—we do not know. But we know that Manetho is not to be trusted blindly, at least not in the copies we have. Speaking of dynasties, we should note that they are derived from Manetho, who was trying to distinguish separate royal houses or families. In view of the fact that Manetho is damned with such faint praise, one might ask why we rely on him for this breakdown. The answer, as most Egyptologists admit, is because Manetho’s concept has been used for so long that it would be inconvenient to discard it. His dynastic breakdowns work well enough, though in some cases it is hard to see why he started a new dynasty when he did.

Painstaking archaeological spadework and the study of hieroglyphic inscriptions have enabled scholars to check Manetho’s list of kings against contemporary records, and to construct lists of their own that sometimes differ drastically from the Greek’s. By the time of the Middle Kingdom the Egyptians were dating events by the years of a king’s reign. If a mass of dated objects gives year 23 as the last year for a particular monarch, we assume that he probably ruled no longer than twenty-three years. The records are fairly complete for the later period of Egyptian history; so, counting back from 525 B.C., when the Persians invaded Egypt, we can estimate the length of the later dynasties with fair accuracy.

Records from the earlier dynasties are still fragmentary. The Old Kingdom, which includes Dynasties One through Six, was followed by a period of confusion, when the country broke apart into smaller units ruled by local princes, some of whom continued to claim the titles of pharaoh. This First Intermediate Period, as it is called, causes chronological problems because dynasties Seven through Eleven, which comprise the period, were, in some cases, overlapping or contemporaneous. By the end of the Eleventh Dynasty the kingdom was again united under kings who kept good records. This is the Middle Kingdom, which includes dynasties Eleven and Twelve. Another period of disunion followed the Twelfth Dynasty, and again there is disagreement about the length of dynasties Thirteen through Seventeen. The Eighteenth Dynasty marks the beginning of the New Kingdom, or Empire, as it used to be called; documentary evidence from this period is good, but here the chronological problem is confused by possible coregencies, which have provided Egyptologists with some of their most exciting and inspiring sources of argument. There are other chronological confusions between the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty and the end of Egyptian history proper, so we cannot simply add up the known years of various kings’ reigns to find out when the First Dynasty began. Fortunately, there are other methods.

Everybody knows that the Egyptians invented the calendar. However, this is one of the pleasant oversimplifications that appear in high school history books; the Egyptians had not one calendar, but several. Probably the earliest was a lunar calendar whose months ran from one new moon to the next. A number of “primitive” peoples have lunar calendars, since the changes in the phases of the moon are conspicuous; but in Egypt the rhythmical activity of the river soon suggested