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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 Pharaoh s, determine the length of their reigns, and adjust for any Interregnum s 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 c. 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 Synchronism s. Over the past decades a number of these have been found, of varying degrees of usefulness and reliability.


  • 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 accurate within 5 years.

  • Calculated dates of eclipses, and possible mentions in Egyptian inscriptions that may fix the beginning of Akhenaten 's new religion. (URL for pdf mislaid.) -->


  • Carbon-14 Dating . Evidence from excavations, Carbon-14 recalibrations due to demonstrated uneven absorption of radioactive carbon in living things. 4



THE ATTRACTION OF ALTERNATIVE CHRONOLOGIES

Although Professor Heinrich Otten has called the current scholarly consensus a "rubber chronology" that you can stretch or shrink anywhere, 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, as 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

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 of dynasties were sequential, whereas it is now known that several existed at the same time. And after all of these revisions, the most important difference is that dates in the Old Kingdom are now placed 300 years later.


NEW CHRONOLOGIES

Many 'revised' Egyptian chronologies have been suggested over the years, which are summarised by P John Crowe in his article "The Revision of Ancient History - A Perspective" {Link without Title} as follows:



NOTES

# Set forth in "Excursus C: The Twelfth dynasty" in his ''The Calendars of ancient Egypt'' (Chicago: University Press, 1950).
# One example is Patrick O'Mara, "Censorinus, the Sothic Cycle, and calendar year one in ancient Egypt: the Epistological problem", ''Journal of Near Eastern studies'', 62 (2003), pp. 17-26.
# Donald B. Redford, "The Dates of the End of the 18th Dynasty", ''History and Chronology of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt: Seven studies'' (Toronto: University Press, 1967), pp. 183-215.
# One discussion of recalibrating radiocarbon dates is Colin Renfrew , ''Before Civilization'' (Cambridge: University Press, 1979), pp. 69-83. ISBN 0521296439
# J. H. Breasted 's dates are taken from his ''Ancient Records'' (first published in 1906), volume 1, sections 58-75; Shaw's are taken from his ''Oxford History of Ancient Egypt'' (published in 2000), pp. 479-483.


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