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 "Conventional Egyptian chronology" is the scholarly consensus, placing the beginning of the Middle Kingdom in the 21st century BC. Scholarly consensus regarding the beginning of the Old Kingdom has shifted to earlier dates during the 20th century and is now placed in the 27th century BC.

Counting regnal years

The first problem the student of Egyptian chronology faces is that the ancient Egyptians used no single system of dating, or consistent system of regnal years. 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 ancient Egyptian 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 intermediate 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:

1. The age of the Earth as believed at the time, and
2. 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 the 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][4]

• 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.^[5]

Conventional chronology

Despite the amount of guesswork and inaccuracies in the conventional chronology, its general outline 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.)^[6]

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.

Alternative chronologies

A number of suggestions for alternatives to the general consensus on the conventional chronology have been presented during the 20th century, a "Revised Chronology" by Immanuel Velikovsky in 1952 the "Glasgow Chronology" formulated by Velikovsky's Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in 1978, and a "New Chronology" by David Rohl, erstwhile director of the Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences.

See also

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

Notes

External links

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