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Ancient Egyptian Chronology - Early Thinking

Problems in the chronology of ancient Egypt are as ancient as Egypt itself. Next to unfulfilled prophecy there is no study of which it may with more truth be said that it either finds a man mad or leaves him so, than Egyptian chronology. Every man is fairly entitled to indulge in some pet monomania, and some think that this isthe price we must pay for the enjoyment of average commonsense. Otherwise it might be a question whether this perilous subject,on which the clearest heads and the most powerful intellectsare exposed to such serious risks, ought not to be tabooed altogether.

The Welsh and Irish annals, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's British History, were long religiously believed in, not only ky the ignorant vulgar, but even by the learned. In ancient times, when culture was the almost exclusive possession of powerful pagan hierarchies, who cared little for truth, save as a monopoly of their caste, and had an immense interest in keeping it from the people, the currency of such mythical chronologies would be of course the rule. The Babylonians, though undoubtedly a most ancient of peoples, must have been a trifle younger than they gave themselves out to be, and Rome a few centuries older than Polybius, Livy, and Dionysius supposed. Old Ennius made Rome a couple of centuries more venerable than Cato, Varro, and the annalists of the Augustan age; and Cicero mentions a Babylonian computation which exceeds that of Berosus by about a thousand years.

Manetho states that the period before his reign was occupied by the rule of the gods, demigods or heroes, and manes, extending through nearly 25,000 years, according to Eusebius. Similar statements are found in the writings of Herodotus and Diodorus. These divine dynasties, whether cyclical or not, have no place in history, being purely mythical and not traditionary. And it should be observed, that whereas in tne annals of other ancient nations a time of tradition intervenes between that of myths and that of facts, no such period of transition is found in the Egyptian records, where pure fiction is immediately followed by accurate history.

Bunsen epigrammatically remarked, that the Egyptians left a chronology without a history. The saying is pointed with no less truth than wit. All that Herodotus, Diodorus, and Manetho have left of the history of Egypt for thousands of years, might be put into a sixteen-paged tract, and, with the omission of palpably mythical matter, into one less than half that size. But this is not the worst of the case. The history, as told by Herodotus, is utterly irreconcileable with that in Diodorus, and the few fragments of Manetho's narrative are flatly contradicted by both.

Diodorus says that Egypt had been under foreign rule 447 years in all at the date at which he wrote; namely, 36 under four Ethiopian princes, 135 under the Persians, beginning with Cambyses, and 276 under the Macedonians, from its conquest by Alexander the Great. Herodotus, it is true, speaks of eighteen Ethiopian kings, as being included among the 330 sovereigns of Egypt between Menes, the founder of the monarchy, and Moans, who dug the celebrated lake which bore his name.

But the confusion here was order itself compared with what distracts when turning to the chronology. Out of something like a dozen ancient deliverances upon the point, no two of them harmonized even tolerably. In order to restore Egypt to her true place in universal history, the one thing needful is to disentangle the chronology of the Pharaohs.

By the mid-19th Century the era of the commencement of Egyptian history, the reign of Menes was set by Le Sueur at 5773 BC; Brugsch 4455 BC; Lepsius 3893 BC; Bunsen 3643 BC; Poole 2717 BC; and Palmer 2224 BC. Here the difference in opinion as to the starting-point of Egyptian history was no less than 3549 years, a difference amounting to more than the whole period assigned to the entire history by some of these writers. A similar variety of opinion on the date of other events in Egyptian history was naturally to be expected from the same writers, and in fact we find the era of Cheops or Shufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, was, according to Le Sueur 4975 BC; Brugsch 3657 BC; Lepsius 3426 BC; Bunsen 3229 BC; Poole 2352 BC; and Palmer 1903 BC.

Sir Gardner Wilkinson fixed the date of the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty, upon a collation of the monumental evidence and the Greek lists, at the year BC 1575. The dates for this, which is one of the most important starting-points for the investigation of Egyptian chronology are, according to Palmer was 1748 BC; Brugsch 1706 BC; Lepsius 1684 BC; Bunsen 1638 BC; and Poole 1525 BC.