is quite worthless. Manetho alone of all authorities offers a complete chronology from the 1st Dynasty to the XXXth. In the case of the six kings of the XXVIth Dynasty, Africanus, the best of his excerptors, gives correct figures for five reigns, but attributes six instead of sixteen years to Necho; the other excerptors have wrong numbers throughout. For the XIXth Dynasty Manetho’s figures are wrong wherever we can check them; the names, too, are seriously faulty. In the XVIIIth Dynasty he has too many names and few are clearly identifiable, while the numbers are incomprehensible. In the XIIth Dynasty the number of the kings is correct and many of the names can be justified, but the reign-lengths are nearly, if not quite, all wrong. The summations of years for the Dynasties XII. and XVIII. are likewise wrong. It seems, therefore, that the known texts of Manetho, serviceable as they have been in the reconstruction of Egyptian history, cannot be employed as a serious guide to the early chronology, since they are faulty wherever we can check them, even in the XXVIth Dynasty whose kings were so celebrated among the Greeks. There remain the astronomical data. Of these, the Sothic date furnished by a calendar in the Ebers Papyrus of the 9th year of Amenophis I. (when interpreted on the assumption stated above), and another at Elephantine of an uncertain year of Tethmosis III., tally well with each other (1550–1546, 1474–1470 B.C.) and with the Babylonian synchronism (not yet accurately determined) under Amenhotp IV. (Akhenaton). Another Sothic date of the 7th year of Senwosri III. on a Berlin papyrus from Kahūn, similarly interpreted (1882–1878 B.C.), gives for the XIIth Dynasty a range from 2000 to 1788 B.C. This (discovered by L. Borchardt in 1899) seems to offer a welcome ray, piercing the obscurity of early Egyptian chronology; guided by it the historian Ed. Meyer, and K. Sethe have framed systems of chronology in close agreement with each other, reaching back to the 1st Dynasty at about 3400 B.C. To Meyer is further due a calculation that the Egyptian calendar was introduced in 4241–4238 B.C.[1] Their results in general have been adopted by the “Berlin school,” including Erman, Steindorff (in Baedeker’s Egypt) and Breasted in America. Nevertheless many Egyptologists are unwilling to accept the new chronology, the chief obstacle being that it allows so short an interval for the six dynasties between the XIIth and the XVIIIth. If the XIIth Dynasty ended about 1790 B.C. and the XVIIIth began about 1570 B.C., taking what seems to be the utmost interval that it permits, 220 years have to contain a crowd of kings of whom nearly 100 are already known by name from monuments and papyri, while fresh names are being added annually to the long list; the shattered fragments of the last columns in the Turin Papyrus show space for 150 or perhaps 180 kings of this period, apparently without reaching the XVIIth Dynasty. An estimate of 160 to 200 kings would therefore not be excessive. The dates that have come down to us are very few; the only ones known from the Hyksos period are of a 12th and a 33rd year. In the Turin Papyrus two reign-lengths of less than a year, seven others of less than five years each, one of ten years and one of thirteen seem attributable to the XIIIth and XIVth Dynasties. Probably most of the reigns were short, as Manetho also decidedly indicates. It is possible that the compiler of the Turin Papyrus, who excluded contemporary reigns in the period between the VIth and the XIIth Dynasties, here admitted such; nor is a correspondingly large number of kings in so short a period without analogies in history. Professor Petrie, however, thinks it best, while accepting the evidence of the Sirius date, to suppose further that a whole Sothic period of 1460 years had passed in the interval, making a total of 1650 years for the six dynasties in place of 220 years. This, however, seems greatly in excess of probability, and several Egyptologists familiar with excavation are willing to accept Meyer’s figures on archaeological grounds. To the present writer it seems that Meyer’s chronology provides a convenient working theory, but involves such an improbability in regard to the interval between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties that the interpretation of the Sothic date on which it is founded must be viewed with suspicion until clear facts are found to corroborate it. Corroboration has been sought by Mahler, Sethe and Petrie in the dates of new moons, of warlike and other expeditions, and of high Nile, but their evidence so far is too vague and uncertain to affect the question seriously. It is remarkable that no records of eclipses are known from Egyptian documents. The interesting date of the harvest at El Bersha, quoted by Meyer in Breasted, Records, i. p. 48, confirms the Sothic date for the XIIth Dynasty in some measure, but it belongs to the same age, and therefore its evidence would be equally vitiated with the other by any subsequent alteration in the Egyptian calendar. Before the discovery of the Kahun Sothic date, Professor Petrie put the end of the XIIth Dynasty at 2565 B.C.; in 1884 even Meyer had suggested 1930 B.C. as its minimum date, thus allowing 400 years at the least for the period from the XIIIth Dynasty to the XVIIth.
| Dynasty. | Meyer 1887 (minimum date). | Petrie 1894 &c. | Meyer 1904–1908. |
Sethe 1905. | Breasted 1906. | Petrie 1906. |
| I. | 3180 | 4777 | 3315 | 3360 | 3400 | 5510 |
| II. | ” | 4514 | 3110 | 5247 | ||
| III. | ” | 4212 | 2895 | 2810 | 2980 | 4945 |
| IV. | 2830 | 3998 | 2840 | 2720 | 2900 | 4731 |
| V. | 3721 | 2680 | 2630 | 2750 | 4454 | |
| VI. | 2530 | 3503 | 2540 | 2480 | 2625 | 4206 |
| VII. | 3322 | 2300 | 2475 | 4003 | ||
| VIII. | 3252 | 3933 | ||||
| IX. | 3106 | 2360 | 2445 | 3787 | ||
| X. | 3006 | 3687 | ||||
| XI. | 2821 | 2160 | 2100 | 2160 | 3502 | |
| XII. | 2130 | 2778 | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 | 3459 |
| XIII. | 1930 | 2565 | 1791 | 1788 | 3246 | |
| XIV. | 2112 | 2793 | ||||
| XV. | 1780 | 1680* | 2533 | |||
| XVI. | 1928 | 2249 | ||||
| XVII. | 1738 | 1731 | ||||
| XVIII. | 1530 | 1587 | 1580 | 1580 | 1580 | |
| XIX. | 1320 | 1327 | 1321 | 1350 | 1323 | |
| * Meyer makes XIII. overlap XV. (Hyksos), and XIV. (Xoite), contemporary with XVI. (Hyksos) and XVII. (Theban). | ||||||
| Dynasty. | Wiedemann 1884. | Meyer 1884. |
Petrie 1905–1906. | Breasted 1906. | Maspero 1904. |
| XIX. | 1490 | 1320 | (1328), 1322 | 1350 | |
| XX. | 1280 | 1180 | 1202 | 1200 | |
| XXI. | 1100 | 1060 | 1102 | 1090 | |
| XXII. | 975 | 930 | 952 | 945 | |
| XXIII. | 810 | 755 | 745 | ||
| XXIV. | 720 | 721 | 718 | ||
| XXV. | 715 | 728 | 715 | 712 | |
| XXVI. | 664 | 663 | 664 | 663 | |
| XXVII. | 525 | 525 | 525 | 525 | 425 |
| XXVIII. | 415 | 405 | c. 405 | ||
| XXIX. | 408 | 399 | 399 | ||
| XXX. | 387 | 378 | 380 | ||
| Ochus | 350 | 342 | 342 |
Beyond the XIIth Dynasty estimates must again be vague. The spacing of the years on the Palermo stone has given rise to some calculations for the early dynasties. Others are grounded on the dates of certain operations which are likely to have
- ↑ Reisner (Early Dynastic Cemeteries, p. 126), from his work in the prehistoric cemeteries, believes that Egypt was too uncivilized at that early date to have performed this scientific feat.
