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 is a partial list of Egyptologists. An Egyptologist is any Archaeologist, Historian, linguist, or Art historian who specializes in Definition A chronology may be either relative &mdashthat is locating related events relative to each other&mdashor ''absolute'' &mdashlocating 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 Late Period of Egypt refers to the last flowering of native Egyptian rulers after the Third Intermediate Period from the 26th Saite Dynasty into Persian The New Kingdom, sometimes referred to as the Egyptian Empire, is the period in Ancient Egyptian history between the 16th century BC and The Old Kingdom is the name commonly given to that period in the 3rd millennium BCE when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement The reader is advised to include this factor of uncertainty with any date offered either in Wikipedia or any history of Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now A "Conventional Egyptian chronology" is available, which centralizes the several possible dates or whole possibilities of various schemes. For a general discussion see Egyptian chronology. For a similar list see List of Pharaohs.

Contents 1 Counting regnal years 2 Synchronisms 3 The attraction of alternative chronologies 4 Notes 5 See also 6 External links

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. A regnal year is a year of the reign of a sovereign. From Latin regnum meaning kingdom rule 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. An era is a commonly used word for long period of time When used in science for example geology eras denote clearly defined periods of time of arbitrary but well defined The Islamic calendar or Muslim calendar ( Arabic: التقويم الهجري at-taqwīm al-hijrī; Persian: تقویم هجری قمری ‎ Limmu was an Assyrian Eponym. At the beginning of the reign of an Assyrian king the limmu an appointed royal official would preside over the Mesopotamia (from the Greek meaning "land between the rivers" is an area geographically located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers largely corresponding 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. Pharaoh is the title given in modern parlance to the ancient Egyptian kings of all periods An interregnum (plural interregna or interregnums) is a period of discontinuity of a government organization or social order 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. The Turin King List, also known as the Turin Royal Canon is an Hieratic Papyrus thought to date from thereign of Ramesses II, now in the Museo

• 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. Manetho (or Manethon) was an Egyptian Historian and Priest from Sebennytos ( Ancient Egyptian: Tjebnutjer) who Sextus Julius Africanus was a Christian traveller and Historian of the early 3rd century AD 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. Etymology According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible is from Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin 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. Noah's Ark, according to the Book of Genesis (chapters 6-9 is the story of a large vessel built at God 's command to save Noah, his family

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. Early history The most Neolithic site in Assyria is at Tell Hassuna, the center of the Hassuna culture Babylonia was an Amorite state in lower Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq) with Babylon as its capital The Hittites were an ancient Anatolian people who spoke a language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family and established The term ancient Greece refers to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca 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. The site of Amarna (commonly known as el-Amarna or incorrectly as Tel el-Amarna; see below ( Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnah) is located Amenhotep III (sometimes read as Amenophis III meaning Amun is Satisfied was the ninth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty. Akhenaten (often alt: Akhnaten, or rarely Ikhnaton) (In English ˌɑkəˡnɑtən or approximately "AHK-en-AHT-en" his royal name Amenhotep (See Chronology of the Ancient Near East. See Short chronology for a timeline in absolute dates The Chronology of the Ancient Near East is a framework of dates for )

• 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. Amenhotep III (sometimes read as Amenophis III meaning Amun is Satisfied was the ninth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty. The Ptolemaic dynasty (sometimes also known as the Lagids, from the name of Ptolemy I's father Lagus) was a Hellenistic Macedonian royal family Ramesses XI (also written Ramses and Rameses) reigned from 1107 BC to 1078 BC or 1077 BC and was the tenth and final king of the Twentieth dynasty of Egypt Usermaatre Setepenamun Osorkon II was a Pharaoh of the Twenty-second Dynasty of Ancient Egypt and the son of Takelot I and Queen Kapes The poor documentation of these finds in the Serapeum also compounds the difficulties in using these records. A Serapeum is a Temple or other religious institution dedicated to the syncretic Hellenistic - Egyptian god Serapis, who combined aspects

• 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. The Sothic cycle or Canicular period is a period of 1461 Ancient Egyptian years (of 365 days each or 1460 Julian years (averaging 365 Richard Anthony Parker ( December 10, 1905 – June 3, 1993) was a prominent Egyptologist and professor of Egyptology. The Eleventh (all of Egypt Twelfth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties of ancient Egypt are often combined under the group title Middle Kingdom. ^[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. Donald B Redford (born 1934 is an influential Canadian Egyptologist and Archaeologist, currently Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies "Amarna period" redirects here For information on Amarna see Amarna The Eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1292 BC is perhaps the best known of ^[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 precise within 5 years. The Great Pyramid of Giza, also called Khufu's Pyramid or the Pyramid of Khufu, and Pyramid of Cheops, is the oldest and largest of the three

• Radiocarbon dating (also called Carbon-14 or C-14 dating). Radiocarbon dating is a Radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring Radioisotope Carbon-14 (14C to determine the age of 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. Carbon-14, 14C, or radiocarbon, is a Radioactive isotope of Carbon discovered on February 27, 1940, by Nitrogen-14 is a stable, non- Radioactive Isotope of the Chemical element Nitrogen. 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. ^[4]

The attraction of alternative chronologies

Although Professor Heinrich Otten has called the current scholarly consensus a "rubber chronology" that could be stretched or shrunk, 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. ^[5] 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]

Egyptian dynasty	J. H. Breasted's dates	Ian Shaw's dates
1st & 2nd dynasties	3400 – 2980	c. James Henry Breasted ( August 27 1865 &ndash December 2, 1935) was an American Archaeologist and Historian. Dr Ian Shaw is an Egyptologist and senior lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. 3000 – 2686
3rd dynasty	2980 – 2900	2686 – 2613
4th dynasty	2900 – 2750	2613 – 2494
5th dynasty	2750 – 2625	2494 – 2345
6th dynasty	2623 – 2475	2345 – 2181
7th & 8th dynasties	2475 – 2445	2181 – 2160
9th & 10th dynasties	2445 – 2160	2160 – 2025
11th dynasty	2160 – 2000	2125 – 1985
12th dynasty	2000 – 1788	1985 – 1773
13th to 17th dynasties	1780 – 1580	1773 – 1550
18th dynasty	1580 – 1350	1550 – 1295
19th dynasty	1350 – 1205	1295 – 1186
20th dynasty	1200 – 1090	1186 – 1069
21st dynasty	1090 – 945	1069 – 945
22nd dynasty	945 – 745	945 – 715
23rd dynasty	745 – 718	818 – 715
24th dynasty	718 – 712	727 – 715
25th dynasty	712 – 663	747 – 656
26th dynasty	663 – 525	664 – 525

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.

Notes

See also

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

External links

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

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now Biblical chronology is the academic study of the dating of events in the Hebrew Bible. Definition A chronology may be either relative &mdashthat is locating related events relative to each other&mdashor ''absolute'' &mdashlocating See Short chronology for a timeline in absolute dates The Chronology of the Ancient Near East is a framework of dates for Dating material drawn from the Archaeological record can made by a direct study of an artifact or may be deduced by association with materials found in The History of Ancient Egypt spans the period from the early predynastic settlements of the northern Nile Valley to the Roman conquest in 30 Articles (arranged alphabetically related to Egypt include 0-9 First dynasty of Egypt - 1st -through- 31st - Thirty-first dynasty of Egypt This article contains a list of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, from the Early Dynastic Period before 3000 BC through to the end of the Ptolemaic

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