Because Manetho wrote in Greek, he reproduced Egyptian names in a manner not fully true to the original. Some of his names are better known in wide circles than the more accurate renderings. For example, he calls the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza Cheops, while anglophone Egyptologists prefer to render the ancient Egyptian name as Khufu.
The modern rendering of Egyptian names – royal and non‐royal – is a problem. Ancient Egyptian writing does not indicate vowels (see Chapter 2), so we do not know with certainty where to insert vowels between consonants and what vowels to use. Moreover, we do not know what some consonants would have sounded like. Opinions have changed over time and there has never been full agreement, while scholars writing in various modern languages follow distinct systems. Many different spellings of names appear: for example in English scholarship, Thutmose, Thutmosis, Tuthmosis, and Thothmes; Rameses, Ramesses, and Ramses. These inconsistencies may confuse especially newcomers to Egyptology, but quite soon they cease to annoy.1
Modern practice also often uses a distinctive term to refer to the kings of Egypt up to the Greek period: Pharaoh, often without the definite article. This habit derives from Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, where the king of Egypt is called Pharaoh. The Greek term rendered the ancient Egyptian per’aa, which meant “great house” or “palace.” In the 18th dynasty, “palace” became a common way to designate the king, who was at the center of the institution, and in the 22nd dynasty it became an epithet of respect. Before the Graeco‐Roman Period ancient Egyptians hardly ever gave their kings the title pharaoh, but in modern studies pharaoh and king are synonyms. It is only because the special term is so broadly known that scholars continue to use it.
The most influential feature of Manetho’s organization was his division of the list of kings into “dynasties.” He was the first to use this Greek term for a group of rulers in order to designate a succession of kings who shared common attributes, mostly that they represented several generations of a family. He broke the long sequence of rulers up into 31 dynasties.2 His sections for each dynasty start with the number of kings and the capital city. Then he lists the names of individual rulers and numbers of years, and at the end he sums up the total number of years. For example:
Dynasty 23, 3 kings from Tanis
Petoubates: 25 years
Osorkho: 9 years
Psammous: 10 years
Total: 44 years3
The subdivisions are mostly obvious as they acknowledge when a new family seized power or when the capital moved. But the reasons for Manetho’s changes of dynasties can be unclear to us. He sometimes starts a new dynasty although the first king was the son of the preceding king in the list. Manetho or his sources must have noted breaks that are not evident to us.
Today’s scholarship adheres closely to Manetho’s organization of Egyptian history into dynasties. All people, events, monuments, and so on are provided a chronological context by stating to what dynasty they belonged. Subjects such as imperial policy or administrative structure are regularly studied as they are attested in a specific dynasty. The notion of dynasty is so strong that scholars now speak of a dynasty 0 to group together rulers who preceded Manetho’s Menes. While dynasties provide a handy means to subdivide Egypt’s long history, the rigorous adherence to Manetho’s list can impose a restricted and misleading framework on historical analysis. Many surveys move from one dynasty to the next (sometimes giving each dynasty a separate chapter) and enumerate events reign by reign as if Egypt’s history could only be an annotated king list, as it was in Manetho’s work.
Egyptian concepts of kingship
All Egyptian king lists, including Manetho’s, reflect an ideology of kingship that is not historically accurate to our way of thinking: there can only be one king at a time because his rule is universal. That was indeed true in times of centralized power, but in other periods multiple political centers and regional dynasties coexisted. For example, in the mid‐2nd millennium the 13th through 17th dynasties overlapped. The 13th and 17th dynasties ruled the south, while the 14th shared power in the Delta with the 15th and 16th dynasties, which were both made up of foreigners. Manetho provides only six names of kings, those of the 15th dynasty, for the entire period, but he lists the five dynasties in succession with numbers of kings and regnal years. His totals come to 260 kings, who would have ruled for 1590 years. Manetho presented these kings as if they lived one after the other, because Egyptian tradition did not acknowledge the existence of parallel kings.
The Egyptians saw each reign as a complete era. When a king came to the throne, it was as if the world was created anew and would go through a full cycle of existence. All the king’s deeds in the new era were in essence performances of royal duties, which were like ritual acts that all his predecessors had already performed. This attitude led to assertions that can mislead the modern historian. Kings could claim accomplishments of a past reign as their own. King Pepy II of the 23rd century, for example, portrayed himself as defeating Libyan enemies, presenting a scene also attested from the reign of King Sahura who lived two centuries earlier. The 7th‐century King Taharqo likewise duplicated Sahura’s representation. While we see this as a falsification of history, the Egyptians considered each representation a ritual re‐enactment of feats that were part of normal royal behavior. Kings like Rameses II started their reigns with massive building projects because they wanted to show that creation was repeated when they took power.
The modern concept of history is very different from the ancient Egyptian; we do not see the accession of each king as a new era that repeats earlier reigns. Moreover, although dynastic divisions provide a handy means to organize a millennia‐long history, they do not always reflect the historical changes that interest us most. We try to see continuities and patterns over longer periods of time, and hope to determine how people built upon the work of their predecessors. One of the hardest challenges to a modern writer of Egypt’s history is how to take documentary evidence that is as a rule organized on the basis of who reigned and to mold it into a narrative that seeks to identify long‐term trends in diverse aspects of life. A listing of events reign by reign may have a clear structure, but it provides a skewed image of history.
1.5 The Chronology of Egyptian History
The dynastic lists do provide a great help in the reconstruction of the relative chronology of Egypt’s history. We can almost always establish the sequence of rulers within a dynasty and of successive dynasties, if they did not overlap. Thus we know in what order the pyramids near Cairo were constructed, for example, something that would be much harder to find out from other evidence. The parallel dynasties are obviously a problem, but our understanding of Egyptian history is now secure enough to determine when these occurred, although we do not always know how long they coexisted.
Modern subdivisions of Egyptian history
Manetho’s king list presents Egypt’s political history as a millennia‐long succession of dynasties that all functioned under the same circumstances. In the mid‐19th‐century, a German scholar, Karl Josias von Bunsen, decided to break up this sequence into distinctive cycles of sequential and of parallel dynasties and created the modern system of subdividing Egypt’s ancient history into Kingdoms and Intermediate Periods. Today all Egyptologists use his terms Old, Middle, and New Kingdom to indicate when the state was unified, that is, when there was a