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Egyptian King Lists
Turin King List
Manetho
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Dynasties
Hieroglyphs & language
Temples & Monuments
The king lists of antiquity
The historical reconstruction of the timeline of ancient Egypt relies on a blend of native records, classical accounts and early Christian chronicles. While monumental inscriptions such as the Abydos King List and the Turin Papyrus offer direct archaeological evidence, the primary source of the modern historical framework is Manetho, an Egyptian priest from the 3rd century BC. In his work Aegyptiaca, (History of Egypt, or literally Egyptian things), he combined material from the sacred temple archives with popular traditions, legends, and narratives to organise the pharaohs into the dynasties that are still used today. The transcriptions of the pharaohs names preserved by Manetho were so influential that they constituted the initial point of reference for Jean-François Champollion's 19th-century decipherment of the hieroglyphs. The cartouches of the pharaohs would turn out to be the ultimate key to unlocking the secret of the hieroglyphs.
The voyage of these records through the millennia was a treacherous one, fraught with pitfalls and historical gaps. The lost original papyri from authors like Manetho, we are forced to rely on a long series of transcriptions that functioned as a slow, historical distortion. As the records were copied and recopied across centuries, the original data was filtered through shifting languages, cultural biases, and scribal errors. By the time these lists reached the modern era, they had become a fragmented echo of the originals, the authentic Egyptian names often muffled or reshaped by the many hands they had passed through. Errors and corruption in subsequent copies is inevitable. These errors range from simple scribal misunderstandings and phonetic blurring to more deliberate alterations and omissions. In many cases, driven by political agendas or the desire to harmonise Egyptian timelines with their own religious worldviews, historians actively reshaped the data. This has left modern scholars with the complex task of peeling back layers of editorial bias to find the authentic history beneath.
However, these records often underwent significant transformation:
- The Bible mentions only four minor pharaohs of the Late Period by name (such as Shishak and Necho), generally referring to others simply as "Pharaoh." Early Greek historians also struggled to approximate Egyptian phonetics into their own alphabet, resulting in names that were often phonetically distorted.
- Because Manetho’s original text is lost, we rely on quotations preserved by Christian historians like Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea. These scholars were motivated by "Sacred Chronology," attempting to synchronize Egyptian history with the Bible.
- Corruption of Data: Over centuries of manual copying, Manetho’s lists suffered from "corruptions"—omissions, spelling errors, and deliberate alterations to fit theological narratives.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the advent of the new science of Egyptology and the gradual revelation of the original names of the pharaohs.
Chronology of the king lists
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Karnak King List
This was originally created during the reign of Thutmose III for honouring celebrated ancestors and was located in the south-west corner of the Akh-Menu Hall at the Great Temple at Karnak. On display at the Louvre in Paris.
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Abydos King List of Seti I
A list of 76 pharaohs inscribed in the Hall of Kings in the Mortuary Temple of Seti I at Abydos, where selected ancestors were honoured. Still in its original place in Egypt.
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Turin King List
The most comprehensive ancient list of Egyptian pharaohs is found in a poorly preserved hieratic papyrus scroll dating from the reign of Ramesses II. This list is undoubtedly the most significant of Ancient Egypt. It is likely that Manetho used a list very similar to this one. On display at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.
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Herodotus of Halicarnassus
The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt during the 27th Dynasty, when Egypt was under Persian domination. His Histories is the earliest known work to use the actual royal names rather than the generic term ‘pharaoh’. As a chronological work, however, it is of little value: for instance, he placed kings of the Old Kingdom after the New Kingdom. Although his work is often unreliable, Herodotus provides a detailed account of ancient Egypt and offers anecdotal insights into the lives of numerous pharaohs, some of whom are composites of multiple kings. He also references the priests claim that there had been around 330 kings in total
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Manetho of Sebennytos
The Egyptian priest Manetho wrote Aegyptiaca, also known as the ‘History of Egypt’, which covered all the pharaohs up to the time of Alexander the Great's conquest. During the first centuries CE, knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs gradually declined and was completely lost by the time Western Rome fell in 476. Thanks to the early historians who transcribed extracts from the Aegyptiaca, the Greek approximations of the original names of the pharaohs were preserved, as was the chronology and division of the long line of pharaohs into dynasties. This chronology was the most complete available on the pharaohs. Although it is far from perfect, much of it has been corroborated by archaeological findings, and the division into dynasties is still in use today.
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Plutarch
Plutarch is sometimes referenced as having information about Manetho, and he does in fact refer to him several times in Isis and Osiris. However, it is unlikely that his source was Aegyptiaca; it is more probable that it was another one of Manetho's works. Plutarch travelled to Alexandria and Egypt to further his education. Although the date of composition of the essay is unknown, it is generally thought to have been written after his visit. He makes no mention of a list of kings.
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Josephus
The Roman–Jewish historian and military leader Flavius Josephus (c. 37-100) mentions Manetho in Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion: “the Egyptian-born Manetho, who translated Egyptian history from the priestly writings”. Josephus does not mention dynastic divisions and only names about 25 rulers, most of whom were from the New Kingdom.
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Africanus
Julius Africanus (c. 160–240) was an early Christian historian. He wrote Chronographiai, a five-volume history of the world, which covers the period from the creation of Adam to his own time. The original manuscript has not survived; only fragments remain, primarily in the form of excerpts preserved by Eusebius and Syncellus.
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Ancient Chronicle (Pseudo-Manetho)
A forgery claiming to be an ancient Egyptian text called the Old or Ancient Chronicle was also circulated. It described 30 dynasties over 113 generations, spanning 36,525 years. See Syncellus below.
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Jerome
An updated Latin translation of the second book of Eusebius’ (the Canons) known as the Chronicle of Jerome was created by Christian priest and historian Jerome of Stridon around 382. Jerome updated or extended the timeline from where Eusebius left off, adding events up to his own time. Jerome’s well-received Chronicle, written in Latin, made it more accessible to a wider audience in the Western world, while Eusebius’ Greek original became increasingly obscure. There are more than a hundred surviving manuscripts of the Chronicle.
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The Book of Sothis (Pseudo-Manetho)
Also called the Sothic Cycle, attributed to Manetho but most likely a forgery used/composed by Panodorus of Alexandria. The sequence of kings is clearly not presented in chronological order. See Syncellus below.
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Eratosthenes (Pseudo-Eratosthenes)
A forgery trying to gain credibility by using the famous Eratosthenes. Some of the names listed are found in Manetho and Herodotus, suggesting that there may be a common but corrupted source behind the list, but most names bear no resemblance to the names on other king lists.
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Manetho
Selected Chronography, a chronicle written by the Byzantine monk George Syncellus, is the primary source of our knowledge of the contents of Aegyptiaca. Thanks to Syncellus’ preserved excerpts from Africanus and Eusebius’ chronicles, as the original manuscript of Syncellus has been lost, and only later copies remain.
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Surviving manuscripts
None of the original books written by the authors in question above have survived. The extant manuscripts date from the 10th century or later, representing copies of copies that are themselves separated from the originals by several centuries. Given the considerable number of generations of texts, it is inevitable that the originals will have been contaminated or corrupted to some extent.
A number of potential errors may be introduced in the course of the copying process, The may include the skipping of lines, the omission of words, or the replication of phrases. Such errors may be inadvertent, but they can give rise to discrepancies between different manuscript copies, particularly if the document undergoing transcription itself was already compromised by earlier transcriptions. Copyists might have trouble comprehending the text they were transcribing if it was written in an unfamiliar language or used archaic expressions. There are numerous other ways errors might be introduced. -
Hieroglyphs deciphered
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 played an instrumental role in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs were still unreadable, but progress was being made. It contains the same text written in three scripts: hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. Many scholars worked to solve the puzzle, slowly adding clues, until Jean François Champollion made a breakthrough in 1822. He used the Rosetta Stone inscriptions and his methodical study of demotic and hieratic from previous years to finally be able to decipher the hieroglyphs. The discovery opened the way to the reading of a wide range of texts on monuments and papyri, and it can be said that the field of Egyptology was born.