Not the election: Some notes on the dynasties of ancient Egypt
On the difficulties of counting to 33.
This weekend marks the first anniversary of the day I unexpectedly lost someone who I still haven’t really worked out how to live without, so please forgive the fact I am at neither my most creative nor productive right now. Instead, here's one I made earlier, which went to paying subscribers back in February. If you want more of this stuff, you know what to do.
It can be hard to get your head around quite how much Ancient Egyptian history there is. The line of kings and queens of which Charles III is the scion, one of the oldest extant monarchies on Earth, has existed for a little under 1,200 years; but we as a nation apparently find this a bit much, so when teaching it to kids we tend to lop off the first couple of centuries and start in 1066.
By the time the Normans turned up in Hastings, though, the Egyptians had something like 4,000 years of recorded history behind them. There’s a bit of Egyptian history commonly termed “the late period”, which begins in the 7th century BCE and ends in the 4th when the Greeks arrive. (The Romans are still several centuries off.) It overlaps, in other words, with a fairly early bit of which we would generally term “ancient history”. The late period.
Understandably, then, those who study all this have tended to break it down into chunks in order to make it legible. And once a system is in place, it can be hard to displace it.
Which is, one assumes, how Ancient Egypt ended up with a system of periodisation that makes little sense, even to the most casual of observers: entire dynasties that probably didn’t exist; others which probably did but are somehow left out entirely.
Basics, first. The history of Ancient Egypt has traditionally been split into 33 dynasties: the first of these is known as the 1st Dynasty, the 4th as the 4th Dynasty, 18th as the 18th Dynasty, all the way up to… well, we’ll be coming back to that. That’s a lot of dynasties to keep track of, so generally speaking Egyptologists divide the history up into broader chunks, too: the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, periods when the country was powerful and united and everything was basically brilliant providing you were pharoah; and Intermediate Periods, essentially dark ages, periods of division or foreign domination when everything fell to bits.
The originator of this tripartite division of Egyptian history turns out to be a 19th century German by the magnificent name of Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen, who proposed dividing it up into Altes Reich, Mittleres Reich and Neuese Reiche (old, middle and new empires). But his scheme left no room for intermediate periods, bunged both old and middle kingdoms into the Old Empire, and turned what is known today as the Second Intermediate Period into the Middle One. It took several decades of archaeology and argument to settle on the scheme in use today which is, in any case, a matter of convention, rather than actual, objective reality.
This is probably one reason why different authorities seem to disagree on where the line between these various bits should go. Depending on who you ask, the early dynastic period which precedes the Old Kingdom, for example, includes either the first two dynasties (Wikipedia, History.com) or the first three (Britannica) depending on who you ask. That’s because the moment a civilisation embarks upon a period of greatness is, if anything, even harder to pin down than when it falls (and we all know how hard that can be). The case for starting the Old Kingdom with the 3rd Dynasty, an Egyptologist of my acquaintance tells me, is that this is when the capital moved to Memphis, suggesting a new phase in the country’s development and a shift in the balance of power; the case for the 4th is that this is when it started using that power to get into the pyramid building game in a big way. Ultimately, though, it’s judgement call – or, as my Egyptologist friend says, “It’s all made up anyway”. Great stuff.
It gets worse.
Egyptian history, Wikipedia tells us, is “usually, but not always, divided into 33 pharaonic dynasties”. The first 30 of these come from Aegyptiaca, a work by Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in the 3rd century BCE: that text is lost, but we have fragments and summaries, and Manetho’s scheme has been the basis for Egyptian chronology ever since.
There are, though, a number of problems with it. One is obviously that it stops before the 3rd century BCE, because ancient Egyptian priests, for all their many talents, could not see into the future. Another is that it’s not always obvious what Manetho means by “dynasty”, since some families seem to account for more than one, while other dynasties contain pharaohs who were not, in fact, related. But the biggest issue is that – despite the fact we’re talking about the 3rd century BCE here, a couple of centuries before Julius Caesar, around a thousand before the creation of England – Egyptian history is so long that Manetho was writing about events that were thousands of years before he was around. Some of these were farther from him than he is from us.
Which might explain why the 7th dynasty, which Manetho claims ruled at the beginning of the First Intermediate Period, around 2181 BCE and the better part of two thousand years before his own time, seems not to have actually existed. Some experts think it consisted of kings generally attributed to the 8th (which, in other words, was two dynasties); others that it was simply fictitious. In Aegyptiaca, Wikipedia notes, it “appears essentially as a metaphor for chaos”. Has the inclusion of a fictitious dynasty which is essentially a metaphor for chaos led anyone to rethink the numbering scheme? No it has not.
Archaeology has turned up other problems with Manetho’s scheme. The 10th seems to be a continuation of the 9th – in which case the numbering should more properly go “5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 11th”. It also makes no attempt to differentiate between dynasties that existed in series, like those I just listed, and those that existed in parallel, during intermediate periods when the country split into rival power bases. Both the 15th/16th and 22nd/23rd seem to have overlapped, yet all get their own numbers. Then there’s the hypothesised “Abydos Dynasty”, which may have existed alongside the 15th and 16h, but doesn’t.
If that isn’t enough to give you a migraine, then consider the fact there may have been other dynasties before the so-called first.1 By way of evidence, consider this graph:
The average dynasty lasts 103 years. Only the 18th, the first of the New Kingdom, the one which gave us the vast majority of the Ancient Egyptians you’ve actually heard of – Amenhotep, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen – manages over 250, and many barely got started: the briefest seems to be the 28th, which consists of a single pharaoh who lasted just six years.
The first two dynasties, though, last a couple of centuries apiece, which is long. Given they are also old, that to me suggests the explanation is less likely to be “just and venerable rule” than “poor historical memory”. Manetho probably knew a lot less of his own ancient history than he let on.2
After his scheme runs out, it’s followed by the 31st dynasty – a brief period of dominance by the Achaemenid Empire (Persia) – which is also a restoration of the 27th but for some reason numbered separately which is fine. Then Alexander the Great conquers the lot, including Egypt, and counts as a dynasty in his own right but isn’t numbered 32nd. Then his successors, the Greek-speaking Ptolomies, run the place for nearly three centuries – it was probably one of them that Manetho was writing for – which brings the total up to 33, and nobody has thought to bung the last two together even though they’re no less related than the various pharaohs of the later 18th dynasty.
Anyway: the point is clear. The periodisation and dynasty numbers are conventions, as much as facts, a way of rendering the history legible as much as a description of how it felt at the time. We still use the system devised by Manetho because it’s established and convenient and right enough, and even if it occasionally gets the numbers wrong or chucks in a fictitious dynasty it’s too big a ball-ache to change the numbering everyone’s used to.
Or to put it another way: Ancient Egyptian history is basically one big QWERTY keyboard.
Also not the election
A review! From the TLS! Apparently I have “a good eye for the telling story and a light touch”, and am “also genuinely funny”. Cool. You can read the whole thing here.
You'll enjoy it, probably. Why not buy a copy from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, or Foyles?
One might term these the Morbius, Fugitive or Timeless dynasties, perhaps. (Jasper, for the eight people who will get this joke, I implore you to leave it in.)
Adding credence to this theory is the fact that sources vary wildly on exactly how long these things lasted. Some bonus extracts from Wikipedia to show what a mess we're dealing with here: “The existence of Thamphthis is not archaeologically attested.” “Netjerkare Siptah could either be the last monarch of Dynasty VI or the founder of Dynasty VIII depending on the historian's characterization.” “The existence of Nitocris is not archaeologically attested.” “Some historians consider Yakbim Sekhaenre to be the founder of Dynasty XIV, while others believe Yakbim Sekhaenre reigned during Dynasty XVI” – not, you note, dynasty XV. Honestly, this whole thing is chaos.