‘Challenging Time(s)’ – A New Approach to Written Sources for Ancient Egyptian Chronology

Project Information

CT

Grant agreement ID: 757951

DOI

10.3030/757951

Project closed

EC signature date 22 November 2017

Start date 1 March 2018

End date 31 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 992,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 992,00

Coordinated by

OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CT (‘Challenging Time(s)’ – A New Approach to Written Sources for Ancient Egyptian Chronology)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Ancient Egyptian chronology is a corner stone for the understanding of the rise and fall of early civilisations. Besides material culture and archaeology, texts and inscriptions are the main sources for establishing and refining Egypt’s historical chronology. The evaluation of data from radiocarbon measurements, archaeo-astronomy, and further scientific methodologies depend on a scaffolding of Egyptian history according to excavations and texts. Since the evaluation of none of those three sources of information is independent from the others, it is indispensable to recognise dependencies and potential vicious circles like in the case of radiocarbon dates, which usually are modelled on the basis of historical chronology, e.g. via Bayesian statistics. The data obtained from material culture and texts therefore urgently require proper assessment in their particular contexts.
‘Challenging Time(s)’ has studied ancient king-lists from the Old Kingdom Annals down to medieval Byzantine offshoots of Manetho’s, critically evaluated contemporaneous written sources from the kings’ reigns of three millennia, and surveyed prosopographic data in order to establish genealogies. Information obtained from the king-lists was checked against contemporaneous sources in order to recognise more precisely how the Egyptians themselves perceived history and how they handed down information on history and chronology. In the light of this, current models of historical chronology and event history have been tested and compared with sequences of generations as known from long-ranging genealogies.
From the Early Dynastic Period in the third millennium BC down to the Late Period in the first millennium BC, uncountable texts and inscriptions have been re-examined, checked against the originals, photographs, or epigraphic drawings, newly translated and analysed to extract new data or hitherto overlooked information with the aid of the latest advances from Egyptological linguistics and philology, and their reliability as sources for reconstructing Egypt’s history and chronology has been assessed and judged. Numerous details and problems of Egyptian chronology have been addressed and clarified, and new perspectives for a more precise reconstruction have been defined.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Although Manetho is one of the most important sources for the Egyptian notion of history and reflects genuinely Egyptian data for chronology, not even the date of composition of his king-list has been determined beyond doubt. ‘Challenging Time(s)’ therefore started with the collection and evaluation of testimonia on Manetho in order to address this crucial research question anew to the result that the traditionally held view of the 3rd century BC as Manetho’s floruit is correct. The royal names according to Manetho are an invaluable source for any kind of linguistic and onomastic research, in particular with regards to royal ideology, language history, and chronology. Any analysis of the regicentric Egyptian chronology must consider this material in hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic sources, but also in the so-called “Nebenüberlieferung” in the Cuneiform scripts of Akkadian and Hittite, in Hebrew, and in Greek. With the aid of a strict and clear-cut linguistic methodology, this research project has contributed to making the mention of Egyptian kings in non-Egyptian sources accessible for Egyptian history and chronology as well as Egyptian phonology, morphology, and language history. From the Lamares Problem to the Manakhpiriya Problem, from a Hittite letter mentioning Armaa to Shishak in Biblical tradition have more precise results been achieved.
Starting with the Early Dynastic Period, contemporaneous texts and inscriptions have been analysed in order to address crucial difficulties of Egyptian chronology. The mode of naming and counting regnal years has been assessed, the regularity and interval of Old Kingdom tax collecting (“cattle count”) has been investigated, the possibility of coregencies during the Middle Kingdom examined, the sequence of kings and dynasties in the Second Intermediate Period reviewed, the regnal length of several kings of the New Kingdom, among them Thutmosis IV and Haremhab, surveyed, and the general dating mode of the High Priests of Amun and of the Tanite kings during the Third Intermediate Period investigated.
Prosopographic data has been collected and genealogies have been checked or newly established from the royal families of the Old Kingdom to elite families of the Second Intermediate Period and to the families of the kings and High Priests of Amun in the Third Intermediate Period. A new statistical method has been developed to calculate the duration of generations per genealogy in order to make use more precisely of this data when judging the length of reigns, dynasties, and periods of Egyptian history. Besides a refined reconstruction of family trees, principles of Egyptian lineages, kinship, and succession, but also the expression and definition of filiation and the marital status of women as reflected in their designations have been explored with special attention to different customs of parlance in different kinds of sources and text genres.
This research has industriously published its results and will continue to do so. All publications are accessible via the project homepage and the project repository.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

‘Challenging Time(s)’ has contributed to the understanding of language contact between Egyptian and Akkadian as well as Hittite in the second millennium BC, Egyptian and Hebrew in the first millennium BC, and Egyptian and Greek in the Graeco-Roman Period, but also to the appraisal of Egyptian royal names via the reconstruction of their actual pronunciation. As a major breakthrough, the first comprehensive model of syllable structure rules and vocalisation patterns for the Egyptian language of the third millennium BC could be established, which helps to understand better the transmission of royal names and general tendencies in Egyptian language history.
New guidelines for the recording and evaluation of inscriptions have been tested, and traditional approaches to entire source groups such as New Kingdom jar dockets have been critically reviewed. The use of written sources for ancient Egyptian chronology has substantially changed both methodologically and with regards to the exploitation and interpretation of written sources in a broader cultural and historical context.
The results from the reconstruction of genealogies have proved useful for the estimation and testing of the length of reigns, dynasties, and periods of Egyptian history. A newly developed statistical method for calculating the duration of generations has the potential to set new standards in the usage of genealogical data for chronology; and details such as the exact expression of filiation and the marital status of women in various text genres will further contribute to the understanding of Egyptian society.
By means of critically examining crucial written sources as well as collecting additional data from king-lists and prosopography, ‘Challenging Time(s)’ has solved decades-old conundra and drafted new models of Egyptian historical chronology. All that will have a lasting impact not only on future research on ancient Egyptian chronology, but will also stimulate research on the chronology and history of neighbouring cultures across the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East.

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