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.
