Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CT (‘Challenging Time(s)’ – A New Approach to Written Sources for Ancient Egyptian Chronology)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-09-01 do 2023-08-31
‘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.
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.
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.