The History of Ancient Egypt
Menes, known in the Bible as Mizraim, was the first king of Egypt who began to rule after the Dispersion in 2191 BC. The first cities of Egypt were founded three years later in 2188 BC.
According to Constantinus Manasses, Egypt lasted for 1,663 years as an independent nation and superpower from being founded by Menes until it was conquered by Cambyses II of Persia in 525 BC.
For most of the two thousand years before Christ, Egypt was the main superpower and wealthiest nation on Earth.
Much of our knowledge of Egyptian history comes from the book of a chronicler named Manetho who was a priest of Ptah in the third century BC. Manetho listed 31 dynasties of Egypt from the reigns of "the gods" down to Alexander the Great.
Since the first century before Christ, ancient non-Egyptian historians interpreted Manetho's 31 dynasties as a sequence in order. On this site, we call this the "conventional history" of Egypt. However, there were actually five ruling cities in ancient Egypt each of which had its own dynasty. Instead of calling the ruler of the city "the mayor," every big city had its own king. At certain times in Egyptian history a pharaoh ruled as king over the other kings. At other times, the cities were independent kingdoms.
Early Roman and Greek scholars misunderstood the dynasties of Manetho to be a linear sequence. When they counted back a certain number of years to reach a certain event in their own history, they would associate it with the wrong Egyptian king from Manetho's list.
To explain this, imagine if you were to write a history of the United States of America, beginning with the first English colony in 1607. To write such a book, you might start with the governors of Virginia, then the governors of Massachussets, then Maryland, then Pennsylvania, etc. If you wrote such a list for all fifty states, and the presidents of the Federal Government, then being written in a book, it would look like one long sequence going back about 10,000 years!
Conventional History
The conventional history of Egypt is categorized as follows:
- Neolithic Era
- Predynastic and Old Kingdom
- First Intermediate Period
- Middle Kingdom
- Second Intermediate Period
- New Kingdom
- Third Intermediate Period
- Late Period
Chronological Framework of Ancient History
The Chronological Framework of Ancient History (CFAH) is a revised chronology of the ancient world published as a series of papers by Ken Griffith and Darrell K. White. The authors searched ancient texts for examples of durations from one event to another event. Finding about 450 such durations, they assembled a chronological framework that the chroniclers seem to agree upon. They found that the ancient chroniclers basically agree with Bishop Ussher's chronology of the Bible. The Flood was in 2348 BC, the Tower of Babel was founded in 2233 BC, and the confusion of tongues caused the Dispersion in 2192 BC.
The first cities were founded a year later in Assyria (Nineveh, 2191 BC), and three years later in Egypt in 2188 BC.
Our revised view of Egyptian history divides into a different set of periods:
- The Old and Middle Kingdom from the Dispersion in 2191 to the Exodus in 1491 BC
- The Hyksos Domination from 1491 to 1063 BC, when Ahmose I killed Khamudi, the last Amalekite/Hyksos King.
- The New Kingdom of the 18th Dynasty from 1063 to the end of the Amarna Era in 841 BC.
- The Libyan and Ethiopian Domination from 841 to 671 BC.
- The Nineteenth Dynasty from 671 to 525 BC.
- The Persian Domination from 525 to 332 BC.
- The Ptolemaic Period from 332 to the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.
