[Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft] Historiographie in der Antike || Periodizing Egyptian History: Manetho, Convention, and Beyond

✍ Scribed by Adam, Klaus-Peter

• Book ID: 125487699
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Weight: 191 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 3110206722
• DOI: 10.1515/9783110206722.181

✦ Synopsis

In his essay Ramesside Egypt in a Changing World. An Institutional Approach, Mario Liverani takes his starting point from the observation that while historians of the Ancient Near East consider the 12 th century BC a turning point of history and a real break, Egyptologists view the very same period under the mark of continuity. 2 Remarkably enough, those same Egyptologists who adopted Manetho's dynastic grid (and so the two Ramesside dynasties as distinct units) did not follow him in his setting apart the 19 th and the 20 th dynasty and assigning them to two different periods of history. The second book of the Ptolemaic historian's Aigyptiaka once covered dynasties 12-19, with dynasties 20-30 (and maybe 31) treated separately in the third volume. The exception here is Alfred Wiedemann in his Egyptian History of 1884 who still adopted the division. 3 It is now common sense in Egyptology to speak about the Ramesside Age as a well-defined historical period stretching from the founder of dynasty 19, Ramesses I, to Ramesses XI, the last 1 The main ideas of this contribution were first formulated for a lecture given at the University of Chicago in January 2001 and published in German as T. Schneider, Die Periodisierung der ägyptischen Geschichte: Problem und Perspektive für die ägyptologische Historiographie, in: T. Hofmann / A. Sturm (Hgg.), Menschen-Bilder / Bilder-Menschen. Kunst und Kultur im Alten Ägypten, Norderstedt 2003, 241-256, where a periodization attempt was made for the 1st millennium BC. This section has been omitted here and the main text partly modified and revised. I should like to thank Mrs Ruth Washington (Zurich) for having improved the style of my Chicago paper and Dr. Kasia Szpakowska for having read and commented upon the present version. 2 M. Liverani, Ramesside Egypt in a Changing World. An Institutional Approach, in: I. Brancoli (Hg.), L'impero ramesside. Convegno internazionale in onore di Sergio Donadoni, Roma 1997, 101-115 (who sees territory vs. ethnicity as the distinctive features of Bronze Age vs. Iron Age states, 113f.). 3 A. Wiedemann, Ägyptische Geschichte, Gotha 1884.