“The Present Status of Egyptian Chronology” by William A. Ward reveals how unsure scholars are on the true chronology of Ancient Egypt. Ward concludes his piece by saying that “an absolute chronology for Egypt in the bronze age cannot be achieved with the evidence currently available”. There are several available options on what the ‘true’ chronology of Egypt is, but they are all in high debate. The evidence available is not always reliable, and when new information is discovered it must be taken into account in Egypt’s history. For example, Ward lists the four most common sources of data when putting Egypt on a time line. They are as follows: Manethos’ Kings List, the length of individual reigns and dynasties, overlap in rulers, and parallel dates in Western Asia. All of these come with their own set of uncertainties as well. There have been many errors found in Manethos’ work, there are several possibilities for the lengths of many reigns, as well as possible overlap of rulers, and these time periods are also disagreed on, and then finally when absolute dating in Western Asia is changed, the chronology of Egypt should also reflect these changes. However, some of the comparisons are a bit of a stretch, such as the example Ward gives, the coexistence of Hamurapi of Babylon, and Neferhotep I of Egypt, based upon reconstructions of damaged texts. Ward also mentions that some interpretations of astronomical data recorded by Ancient Egyptians have been used for dating, but many question the accuracy of the data in ancient times. Basically all the evidence that Egyptian chronology is based on is disagreed on by scholars, so therefore a certain chronology cannot be agreed on.
I always find it amusing when I read a paper such as this one, that presents a lot of compelling data on a certain topic, is concluded by saying that no conclusion on the subject can be made at this time. Even though there is a lot of information available, people are always going to have different opinions on what really happened. Hopefully overtime better technology and methods will be developed, or perhaps more information may be found, such as a Rosetta stone equivalent for Egyptian chronology; however, I wonder if even if such advancements are made if scholars will ever be able to agree upon an absolute chronology for Ancient Egypt. I think that even if new advancements are made, there will still be much debate because of the uncertainty of the evidence. Even though new technology can be invented, it must be kept in mind that the evidence being dealt with is ancient, and therefore scholars can never be certain of how it was created. Just for example, we learned in class that Egypt had a religious calendar and civil calendar. As Ward points out too, there was never a unified calendar in Ancient Egypt, so if time wasn’t even uniformly counted back then, it is definitely going to be difficult to put a chronology together today so long after it happened.
Haley, your discussion of chronology makes me think about how we take our timekeeping and calendar for granted. It’s almost as if we accept the calendar as a natural phenomenon over which we have no control. It’s weird to think that that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The calendar is a man-made construct, and in comparison to how universalized it is today, it would be so strange to even think about keeping time another way.
However though, what does that say about our society in contrast to the Ancient Egyptians? Today’s humanity has not only spread across the globe but also has organized and institutionalized itself with incredible detail. We are bound to the clock and the calendar with schedules and deadlines. Is that a characteristic of a more advanced civilization than Ancient Egypt was? I would argue that it isn’t because they were around for so long; they must have been a relatively ‘advanced’ civilization by most definitions of the word. Maybe it has to do with the huge wealth gap between the few royals and the common masses.
Our lens to Ancient Egypt is dictated by the royals and the rest of the upper class because they had the greatest access to writing. They were less bound by deadlines and worried less about tax schedules and farming seasons because other people took care of those things for them. What if the common people of Ancient Egypt were more rigid timekeepers, but we just don’t know anything about it? Take nilometers for example; those were hugely important to monitoring subsistence as the year went on, and they were very precise. So I wonder if it has less to do with technology and more to do with the amount of information available to interpret.