Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 29

Although Manetho gives a full list of the kings of Egypt, we cannot always equate the names he provides with those we find in other king lists and in monuments. That is due to the fact that Egyptian royal names, at least from the Middle Kingdom on, contained five elements (there are some variations over time). For example, for a ruler of the 18th dynasty we call Thutmose IV the names were:

1 as the god Horus: Mighty Bull, perfect of glorious appearance (= Horus name);

2 as the Two Ladies, that is, the vulture and the cobra representing Upper and Lower Egypt: Enduring of kingship like the god Atum (= nebty‐name);

3 as the Golden Horus: Strong of arm, oppressor of the nine bows.In those three epithets he was shown as a god or as a pair of goddesses, while the final two names were written in cartouches, a symbol that a king was involved.

4 the first name preceded with two signs that indicate Upper and Lower Egypt, the sedge plant and the bee: Menkheprura, which means “The enduring one of the manifestations of Ra” (= Prenomen, given when he ascended the throne);

5 the second name, the king’s birth name with the indication “son of Ra”: Thutmose, greatly appearing one; beloved of Amun‐Ra (= Nomen).

Manetho could use any of the five names, often in abbreviated form, as the basis of his designations of kings; other king lists mostly used the prenomen, while early monuments mostly gave the Horus name. Especially for the Early Dynastic Period, it is often unknown what the correspondence is between Manetho’s names and those on monuments.

Because Manetho wrote in Greek, he reproduced Egyptian names in a manner not fully true to the original. Some of his names are better known in wide circles than the more accurate renderings. For example, he calls the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza Cheops, while anglophone Egyptologists prefer to render the ancient Egyptian name as Khufu.

The modern rendering of Egyptian names – royal and non‐royal – is a problem. Ancient Egyptian writing does not indicate vowels (see Chapter 2), so we do not know with certainty where to insert vowels between consonants and what vowels to use. Moreover, we do not know what some consonants would have sounded like. Opinions have changed over time and there has never been full agreement, while scholars writing in various modern languages follow distinct systems. Many different spellings of names appear: for example in English scholarship, Thutmose, Thutmosis, Tuthmosis, and Thothmes; Rameses, Ramesses, and Ramses. These inconsistencies may confuse especially newcomers to Egyptology, but quite soon they cease to annoy.¹

Modern practice also often uses a distinctive term to refer to the kings of Egypt up to the Greek period: Pharaoh, often without the definite article. This habit derives from Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, where the king of Egypt is called Pharaoh. The Greek term rendered the ancient Egyptian per’aa, which meant “great house” or “palace.” In the 18th dynasty, “palace” became a common way to designate the king, who was at the center of the institution, and in the 22nd dynasty it became an epithet of respect. Before the Graeco‐Roman Period ancient Egyptians hardly ever gave their kings the title pharaoh, but in modern studies pharaoh and king are synonyms. It is only because the special term is so broadly known that scholars continue to use it.

The most influential feature of Manetho’s organization was his division of the list of kings into “dynasties.” He was the first to use this Greek term for a group of rulers in order to designate a succession of kings who shared common attributes, mostly that they represented several generations of a family. He broke the long sequence of rulers up into 31 dynasties.² His sections for each dynasty start with the number of kings and the capital city. Then he lists the names of individual rulers and numbers of years, and at the end he sums up the total number of years. For example:

 Dynasty 23, 3 kings from Tanis

 Petoubates: 25 years

 Osorkho: 9 years

 Psammous: 10 years

 Total: 44 years³

The subdivisions are mostly obvious as they acknowledge when a new family seized power or when the capital moved. But the reasons for Manetho’s changes of dynasties can be unclear to us. He sometimes starts a new dynasty although the first king was the son of the preceding king in the list. Manetho or his sources must have noted breaks that are not evident to us.

Today’s scholarship adheres closely to Manetho’s organization of Egyptian history into dynasties. All people, events, monuments, and so on are provided a chronological context by stating to what dynasty they belonged. Subjects such as imperial policy or administrative structure are regularly studied as they are attested in a specific dynasty. The notion of dynasty is so strong that scholars now speak of a dynasty 0 to group together rulers who preceded Manetho’s Menes. While dynasties provide a handy means to subdivide Egypt’s long history, the rigorous adherence to Manetho’s list can impose a restricted and misleading framework on historical analysis. Many surveys move from one dynasty to the next (sometimes giving each dynasty a separate chapter) and enumerate events reign by reign as if Egypt’s history could only be an annotated king list, as it was in Manetho’s work.