Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 30

All Egyptian king lists, including Manetho’s, reflect an ideology of kingship that is not historically accurate to our way of thinking: there can only be one king at a time because his rule is universal. That was indeed true in times of centralized power, but in other periods multiple political centers and regional dynasties coexisted. For example, in the mid‐2nd millennium the 13th through 17th dynasties overlapped. The 13th and 17th dynasties ruled the south, while the 14th shared power in the Delta with the 15th and 16th dynasties, which were both made up of foreigners. Manetho provides only six names of kings, those of the 15th dynasty, for the entire period, but he lists the five dynasties in succession with numbers of kings and regnal years. His totals come to 260 kings, who would have ruled for 1590 years. Manetho presented these kings as if they lived one after the other, because Egyptian tradition did not acknowledge the existence of parallel kings.

The Egyptians saw each reign as a complete era. When a king came to the throne, it was as if the world was created anew and would go through a full cycle of existence. All the king’s deeds in the new era were in essence performances of royal duties, which were like ritual acts that all his predecessors had already performed. This attitude led to assertions that can mislead the modern historian. Kings could claim accomplishments of a past reign as their own. King Pepy II of the 23rd century, for example, portrayed himself as defeating Libyan enemies, presenting a scene also attested from the reign of King Sahura who lived two centuries earlier. The 7th‐century King Taharqo likewise duplicated Sahura’s representation. While we see this as a falsification of history, the Egyptians considered each representation a ritual re‐enactment of feats that were part of normal royal behavior. Kings like Rameses II started their reigns with massive building projects because they wanted to show that creation was repeated when they took power.

The modern concept of history is very different from the ancient Egyptian; we do not see the accession of each king as a new era that repeats earlier reigns. Moreover, although dynastic divisions provide a handy means to organize a millennia‐long history, they do not always reflect the historical changes that interest us most. We try to see continuities and patterns over longer periods of time, and hope to determine how people built upon the work of their predecessors. One of the hardest challenges to a modern writer of Egypt’s history is how to take documentary evidence that is as a rule organized on the basis of who reigned and to mold it into a narrative that seeks to identify long‐term trends in diverse aspects of life. A listing of events reign by reign may have a clear structure, but it provides a skewed image of history.