So we must give up the search for absolute dates as hopeless, and limit ourselves to an approximate computation of the periods of Egyptian history. The genealogies of the ruling houses, as well as those of private people, are of great service, for where we can trace a pedigree through long periods, we are able to give an approximate estimate of the number of generations. Thus we arrive at the “minimum” dates, with which we must content ourselves for the present.
For the long periods from the VIIth to the XIth Dynasties and from the XIVth to the XVIIth, which are almost completely destitute of monuments, the dates are extremely problematic. The dates therefore given for the XIIth Dynasty, for the Pyramid period and for Menes, only prove that they cannot well be put later, whilst they leave the way open for any one to put them farther back.[b]
The lists of Manetho, above referred to, are so important as to require fuller notice.
MANETHO’S TABLE OF THE EGYPTIAN DYNASTIES
No one can help being struck by the enormous total to which Manetho’s summing up of the dynasties brings us. By means of the Egyptian priest’s lists we are in truth carried back to the times that for all other peoples are purely mythical, but for Egypt are certainly historic.
Embarrassed by this fact and finding no other means of discrediting Manetho’s authenticity and veracity, some modern writers have supposed that Egypt has been at various periods of its history divided into several kingdoms, and that Manetho gives us as successive some royal families whose reigns were in fact simultaneous.
According to these authorities the Vth Dynasty, for example, would have reigned at Memphis at the same time that the VIth governed at Elephantine. It is not necessary to demonstrate the advantages of such an arrangement. By bringing certain dates closer together and by correcting others it is possible by an ingenious and clever arrangement of the dynasties to shorten almost at will the space of time covered by Manetho’s lists; thus while, in the table, we have the date 5626 A.H., that is, before the Hegira, [5004 B.C.] as that of the foundation of the Egyptian monarchy, other writers like Bunsen do not go farther back than 4245 A.H. or 3623 B.C.
On whose side does the truth lie? The more one studies the question, the more it is seen how difficult it is to reply. The greatest of all obstacles to the establishment of a definite Egyptian chronology is that the Egyptians never had a chronology proper. The employment of an era, properly so called, was unknown to them, and up to the present time it has never been proved that they reckoned otherwise than by the years of the reign. And moreover these years were far from having a fixed point of beginning, since sometimes they began at the commencement of the year in which the preceding king died, and sometimes with the coronation of the new king. Whatever may be the apparent precision of its calculations, modern science will always be baffled in its attempts to establish that which the Egyptians themselves did not possess.[c]