About Manetho

Manetho was a third century B.C. Egyptian priest who wrote a history of Egypt that included chronological information about Egyptian dynasties and rulers. The work was widely circulated in ancient times and read by many scholars of the time. Unfortunately, his original text has been lost and we depend primarily upon inconsistent and garbled copies preserved by the Christian writers Africanus and Eusebius (third and fourth centuries A.D.) and the Jewish historian Josephus (first century A.D.) These manuscripts are not only often quite inconsistent with each other, but some of the material is at great variance with the archaeological record.

Nevertheless, it is obvious to many scholars who study the material that underlying the Manetho copies is an original chronology that seems to have had access to accurate and ancient historical records.

The present practice of dividing Egyptian history into 30 or 31 dynasties, from the first unification of Egypt at the beginning of Dynasty I to the conquest of Alexander the Great, is generally referred to as the Manetho or Manethonian Model, and it is based on the preservation of Manetho's history as preserved in Africanus and Eusebius. Whether Manetho, himself, followed this arrangement we can't say.

In my book, Manetho's Chronology Restored, I examine the various copies of Manetho's text and, using the archaeological record, I attempt to reconstruct Manetho's original chronology, showing that he did indeed rely on accurate historical records and did record an accurate chronological record of ancient Egypt. In the book I examine the many ways in which the text was garbled in transmission, leading to the inconsistent and confusing variants as presently preserved.

My interest in Manetho's chronology evolved from my analysis of the Genesis chronology in Gen. 5 and 11 and my belief that it was based on Egyptian king-lists. This required that I attempt to establish an accurate account of Egyptian chronology and resolve a number of modest disagreements among various scholars. My Manetho book grew out of that effort.