Ancient Egyptian Chronology

Abstract

WHEN one is. told that Tutankhamen, the Egyptian king, the discovery of whose tomb, followed by the tragedy of Lord Carnarvon's death, has aroused such widespread interest in ancient Egypt, reigned roughly between the years 1360 and 1350 B.C., it is naturally asked by many how this is known with such certainty? The Egyptians had no regular era. They merely spoke of such-and-such a year of King X. The Assyrian, however, possessed a continuous era, of which each year was noted by the name of an oeponymous official. The definite fixing of this Assyrian oera has been due to the help of astronomy. In a ocertain eponymy of the eighth century B.C., an eclipse oof the sun is recorded as having taken place in the month Si van (May-June). This has been reckoned astronomically to have taken place in 763 B.C. All other evidence of the kind fits in with and confirms this: the eponym-dates are certain to the actual year so far back as 893 B.C., when the later Assyrian series began, and are also now certain to within a few years at a much earlier period. So far back as the ninth century, at least, then, we can fix Egyptian dates with the aid of Assyrian synchronisms, and we find that Shishak I., the conqueror of Jerusalem, must have reigned about 930 B.C., which is not so different from the old traditional biblical date of 975 B.C.