Was the Royal List Included in Manetho’s Work?

Abstract

The author tries to clarify whether the list of Manethonian Dynasties which is present in Manetho’s material as rendered by Africanus and Eusebius (who were basing on the missing Manetho’s work) was a part of the original work by Manetho, or the epitomators compiled this list by themselves, extracting relevant information from various parts of Manetho’s narrative. Without special discussions, the second point of view is broadly accepted. The author supposes that this issue can be solved by comparing the list of Manetho’s dynasties in Africanus and Eusebius’ version with the parts of Manetho’s narrative that have survived in the quotation and retelling of Josephus and cover the times of the Dynasties XV–XIX. In the narrative, the kings of the Dynasties XV–XIX are listed in such an arrangement that their respective groups could not be identified as special segments (dynasties) into which the Egyptians divided their royal sequence, but would remain to be understood as members of one sequence without division into special segments who were only named in the interruptions filled by narrations of events. In addition, the narrative does not contain some important information about the dynasties that the list by Africanus and Eusebius preserves. Thus, Manetho had himself included a list of dynasties and kings as a kind of appendix in his work, and it was this that the epitomators reproduced first; from it, through the Epitome, the chronographs received their data about dynasties that were missing in the narrative.