King Annals of the Old Kingdom
now the Petrie Museum in London
The royal annals of the Old Kingdom contain events that are related to the respective king ( Pharaoh ) and the royal houses as well as the worship of royal gods and their festivals. In the first development phase of the Old Kingdom, various royal annal models existed, which were adjusted and standardized very late.
With the beginning of the Middle Kingdom , reliable and uniform recording of annual data replaced the various forms of recording of the Old Kingdom, which show the first characteristics of synchronization at the latest at the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth dynasty .
Counting systems
Year counting
Regularly recurring festivals are first recorded with the beginning of the 2nd dynasty . The organized counting of the year developed from the celebration of celebrations. In addition to the escort of Horus , additional tax inputs and counts are known from label entries, which refer to a royal receipt of the taxes from Upper and Lower Egypt .
The entries in the Palermo and Cairo stone show clear features of a reconstruction of royal annals that were taken from other sources and finally listed and supplemented in a new chronology . For example, the Escort of Horus appears in the first row of the Palermostein every two years, while it is missing in the second row and has been replaced by other years. This points to a possible first construction in the time of the anedjib , since the escort of Horus was continued every two years in the royal annals only after his reign. Immediately before Anedjib, Den had begun to add number hieroglyphics to the label entries in order to introduce improved labeling of continuous annals.
Government years
The counting of the reign of the king began with the coronation , which was also the programmatic name of the first year of reign. In connection with this, the new king celebrated the traditional celebration of the union of the two countries when he took office , which probably refers to the date that originally stood at the beginning of the royal annals. The year of death of the reigning king was recorded as the last year of his reign, even if the king died at the beginning of the year. The Egyptian calendar served as the basis for calculation . However, the coronation year was not taken into account as a celebration of the unification , which is why the first official year of the new king's reign always began on the 1st of Achet I of the following year. Therefore, in the event of an untimely death, the first year of his successor's reign could span a period of almost two years.
In the Old Kingdom, the kings noted the respective information in connection with the clay exchange dates and tax levies, for example with comments such as the year after the second count . Only in the New Kingdom did this form of counting the years of government change, which henceforth began on the date of the coronation. A coronation on 1st Achet I later represented the ideal case, which is why Hatshepsut , based on the system of the Old Kingdom, was crowned on the ideal day .
See also
literature
- Siegfried Schott : Ancient Egyptian festival dates . Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz 1950, ( Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz - Treatises of the Humanities and Social Sciences Class 1950, 10, ISSN 0002-2977 ).