King-Lists & Annals — Egypt's Native Chronology

Egyptians kept their own records of the succession of kings: the Palermo Stone preserves year-by-year royal 'annals' of the early dynasties; the Turin Canon is a papyrus listing kings with reign-lengths; and temple walls at Abydos, Karnak, and Saqqara carry king-lists honoring a chosen line of predecessors. These were never neutral chronicles — they are selective and ideological, quietly erasing rulers deemed illegitimate or shameful: Hatshepsut, the Amarna kings (Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, Ay), and the foreign Hyksos are 'unpersons,' left off the honored lists. The familiar division into dynasties comes from the later Greek-writing priest Manetho, who set out thirty dynasties; a thirty-first — the second Persian period — was added in the later tradition by the epitomizers, not by Manetho himself. All of this directly shapes how Egyptian chronology must be handled — honestly noting who was written out.