Three thousand years in one line
The simplest way to hold Egypt’s history in your head is a sandwich: three long periods of strong central rule, the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, with shorter periods of division in between. Before them comes the formation of the state; after them, a long late phase in which Egypt was often ruled by foreigners, from Libyans and Nubians to Persians, Greeks and finally Romans.
The dates below follow the widely used chronology of the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Shaw, 2000). Other books move some beginnings by a few decades, especially before 2000 BCE, and you will see “c.” in front of nearly every date. That uncertainty is real, and the last section explains where it comes from.
- Predynastic period, before about 3000 BCE: farming villages along the Nile and the first chiefs.
- Early Dynastic period (c. 3000-2686 BCE): Dynasties 1 and 2, the first kings of a united Egypt.
- Old Kingdom (2686-2160 BCE): Dynasties 3 to 6, the age of the pyramids.
- First Intermediate Period (2160-2055 BCE): the country splits into rival centres.
- Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BCE): reunification from Thebes.
- Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 BCE): the Hyksos rule the north.
- New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE): the empire, Thebes and the Valley of the Kings.
- Third Intermediate Period (1069-664 BCE): divided rule, Libyan and Nubian kings.
- Late Period (664-332 BCE): the last native dynasties and two Persian conquests.
- Ptolemaic period (332-30 BCE): the Greek kings who followed Alexander the Great.
Why the Nile valley shaped all of this, from the meaning of “Upper” and “Lower” Egypt to the place of cities and tombs, is explained in the map of ancient Egypt.
Who counted thirty dynasties?
The Egyptians did not number their dynasties. The scheme comes from Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote a history of his country in Greek in the third century BCE, under the Ptolemies. His book is lost; it survives only in quotations by later authors, which do not always agree. Yet his thirty dynasties are still the framework every museum label uses, with a thirty-first, for the second Persian rule, added later.
A dynasty, in Manetho’s sense, is a group of kings linked by family or by their seat of power, not always a single bloodline. The Egyptians themselves kept lists of kings, carved on temple walls or written on papyrus: the Palermo Stone, the Turin King List and the list of ancestors in the temple of Seti I at Abydos are the most important. Combined with Manetho, they give the order of the reigns, but not always their length.
Old Kingdom: kings, stone and pyramids
The story begins with unification, traditionally credited to a king of the south called Narmer, around 3100 BCE. Under the Third Dynasty, about 2650 BCE, King Djoser and his official Imhotep built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first large building made entirely of cut stone. A century later the kings of the Fourth Dynasty built the true pyramids, culminating in the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, around 2560 BCE.
The Old Kingdom fixed the rules of Egyptian art for the next three thousand years: figures in profile with the shoulders turned towards you, the most important person larger than the others, and hieroglyphs placed among the images. The reasons for that style are set out in why Egyptian art looks the way it does.
Middle Kingdom: a country put back together
Around 2160 BCE central power broke down, perhaps helped by low Nile floods, and regional governors ruled their own territories. Reunification came from the south: Mentuhotep II, a king of Thebes, reunited the country around 2055 BCE. Middle Kingdom art is often more human than that of the pyramid age. The statues of Senusret III show a tired, lined face on a young body, a choice that may express the weight of kingship.
The Middle Kingdom ended with a new division. In the north, rulers of Asian origin, the Hyksos (from the Egyptian for “rulers of foreign lands”), took power around 1650 BCE, bringing with them the horse-drawn chariot.
New Kingdom: the empire of Thebes
Around 1550 BCE King Ahmose drove out the Hyksos, and the New Kingdom began: Egypt’s age of empire, from Nubia to Syria. Its kings were buried in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes and built huge temples to Amun at Karnak. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut (1473-1458 BCE) built her terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari.
In the fourteenth century BCE Akhenaten (about 1353-1336 BCE) broke with tradition: he moved the capital to Amarna, promoted the worship of a single sun god, the Aten, and had himself shown with a long face and a soft body. His successor Tutankhamun (about 1336-1327 BCE) restored the old gods and is famous only because his small tomb was found almost intact in 1922. The longest-remembered king of the period is Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE), who carved his own colossi at Abu Simbel.
Late Egypt: foreign kings and the last pharaohs
After 1069 BCE Egypt was rarely united under a native king for long. Libyan families ruled in the north, and in the eighth century BCE the kings of Kush, in today’s Sudan, conquered Egypt and ruled it as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, presenting themselves as more Egyptian than the Egyptians. The Persians invaded in 525 BCE. In 332 BCE Alexander the Great arrived, and after his death his general Ptolemy founded the dynasty that ruled from Alexandria for three centuries.
The Ptolemies were Greek, but in the temples they appeared as pharaohs, in the old style. That is why some of the best-preserved temples in Egypt, such as Edfu, Dendera and Philae, are among the youngest. The last of the line was Cleopatra VII. When she died in 30 BCE, Egypt became a province of Rome.
One comparison shows how long all this lasted. Cleopatra died about 2,530 years after the Great Pyramid was finished, and about 2,000 years before the first Moon landing in 1969. She lived nearer to us than to the pyramid builders.
Why every date has a “c.” in front of it
Egyptian scribes dated events by the year of the reigning king (“year 5 of Ramesses”), not by a continuous era. To turn that into BCE dates, historians add up reign lengths from the king lists and anchor the chain to a few fixed points: references to astronomical events, such as the rising of the star Sirius, and synchronisms with other kingdoms, such as letters exchanged with the rulers of Babylon. Every gap or doubtful reign adds a margin, and the margins grow as you go back.
Science has helped. In 2010 a team led by Christopher Bronk Ramsey published in Science radiocarbon dates from plants and other short-lived materials tied to specific reigns. The results agreed well with the historical chronology, with a few adjustments for the Old Kingdom. So the outline is solid: the uncertainty is a matter of decades for the earliest periods and of a few years for the New Kingdom, not of centuries.
Where to see it
The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo cover the whole timeline, from the Narmer Palette to the Greek and Roman periods. On the ground, the order of the sites follows the river: Saqqara and Giza for the Old Kingdom, Luxor for the New Kingdom, Edfu and Philae for the Ptolemies. In Europe, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Egyptian Museum in Turin and the Neues Museum in Berlin have the largest collections.
Sources
- I. Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford, 2000), chronology.
- C. Bronk Ramsey et al., “Radiocarbon-based chronology for dynastic Egypt”, Science 328 (2010).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Egyptian Art” and period essays.
- W. G. Waddell (trans.), Manetho, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).
- The British Museum, collection record for the statue of Senusret III (EA 686).
