{"it":{"id":"TX020","kind":"text","sub":"Egyptian","name":"Palermo Stone (Royal Annals)","place":"London","date":"c.2400 BCE (5th Dyn.)","oldest":"c.2400 BCE (possibly later copy)","inst":"Palermo: Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonio Salinas; other fragments Cairo JE 39734…","lang":"Old Egyptian","src":[218],"lat":51.523,"lon":-0.133,"tags":["Egypt","Egypt"],"sum":"Egypt's Palermo Stone begins with rulers before the First Dynasty, unknown today.","why":"Egypt's oldest annals begin with kings whose names survived but whose deeds did not.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Compare with the Turin list.","rel":["TX021","TX022"],"hook":"A slab seven feet long once listed Egypt's kings year by year. A piece 25 cm wide survives in Palermo."},"S":{"218":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Stone"]},"rec":{"id":"TX020","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA123","a":"Gods' reign record.","who":"various","main":"Royal annals; predynastic rulers likely human Lower/Upper Egypt chiefs.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Stone","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Royal annals; predynastic rulers likely human Lower/Upper Egypt chiefs.","alternative_reading":"Gods' reign record.","alt_proponent":"various","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Top register mostly names with crowns; no 'god-reigns' durations readable.","key_theme":"predynastic kings listed in top register (names only); annual Nile heights","language":"Old Egyptian","physical_object_institution":"Palermo: Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonio Salinas; other fragments Cairo JE 39734 etc., Petrie Museum UC15508 [institution number unverified this session]","composition_date":"c.2400 BCE (5th Dyn.)","oldest_ms_date":"c.2400 BCE (possibly later copy)","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0570","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Stone"},{"id":"VTX020-2","t":"Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 1 (1906), Internet Archive text","u":"https://archive.org/download/ancientrecordsof01brea_0/ancientrecordsof01brea_0_djvu.txt"},{"id":"VTX020-3","t":"Wikipedia: Palermo Stone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_stone"}],"sum":"# The Palermo Stone: Egypt's Oldest Annals and the Kings Before the Kings\n\nIn 1859 a Sicilian lawyer named Ferdinand Guidano bought a broken piece of black stone covered on both sides with tiny hieroglyphs. Nobody knows where it had been found. It came to Palermo in 1866, and on 19 October 1877 the Guidano family gave it to the city's archaeological museum, where it still sits today in the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonio Salinas. For decades it was simply one more Egyptian curiosity in a provincial collection. Not until 1895, when a visiting French archaeologist noticed it, did anyone grasp what it was. In 1902 the German scholar Heinrich Schäfer published the first full edition and translation. The fragment, it turned out, was a piece of the oldest surviving history of Egypt.\n\n## A fragment of a much larger slab\n\nThe Palermo Stone is small, an irregular shield-shaped piece 43.5 centimetres high, 25 centimetres wide and 6.5 centimetres thick, about the size of a large book. It is made of a hard, compact black stone, probably a kind of basalt. James Henry Breasted, who translated it in his Ancient Records of Egypt in 1906, judged that it had been \"broken out of the middle of a large slab some seven feet long and over two feet high,\" standing on its long edge, with inscriptions on both faces. Modern estimates put the original at roughly 60 centimetres high and 2.1 metres wide.\n\nSix more fragments of the same monument, or of copies of it, have surfaced since. Five are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, four acquired between 1895 and 1914 and one bought on the antiquities market in 1963. A small piece is in the Petrie Museum in London, bought by Flinders Petrie in 1914. Together they are known as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom. One Cairo fragment is said to have come from Memphis; none has a secure findspot, and some of the Cairo pieces may not be genuine.\n\nThe slab was probably made in the Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BCE, during the age of the pyramids. It is not certain. Some scholars have suggested it was carved much later, perhaps as late as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, though even then it would have been copied from an Old Kingdom original.\n\n## How the annals work\n\nThe stone is laid out like a ledger. Across each face run horizontal bands. In each band the name of a king is written in a narrow strip above, and below it his years are set out one by one in boxes. The right edge of each box is shaped like the hieroglyph for \"year.\" Inside each box are the chief events of that year, and one of those events gave the year its official name. There is a \"Year of Smiting the Troglodytes.\" Over time the names became bureaucratic, named for the regular count of the nation's cattle and gold: \"Year of the Seventh Occurrence of the Numbering of Gold and Lands.\" Breasted saw in this the birth of the calendar. \"The Palermo stone thus furnishes us the origin of the Egyptian system of dating.\"\n\nAt the bottom of each box is a measurement in cubits, palms and fingers. Many scholars read it as the height of that year's Nile flood, the number on which every harvest depended. Breasted thought that \"very uncertain.\"\n\nThe events themselves give glimpses of a young state at work: religious festivals, royal jubilees, censuses, statues, buildings, wars. Under King Sneferu, father of Khufu who built the Great Pyramid, one year records \"bringing of 7,000 living prisoners, and 200,000 large and small cattle\" from a raid to the south, and the \"bringing of 40 ships filled with cedar wood,\" timber hauled from Lebanon. Another year records a ship a hundred cubits long, some 167 feet, built of cedar. The annals also name the mothers of kings, such as Meresankh, mother of Sneferu. The record runs from the First Dynasty, which began around 3100 BCE, to Neferirkare, third king of the Fifth.\n\n## The top line\n\nThe most haunting part of the stone is its first band. It does not belong to any dynasty. It holds a row of names, each in its own box, each king shown wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, the northern kingdom of the Nile Delta. On the Palermo fragment nine names survive, of which seven can be read: Seka, Khayu, Teyew, Thesh, Neheb, Wazenez, Mekh.\n\nThese are rulers from before Egypt was one country, before the union of north and south that later tradition credited to a king called Menes. Unlike everyone below them, they have no years, no events, no measurements. Breasted noted they appear \"with no indication of how long each king reigned.\" If the line ran the full length of the slab, he calculated, it may once have held some 120 such names. By the Fifth Dynasty, the last of these kings had reigned about seven centuries before the stone was carved. Even then, in Breasted's words, they \"were already merely a series of names.\"\n\nWho were they? The mainstream view is that they were the human chiefs of predynastic Lower Egypt, remembered only as names, or perhaps legendary figures kept alive in oral tradition, possibly invented to fill out a royal line. Identifying them with real people remains controversial.\n\nBut Breasted's notes point somewhere stranger. The historian Eduard Meyer had found the place of these same Lower Egyptian kings in the Turin king list. There, Breasted wrote, \"They follow the gods and precede the 'Worshipers of Horus,' the immediate predecessors of the dynasties.\" Meyer believed the top row of the annals \"must have begun with the gods.\" Breasted himself labelled one part of the stone \"Kings of Upper Egypt (?) or the Gods (?).\" Later Egyptian tradition, preserved by the priest Manetho in the third century BC, did indeed begin Egyptian history with dynasties of gods and demigods who ruled the land before human pharaohs. The Palermo Stone may be our oldest witness to the bottom edge of that tradition, the place where the memory of divine rulers ran out and the record of human kings began.\n\n## What the scribes knew\n\nThere is a quiet strangeness in how the stone treats time. Its makers could list the events of a year many centuries earlier in some detail, the festivals, the statues, the levels of the river. Then, at the top, they reached a line where all that detail stopped. They kept the names. They kept the crowns. They gave each ruler a box of his own. Whatever they knew about those kings, they chose not to set it down, or had already lost it.\n\nImagine the slab whole and standing on its long edge, more than two metres of black stone catching the sun: band after band of crowded year boxes, kings and floods and fleets of cedar, and above them all a single row of silent names in red crowns, reaching back into an age the scribes could still count but could no longer describe.","qs":["Who ruled Egypt before Egypt?","What did the scribes of the Fifth Dynasty know about these kings that we do not?","Why record a name with nothing else attached?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/240911_CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg/1280px-240911_CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:240911_CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg","title":"240911 CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"CvZ","cap":"Palermo Stone. Royal Annals of Egypt (Old Kingdom). Museo archeologico regionale Antonino Salinas, inv.no. 1028"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_%28Recto_labeled%29.png/1280px-Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_%28Recto_labeled%29.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_(Recto_labeled).png","title":"Fragment I Caire et pierre de Palerme - Henri Gauthier (Recto labeled).png","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Henri Gauthier","cap":"Drawing of the Cairo Stone with the Palerma stone"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_%28Verso_labeled%29.png/1280px-Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_%28Verso_labeled%29.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fragment_I_Caire_et_pierre_de_Palerme_-_Henri_Gauthier_(Verso_labeled).png","title":"Fragment I Caire et pierre de Palerme - Henri Gauthier (Verso labeled).png","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Henri Gauthier","cap":"Drawing of the Cairo Stone with the Palerma stone"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Palermo_Stone_List_of_Pre-Dynastic_Pharaohs.png/1280px-Palermo_Stone_List_of_Pre-Dynastic_Pharaohs.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palermo_Stone_List_of_Pre-Dynastic_Pharaohs.png","title":"Palermo Stone List of Pre-Dynastic Pharaohs.png","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"Yfkjgkjgk","cap":"A reversed list of pre-dynastic pharaohs written on the Palermo Stone."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/The_Royal_Annals_of_Egypt.png/1280px-The_Royal_Annals_of_Egypt.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Royal_Annals_of_Egypt.png","title":"The Royal Annals of Egypt.png","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"PLstrom","cap":"Drawing of the Royal Annals of Egypt with its various fragments including the Palermo Stone (P), the London fragment (L) and the Cairo fragments (1-5)."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c.2400 BCE","h":"Date: c.2400 BCE (5th Dyn.)","s":[294]},{"v":"c. 2400 BCE","h":"c.2400 BCE (possibly later copy)","s":[294]},{"v":"Old Egyptian","h":"Language","s":[294]}],"hs":{"294":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Stone"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX020.webp","w":1280,"h":2140,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/240911_CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg/1280px-240911_CvZ-Palermo-stone.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}