{"it":{"id":"TX021","kind":"text","sub":"Egyptian","name":"Turin King List (Royal Canon of Turin)","place":"Turin","date":"Ramesses II era c.1250 BCE","oldest":"c.1250 BCE","inst":"Museo Egizio, Turin, Cat. 1874 (papyrus) [institution number unverified this session]","lang":"Hieratic","src":[219,574],"lat":45.068,"lon":7.684,"tags":["Egypt","Egypt"],"sum":"The Turin King List, on the back of a tax register, lists over 200 kings, and before them gods, demigods and spirits ruling for thousands of years.","why":"It is the only surviving Egyptian king list that gives reign lengths, and it starts with gods.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Sum the god-reigns.","rel":["TX022","TX001"],"hook":"An Egyptian scribe added up the first seven dynasties: 955 years, 0 months and 15 days."},"S":{"219":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_King_List"],"574":["Museo Egizio, Turin: Turin King List / Royal Canon, Cat. 1874","https://collezioni.museoegizio.it/en-GB/material/Cat_1874/"]},"rec":{"id":"TX021","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA124","a":"Actual era of god-kings (Zep Tepi).","who":"Hancock; Bauval","main":"Ramesside theological chronology; fragmentary (Drovetti damage 1820s).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_King_List","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Ramesside theological chronology; fragmentary (Drovetti damage 1820s).","alternative_reading":"Actual era of god-kings (Zep Tepi).","alt_proponent":"Hancock; Bauval","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Totals for gods' reigns are mostly lost/uncertain in the fragments.","key_theme":"gods, demigods and 'spirits' rule before Menes with long reigns","language":"Hieratic","physical_object_institution":"Museo Egizio, Turin, Cat. 1874 (papyrus) [institution number unverified this session]","composition_date":"Ramesses II era c.1250 BCE","oldest_ms_date":"c.1250 BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0626","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_King_List"},{"id":"S2575","t":"Museo Egizio, Turin: Turin King List / Royal Canon, Cat. 1874","u":"https://collezioni.museoegizio.it/en-GB/material/Cat_1874/"},{"id":"VTX021-3","t":"Collection online - Turin King List/Royal Canon","u":"https://collezioni.museoegizio.it/en-GB/material/Cat_1874"}],"sum":"# The Turin King List: When Gods Sat on Egypt's Throne\n\nSome time in the thirteenth century BCE, a scribe in Egypt picked up a used papyrus roll. One side carried an old tax register, out of date and no longer needed. He turned it over and, on the blank back, began to write in hieratic, the fast cursive script of Egyptian officials, a list of everyone who had ever ruled the land. He did not begin with a human being. The first names in his columns were gods.\n\nThat roll is now called the Turin King List, or the Royal Canon of Turin. It is the most extensive list of kings the Egyptians themselves compiled that has come down to us, and the only one that gives the length of each reign. Almost everything we think we know about the order of Egypt's kings before Ramesses II depends on it. And it opens in an age before history, when, by its account, the throne of Egypt belonged to gods, demigods and spirits.\n\n## A list written on scrap paper\n\nThe papyrus is in the Museo Egizio in Turin as Cat. 1874, displayed in the museum's writing gallery. In its current state it measures about 1.7 to 1.8 metres long and just over 40 centimetres high. The museum dates it to the reign of Ramesses II, 1279 to 1213 BCE, and suggests it may come from Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders across the river from Thebes, though the place is marked with a question mark.\n\nThe list itself may have been copied slightly later, in the Nineteenth or even the Twentieth Dynasty. Scholars describe it as a careless copy of a far more detailed original, which was itself based on much older sources. Only the kings of the first two dynasties are given both their reign lengths and their ages at death, a hint of how much detail the lost master copy once held.\n\nThe choice of writing material says something. A royal monument would be carved in stone. This was jotted on scrap. That has led many Egyptologists to see the list as a working document, an administrator's aid rather than a piece of state propaganda. If so, it may be less biased than the great carved lists in temples, and more likely to include every king its writers knew about, even obscure and short-lived ones. It even names the Hyksos, the foreign kings who ruled the Delta in the Second Intermediate Period, marked with a sign for foreigners instead of the usual royal cartouche.\n\n## Broken in a box\n\nWhat makes the list so frustrating is how it reached us. The Italian traveller and collector Bernardino Drovetti bought it in Thebes around 1818. Nobody recorded where it had been found. It travelled by sea to Genoa and then overland to Turin, arriving in 1824. When the box was opened, the papyrus had crumbled into small pieces. The French decipherer Jean-François Champollion could recognise only the larger fragments with royal names on them.\n\nThe Saxon scholar Gustav Seyffarth then did something remarkable. Unable to read hieratic properly, he reassembled the fragments, some only a square centimetre in size, by matching the fibres of the papyrus. Later scholars refined his work: Giulio Farina, director of the Turin museum, in 1938; Alan Gardiner in 1959; and Kim Ryholt, whose reconstruction of 1997 is now the standard. In 2009 previously unpublished fragments were found in the museum's storerooms. Even so, about half the papyrus is still missing, and what survives is broken into more than 160 pieces. The beginning and the end are both lost.\n\n## The ages before kings\n\nIn the reconstruction the list runs to eleven columns. The first two, and the top of the third, belong to beings who are not human.\n\nColumn one is a list of gods. Several of their names survive: Ra, Geb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth, Maat. Each is written as a king, with the royal title \"King of Upper and Lower Egypt\" in front of the name, and each once had a reign length beside it. Column two continues with more divine and semi-divine rulers, some with names that sound like titles from a forgotten court: \"He who endures,\" \"Does not thirst,\" \"Possessor of noble women,\" \"Protector of noble women.\" The Apis bull appears, and Sokar, a god of the Memphite necropolis. Near the top of column three come the spirits, the last of the ages before human rule.\n\nOnly then, in the tenth row of column three, comes Meni, the king later tradition called Menes, the first human pharaoh, the unifier of the Two Lands. After him follow the familiar names of the First Dynasty and on through the Second and beyond. Djoser, builder of the Step Pyramid, is the only king in the list whose royal title is written in red ink.\n\nThe god reigns are where the list becomes most tantalising, because their totals are mostly lost or uncertain in the surviving fragments. The scribe clearly thought in sums. Partway through, he stopped to total what he had written for the kings of the first seven dynasties: 955 years, 0 months and 15 days, as Ryholt reads it. That is the language of an accountant. The same hand, presumably working from the same kind of sources, gave the gods and spirits before Menes reigns of their own, in the same format, as if they were a continuous part of the same record.\n\n## Theology or memory?\n\nThe mainstream view is that the opening columns are theology, not history. Egyptian kingship was believed to have begun with the gods, and every pharaoh ruled as their heir. To list Ra and Osiris and Horus as the first kings was to state where royal authority came from. The scholar Donald Redford has also noted that the human part of the list is imperfect: many names match monuments, but some do not, and the scribes inserted the word \"Hudjefa,\" meaning roughly \"missing,\" wherever their source was damaged. The Turin papyrus also lists two kings in the Fourth Dynasty who appear to be fictitious. It is a precious source, but not an infallible one.\n\nOthers draw a different conclusion from the same evidence. Writers such as Robert Bauval have argued that the Egyptians' \"First Time,\" Zep Tepi, the age when the gods ruled on earth, preserves a genuine memory of a period before the pharaohs, ruled by beings later remembered as gods. The list cannot prove that. It does show that, in the thirteenth century BCE, a working scribe making a practical document saw no break in kind between the reigns of the gods and the reigns of men. He put them in the same columns, under the same titles, measured in the same years.\n\nThe later Egyptian priest Manetho, writing in Greek a thousand years after Ramesses II, would tell the same story: gods, then demigods, then spirits of the dead, then human dynasties. Two Egyptian sources, separated by a millennium, give the same order of events. The Turin papyrus is the older of them, and the closer to the sources behind them.\n\nIf this was only theology, why did the scribe give the gods reign lengths in years, months and days, like any other king, and what was written in the lost first lines of the roll that would have told us where the counting began?","qs":["The Turin list puts gods and spirits on Egypt's throne before human kings. Myth, theology or a memory of a lost age?","A scribe totalled reigns to the day, yet wrote on the back of old tax paper. How official was this list?","Much of the papyrus was lost in transport. How much should we build on a reconstruction of fragments?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Il_cosiddetto_%27Papiro_dei_Re_o_Liste_dei_Re%27_2_C1874vs_3.tif/lossy-page1-1280px-Il_cosiddetto_%27Papiro_dei_Re_o_Liste_dei_Re%27_2_C1874vs_3.tif.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Il_cosiddetto_%27Papiro_dei_Re_o_Liste_dei_Re%27_2_C1874vs_3.tif","title":"Il cosiddetto 'Papiro dei Re o Liste dei Re' 2 C1874vs 3.tif","lic":"CC0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en","by":"Unknown","cap":"","alt":"Turin King List (Royal Canon of Turin): Il cosiddetto 'Papiro dei Re o Liste dei Re' 2 C1874vs 3"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/TurinKingList-table.png/1280px-TurinKingList-table.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TurinKingList-table.png","title":"TurinKingList-table.png","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"BJegorovic","cap":"Representations of rows from Turin King List based on latest suggestions and corrections for positions of some fragments."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/TurinPapyrus1904.png/1280px-TurinPapyrus1904.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TurinPapyrus1904.png","title":"TurinPapyrus1904.png","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"PLstrom","cap":"The Turin Papyrus composite and colored from plates 2-5 o the 1904 book \"Aegyptische Chronologie\" by Eduard Meyer."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c.1250 BCE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[295]},{"v":"Hieratic","h":"Language","s":[295]}],"hs":{"295":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_King_List"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX021.webp","w":1280,"h":754,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Il_cosiddetto_%27Papiro_dei_Re_o_Liste_dei_Re%27_2_C1874vs_3.tif/lossy-page1-1280px-Il_cosiddetto_%27Papiro_dei_Re_o_Liste_dei_Re%27_2_C1874vs_3.tif.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}