The Turin King List
Although a list of Egyptian kings was recorded by Manetho, a historian writing in Greek in the 3rd century BCE, the most comprehensive and reliable such document, which dates from the reign of Ramesses II (12th century BCE) was purchased by Bernadino Drovetti, an Italian adventurer of the early 19th century. The papyrus scroll was then almost perfectly preserved, but after Drovetti threw it into a box and took it back toEurope,where he sold it the king od Sardinia, it was nothing but a pile of jumbled fragments.
Purpose and Importance of Egyptian Kinglists
The ancient Egyptians kept lists of their kings for two main reasons. One was to honour the royal ancestors in temples, by listing and repeating their names so they could share in the offerings made to the gods every day and their souls endure forever. The other, more pragmatic one, was that the Egyptians reckoned years not in a continuous dating system like ours, but by the years of the reigns of their kings. These records were important for record keeping and especially for locating legal documents pertaining to property and inheritance which were an object of constant litigation in a country with limited agricultural land and large families.
For modern scholarship, these ancient lists provide an indespensible framework in which to place texts and archaeological remains and relate them to our own system of dating. Without them, there would be no possibility of constructing a “history’ of ancient Egypt in the modern sense.
Scholarship and the Kinglist Papyrus
Since its arrival in Europe and incorporation into the Egyptian Museum in Turin, the Turin Kinglist has been exhaustively studied by Egyptologists. Although almost all of the kings listed have been verified in other ancient sources, scholars have been continually frustrated by the fragmentary condition of the documents, constantly disagreeing on how much was missing and how to put the pieces together. It was not until 1938 that Guilio Farina succeeded in making a definitive restoration of the document which was then preserved between two pieces of glass, although there was still some disagreement about his reconstruction.
Enter British Scholarship
Last year, when the British Museum offered to make available advanced new techniques for conserving papyri to the Turin Museum, they offered the services of Egyptologist Richard Parkinson and conservator Bridget Leach. A surprise awaited these two specialists when they arrived in Turin. According to La Stampa, as Parkinson examined the King List, he noted that a number of unplaced fragments noted by the great British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner, where missing. Turin Museum staff went on a search and finally located them in a forgotten store cupboard.
A revamped list of kings?
With permission of the Italian government, the Turin Kinglist will travel to British Museum in London, where it will be subjected to advanced techniques that examine not only its content but the state and content of the document itself before being conserved in a way that ensures its more permanent preservation. The incorporation of the unplaced fragments and an overall rearrangement promise to usher in a whole new era in our understanding of Egyptian history and chronology.
Further Reading:
Vittorio Sabadin “I faraoni scomparsi nel buco:Trovati nei sotterranei dell'Egizio di Torino i frammenti mancanti del "Papiro Reale": sovrani sconosciuti e una storia da riscrivere” La Stampa, 19th February, 2009, http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/arte/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=62&ID_articolo=1164&ID_sezione=117&sezione=News [go to translate this page]
Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 47-8
--.The Royal Canon of Turin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1959)
Robyn Gillam - Robyn Gillam has worked as a freelance writer since 1989 in the areas of cultural studies, cultural politics, Canadian Literature and ...
