The king lists
A thread · Egyptian and Mesopotamian king lists
Egypt does have king lists with reigns in the thousands of years, but the long reigns belong to gods and spirits, the best-known total comes from a later compilation, and the numbers change when the unit does.
- Palermo Stone
- c. 2450 BCE
- Turin Canon
- c. 1245 BCE
- Manetho
- c. 290 to 260 BCE
- Type of connection
- unresolved
- Open questions
- 3 logged
Is there an Egyptian list of kings who ruled for thousands of years?
Yes, in two places, and both need care. The Turin Canon, a papyrus from the time of Ramesses II, opens with gods, spirits and mythical kings before it reaches the first human king. Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek in the third century BCE, did the same, and his work survives only in quotations that disagree with each other. The long reigns belong to that divine part. In the Turin Canon the human kings get reigns in years, with months and days for some. The Abydos list has no divine part at all.
An older document, the Palermo Stone, names predynastic rulers at the top of its annals. I found no reign lengths for them in the summary I read.
The lists side by side
| List | Date | What it covers | The long numbers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palermo Stone | Probably Fifth Dynasty, c. 2450 BCE | Annals from the First to the early Fifth Dynasty. The top register names predynastic rulers by Horus name, at least fourteen, five of them lost | None that I read |
| Turin Canon | c. 1245 BCE, reign of Ramesses II, possibly later | Gods, spirits and mythical kings, then human kings. About half the papyrus is lost | A divine section whose summary line is read as 36,620 years |
| Abydos King List | Reign of Seti I | 76 names from Menes. It omits rulers seen as regional or illegitimate | None. It starts with Menes |
| Manetho, Aegyptiaca | 3rd century BCE, in Greek | Gods, demigods and spirits, then thirty dynasties. Survives only in later quotations | Thousands of years, with totals that differ between the authors who quote it |
| The “Ancient Chronicle”, quoted by Syncellus | A compilation separate from Manetho | Gods and demigods, then thirty dynasties | 36,525 years in all, per Syncellus |
| Sumerian King List (for comparison) | Ur III copies under Shulgi; best-preserved copy from Isin | Eight kings in five cities before the flood, then the post-flood dynasties | 241,200 years for the eight |
| Berossus, Babyloniaca (for comparison) | c. 290 to 278 BCE, in Greek | Ten kings before the flood | 432,000 years, per Eusebius citing Apollodorus |
The first five rows are Egyptian; the last two are Mesopotamian, shown for comparison. Dates and contents as given on Wikipedia and the pages listed under Sources, which are secondary.
What the Turin Canon is
A hieratic papyrus about 1.7 metres long, in more than 160 fragments, bought from Bernardino Drovetti by the Turin museum in 1824. It has eleven columns. Wikipedia says about half is missing; another source says two thirds, so the sources differ. Columns one and two cover gods, spirits and mythical kings, and the human kings follow, beginning with the First Dynasty.
It was written on the back of a discarded tax register.
That detail matters. Wikipedia says the list is thought to have been an administrative aid and suggests it may not have been of great formal importance to its writer. This is not a temple wall, and not a sacred record. The summary line of the divine section has been read as 36,620 years, in nineteenth-century readings by Wilkinson, Bunsen and Meyer as quoted on Wikipedia's article on dating creation. I have not seen a transcription, and the papyrus is fragmentary.
What Manetho's numbers do when you look closely
Manetho's original is lost. The bulk of it survives in Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius and Syncellus. In the Loeb translation of the fragments, the Armenian Eusebius gives figures such as 13,900 and 1,255 years for the earliest reigns. A fragment in Syncellus gives Hephaistos 727¾ years and Helios 80⅙. The translation notes that these are converted from 9,000 lunar years for Hephaistos. Another passage quotes Panodorus: 11,985 lunar years, or 969 solar years.
So whether a divine reign is “thousands of years” or “centuries” depends on the unit the chronographer chose. The people who preserved the numbers were also arguing with them. Eusebius calls the Egyptian accounts “foolish myths”, and Syncellus calls the lunar reckoning “a ludicrous falsehood”. The best-known total, 36,525 years, comes from the Ancient Chronicle that Syncellus quotes. The site pharaoh.se calls that chronicle a forgery partly based on Manetho, and notes that its parts actually add up to 36,531. Wikipedia says many scholars treat the related Book of Sothis as Pseudo-Manetho. I did not read the Greek.
The Mesopotamian parallel, and the number 43,200
The Sumerian King List is in the Library. In the Oxford translation, eight kings rule in five cities for 241,200 years: Alulim 28,800, Alaljar 36,000, En-men-lu-ana 43,200, and so on, and then “the flood swept over”. Most scholars read the list as political legitimation, not history, and Wikipedia says recent scholarship treats the earliest rulers as fictional, since only seven are attested in Early Dynastic inscriptions. The flood is the dividing line: after it the reigns drop to the hundreds, then to ordinary lengths.
Berossus, a Babylonian priest, gave ten kings and 432,000 years before the flood, according to Eusebius citing Apollodorus. That is exactly ten times 43,200, and 43,200 is En-men-lu-ana's reign in the Sumerian list. The Egyptian lists I read do not use either number.
I flag this because 43,200 also appears in the Giza dossier, as the multiplier in a claim about the Great Pyramid and the Earth. I found nothing that connects the two. The pyramid's number is a scale factor chosen to fit a planet, and the list's is a scribe's count of years. The same digits are not a link.
Two priests, one generation
Berossus wrote the Babyloniaca around 290 to 278 BCE under Antiochus I. Manetho wrote the Aegyptiaca under Ptolemy I or II, between 285 and 246 BCE. Both were native priests writing a national history in Greek for the kings of the successor kingdoms, and both began with an enormous prehistory. Both also inherited older material: the Turin Canon predates Manetho by roughly a thousand years, and Berossus probably used Babylonian king lists.
What if the scale of these prehistories was partly a conversation? Two priests in the same generation, writing in the language of their new rulers, each giving their land a past that no Greek chronology could match.
I am speculating about why the numbers are so large, not about whether anyone in the lists existed. Why it is worth asking: because the same genre, in the same generation, in the same language, is a striking coincidence. What supports it: the dates overlap and both men wrote for Hellenistic courts. What speaks against it: the long prehistory is older than either of them. The Turin Canon already has its gods about a thousand years before Manetho, and the Sumerian list has its kings and flood about as long before Berossus. Competition could explain the size of the numbers, not the existence of the idea. Berossus's total is also about 1.8 times the Sumerian list's, by my arithmetic, so it is either a different source or an enlarged one. What would tell the readings apart: comparing the numbers in each priest's work with the oldest manuscripts available to him, and checking whether the totals grew between the earlier and later versions. What stays unknown: whether either man knew the other's work.
What is still open
What does the missing part of the Turin papyrus say?
Over 160 fragments, and half or two thirds of the text lost. Kim Ryholt's 1997 reinterpretation underlies the modern reconstruction of the human kings. A new physical reconstruction was done in the summer of 2022, and as of February 2024 no publication of it had been announced, according to pharaoh.se. The divine section is the least secure part. I have not seen a transcription, so I cannot say how much of the 36,620 total is read and how much is restored.
What did Manetho's original actually contain?
It is reconstructed from Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius and Syncellus, who disagree on numbers, and from a work, the Book of Sothis, that modern scholars say he did not write. The dynasty scheme survives and is the backbone of Egyptian chronology. The divine section is much less certain.
Are the Egyptian and Mesopotamian “kings before the kings” related?
Both traditions put divine or superhuman rulers before human ones, and both are huge in time. In this research I found no source that argues for direct borrowing, and the lists differ in kind: Egypt's long reigns belong to gods and spirits, Mesopotamia's to named human kings before a flood. Convergence, a shared older source and contact are all possible, and I have no evidence that settles it.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Turin King List (date, state of the papyrus, tax-register reverse, editions), Abydos King List, Palermo Stone, Manetho, Berossus, Sumerian King List, and Dating creation for the 36,620-year summary line. Encyclopedia pages, secondary sources.
- Manetho, The Fragments, Loeb Classical Library, 1940, on Bill Thayer's LacusCurtius site, which states the text is in the public domain. Read through a text-fetching tool, in part; I did not check the translator's name.
- pharaoh.se, the Syncellus list (the Ancient Chronicle and its totals) and the Turin Canon page, which has headings only. A specialist hobby site, not a peer-reviewed source.
- Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, The Sumerian King List, for the pre-flood reigns and totals.
- Gardiner, A., The Royal Canon of Turin (Griffith Institute; Wikipedia gives 1957), Farina, G., 1938, and Ryholt, K., 1997, on the Turin papyrus. Cited through Wikipedia; I have not read them.
A thread, not a place. Page opened and last reviewed 14 October 2026. Written from secondary sources and one public-domain translation, and I have not read the papyri or the Greek. If something here is wrong, tell me and it gets corrected on the page with a note saying what changed.