Manetho

Manetho of Sebennytos in the Nile Delta was an Egyptian priest and historian who flourished in the 3rd century BC^(c). He produced a significant history of Egypt in three volumes, Aegyptiaca^[1373.40], but unfortunately, only fragments have survived^(b).

Manetho’s lists of Egyptian kings continue to be used as one of the pillars of Egyptian chronology. Interestingly, he would seem to claim that the earliest of the kings ruled in a foreign land. This has been taken speculatively by some, such as R. Cedric Leonard, to mean Atlantis^(a).>Leonard has also highlighted errors and corruption in the text of Manetho available to us^(f).<

Stelios Pavlou has also written an interesting paper^(d) on Manetho’s King List and is its relevance to the dating of Atlantis. His forensic study led him to conclude that Plato’s 9,000 years were, in reality, only 3,942 years, placing the time of Atlantis somewhere around 4532 BC.

Also relevant is that Manetho wrote of the ancient Egyptians counting time in months rather than years  – “The year I take, however, to be a lunar one, consisting, that is, of 30 days: what we now call a month the Egyptians used formerly to style a year.”

>A 2020 paper offers an up-to-date review of Manetho studies^(e).<

^(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20170608084749/http://www.atlantisquest.com:80/Hiero.html *

^(b) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/manetho.html

^(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20200202093625/https://www.crystalinks.com/manetho.html

^(d) https://www.researchgate.net/project/Extrapolating-from-Manethos-King-List-to-Address-the-Critias-108e-Problem

^(e) https://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/people/pages/manetho.htm *

^(f) Problems with Manetho’s “Reign of the Gods” (archive.org) *