Manetho: Why Did Egypt's First Historian Begin With Gods?

Manetho was an Egyptian priest who wrote the Aegyptiaca, a history of Egypt in Greek, around 280 BCE. His 30 dynasties are still used today, and his history begins with reigns of gods and demigods.

Manetho was an Egyptian priest from Sebennytos in the Nile Delta, active in the early 3rd century BCE under the first Ptolemies. He wrote the Aegyptiaca, a history of Egypt in Greek, apparently drawn from temple records. His division of Egypt's kings into thirty dynasties is still the framework Egyptologists use today.

His book is lost. What survives are quotations and summaries in later writers: Josephus in the 1st century CE, and the Christian chronographers Julius Africanus and Eusebius, known largely through the Byzantine monk George Syncellus. The versions disagree with each other, and numbers vary from copy to copy. Scholars reconstruct his lists by comparing these versions.

Before the human kings, Manetho's history begins with ages of gods, then demigods, then "spirits of the dead," ruling Egypt for immense spans of time. The totals run to many thousands of years before Menes, the first human king. The same pattern appears in the Turin King List, compiled a thousand years earlier, and in the Sumerian King List's long reigns before the Flood.

Manetho also wrote about the Hyksos, the foreign rulers of the north, and about religion and festivals. For readers of lost-civilization ideas, his god-kings are the key passage: an Egyptian priest, drawing on temple archives, placed divine and semi-divine rulers at the start of history. He was writing, in part, to correct Greek writers like Herodotus.