Posted on 09/15/2006 2:08:29 PM PDT by martin_fierro
rimshot!!
Followed by a groan.
At some time between 300 and 250 B.C. Manetho, an Egyptian priest, wrote a list of 31 Egyptian dynasties of kings. Greece ruled the world at the time, and Manetho wanted to prove that Egypt previously had been a great nation also. So he wrote these king lists.
But certain facts need to be kept in mind:
1 - It is well-known among historians that ancient Egyptian writers frequently exaggerated, or lied outright, when it best served their purposes. They slanted information to magnify the greatness of their rulers and nation. Egyptian stone monuments, for example, gloated over victories and never mentioned defeats.
2 - All we have from Manetho are these king lists. Fortunately, we have two copies of his lists. But having two copies only adds to the problem,for the two lists do not agree with one another! The number of years assigned to each king, and time covered by each dynasty, is different in the two lists. Yet ancient dating is keyed to Manetho's king lists!
3 - The lists seem to deal with two simultaneously reigning sets of kings. (It is well-known that ancient Egypt was divided into "Upper Egypt" and "Lower Egypt.") If one set of rulers were reigning when the other was, this fact alone would divide in half the total length of years in which those early Egyptian kings reigned.
4 - A number of scholars believe that Manetho fabricated names, events, numbers, and history, as did many ancient Egyptian pharoahs and historians, in order to glorify the nation and its rulers.
5 - Manetho, living about 250 B.C., prepared king lists which are unlike anything written earlier. Many of those names we cannot compare with anything! There is no indication they have ever existed. All we have is Manetho's assurance that they were once alive.
6 - How could Manetho prepare such lists, when, to the best of our knowledge, he had so little to base them on? In other words, how could he be assumed to know so much and be so accurate?
7 - *James Breasted, a leading archaeologist in the 1920s, declared that Manetho's lists were ridiculous, did not agree with Egyptian history, and should be discarded.
With such a background, can Manetho be trusted to provide us with the basic keystone chronology that all modern archaeological excavation is based on? Clearly not.
bttt
One would think it would be easy to prove or disprove with DNA
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GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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Hmm, guru meditation error.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://i10.tinypic.com/316uv53.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20090217200120/http://i10.tinypic.com/316uv53.jpg
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