Aegyptiaca (Manetho)

The Aegyptiaca (Koine Greek: Αἰγυπτιακά, Aigyptiaka, "History of Egypt") was a history of ancient Egypt written in Greek by Manetho (fl. 290 – 260 BCE), a high priest of the ancient Egyptian religion, in the early 3rd century BCE at the beginning of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. As an Egyptian intellectual who wrote in Greek about his civilization's very long history—over two thousand years old when he wrote his history—Manetho mediated Egyptian and Greek cultures at the dawn of the Hellenistic period. His Aegyptiaca was a comprehensive history of ancient Egypt and stands as a unique achievement in the corpus of ancient Egyptian literature. It continues to be a vital subject in Egyptology, and an important resource in the refinement of Egyptian chronology.

Manetho's purpose was to instruct the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean about Egypt's deep past. His work provided a clear chronology of Egypt from the first pharaoh of a unified Upper and Lower Egypt, dated by modern historians to 3100 BCE, to just before Alexander's entry into the country following the Siege of Gaza in 332 BCE. Manetho prefaced his human chronology with the "history" of a mythical era of divine rule that linked Egyptian gods with their Greek counterparts, an equivalence already established by Manetho's time.

The complete text of the Aegyptiaca has not survived and is now a lost literary work. Indirect literary fragments of the text do, however, remain. The most substantial of the fragments are regnal lists (usually called "king-lists")

Manetho drew upon official records and priestly and oral traditions as sources. He integrated ahistorical myth and folkloric elements into recorded history and religious texts that treated the subject of divine kingship. His king-lists—some verified by modern scholars, others shown to spurious or inaccurate—provide valuable data that allow Egyptologists to cross-reference names and timelines with written Egyptian records and the archaeological evidence.

The remaining fragments of Aegyptiaca constituted an essential—but indirect and at times uncertain—source for understanding Egypt's distant past for over two millennia, long after the use and knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic disappeared in the fifth century CE.

Until the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century CE, the Greek fragments were one of the few resources available to Egyptologists to access the civilization's own recorded history. Historians, authors, and scholars continue to rely on these fragments even into the modern era.

Manetho's Greek transliteration of Ancient Egyptian divine and pharaonic names challenged later scholars, but ultimately enabled wider popular comprehension. Indeed, numerous names for Egyptian figures in contemporary Egyptological texts trace their origins to Manetho's Greek renditions.

Manetho's organization of the Aegyptiaca into thirty-one dynasties of Ancient Egypt (thirty in some sources) remains a defining structural innovation of his work; indeed he is credited with coining the concept of dynastic succession. Remarkably, his dynastic system continues to serve as the foundation for modern Egyptian chronology.