Turin King List
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Turin King List, also known as the Turin Royal Canon, is a hieratic papyrus thought to date from the reign of Ramesses II, now in the Museo Egizio (Egyptian Museum) at Turin.
The papyrus was originally a tax roll, but on its back is written a list of the gods, demi-gods, spirits, and mythical and human kings traditionally thought to have ruled Egypt from the beginning.
The papyrus was found by the Italian traveller Bernardino Drovetti in 1820 at Luxor and was acquired in 1824 by the Egyptian Museum in Turin. When unpacking the box in which it had been transported to Italy, it had disintegrated into small fragments. Jean-Francois Champollion, examining it, could recognize only some of the larger fragments containing royal names, and produced a drawing of what he could decipher. The Saxon researcher Gustav Seyffarth re-examined the fragments, some only 1 square centimeter in size, and made a more complete reconstruction of the papyrus based only on the papyrus fibers, as he could not yet determine the meaning of the hieratic characters. Subsequent work on the fragments was done by the Munich Egyptologist Jens Peter Lauth, which largely confirmed the Seyffarth reconstruction. However, approximately 50% of the reconstructed area remains missing. This papyrus as presently constituted is 1.7 m long and 0.41 m high, broken into over 160 fragments.
The beginning and ending of the list, however, are now lost; there is no introduction, and the list does not continue after the 17th Dynasty. The composition may thus have occurred at any subsequent time, from the reign of Ramesses II to as late as the 20th Dynasty. That the back of an older papyrus was used may indicate that the list was not of great formal importance to the writer.
The papyrus lists the names of rulers, the lengths of reigns in years, and months and days for individual kings. In some cases they are grouped together by family, which approximately corresponds to the dynasties of Manetho’s outline. The list includes the names of ephemeral rulers or those ruling over small territories that may be unmentioned in other sources. The list includes the Hyksos rulers (often left out of other King Lists), although they do not have cartouches, and a hieroglyphic sign is added to indicate that they were foreigners.
In 2009 previously unpublished fragments were discovered in the storage room of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, in good condition [1]. A new edition of the papyrus to be expected.
[edit] Bibliography
- Alan Gardiner, editor. Royal Canon of Turin. Griffith Institute, 1959. (Reprint 1988. ISBN 0-900416-48-3)
- K.S.B Ryholt, The Political Situation in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period. Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications, vol. 20. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997. ISBN 87-7289-421-0.
- George Adam Smith, "Chaldean Account of Genesis" (Whittingham & Wilkins, London, 1872) (Reprint 2005. Adamant Media Corporation, ISBN 1-4021-8590-1) p290 Contains a different translation of the Turin Papyrus in a chart about "dynasty of gods".
[edit] See also
- Palermo stone (An older fragmented king list)
- List of pharaohs
[edit] External links
- Description and Translation of the king list.
- Specialty Interests.
