Ancient Egyptian Chronology

by Erik Hornung (Editor), Rolf H. Krauss (Editor), David A. Warburton (Editor)

This volume deals with the chronology of Ancient Egypt from the fourth millennium until the Hellenistic Period. An initial section reviews the foundations of Egyptian chronology, both ancient and modern, from annals and kinglists to C14 analyses of archaeological data. Specialists discuss sources, compile lists of known dates, and analyze biographical information in the section devoted to relative chronology. The editors are responsible for the final section which attempts a synthesis of the entire range of available data to arrive at alternative absolute chronologies. The prospective readership includes specialists in Near Eastern and Aegean studies as well as Egyptologists.

Genres: History

528 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2006

About the author

Hornung was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1933 and gained his PH.D. at the University of Tübingen in 1956.
He was Professor of Egyptology at the University of Basel from 1967 to 1998.
His main research field has been funerary literature, the Valley of the Kings in particular.
He published the first edition of the Book of Amduat in three volumes between 1963 and 1967.
J. Gwyn Griffiths described Hornung as the foremost authority in such literature.
His book Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, The One and the Many has become his best-known work, in which he concludes, whilst acknowledging previous work by Henri Frankfort and his "multiplicity of approaches" and John A. Wilson's "complementary" treatment of Egyptian modes of thought, that "Anyone who takes history seriously will not accept a single method as definitive; the same should be true of anyone who takes belief seriously".
Hornung became Vice-President of the Society of the Friends of the Royal Tombs of Egypt in 1988. His books have been published in German, but many have been translated into English.

Reviews

[Mark]

It's rather unfair to give this book a "star rating," since it's both the latest word in Egyptian chronology and very well-put-together and at the same time nearly as dry as dust to read. Some of the contributing authors are better writers than others, but that's really beside the point: the data is pharaoh here. Glad I got it; it'll occupy a prominent place on my shelf, but it's not one I'll be rereading cover-to-cover any time soon, if ever...