One might assume the division into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is itself very ancient, perhaps going back thousands of years to Greek sources like the third-century BC Aegyptiaca, composed by Egyptian chronicler Manetho, or even to the hieroglyphic records themselves. Not so. In fact, the tripartite division only began to be proposed by modern Egyptologists in the late nineteenth century, and the terms they introduced (initially ‘Reich’ or ‘empire’, later ‘kingdom’) were explicitly modelled on European nation states. German, particularly Prussian, scholars played a leading role here. Their
...more
