THE PALERMO STONE

THE PALERMO STONE

The term ‘king-list’ is used by Egyptologists to refer to a number of ancient Egyptian lists of the names and titles of rulers, some of which also incorporate information concerning the length and principal events of individual reigns. Virtually all of the surviving examples derive from religious or funerary contexts and usually relate to the celebration of the cult of royal ancestors, whereby each king established his own legitimacy and place in the succession by making regular offerings to a list of the names of his predecessors. The king-lists have survived in various forms, mostly dating to the New Kingdom, but the earliest is the so-called Palermo Stone, a large fragment of a basalt stele in the Palermo Archaeological Museum, Sicily, which dates to the 5th Dynasty (c.2494–2345).
The Palermo Stone is inscribed on both sides with hieroglyphic texts describing the reigns of the kings of the ﬁrst ﬁve dynasties, as well as the preceding era of mythological rulers.

The original stele is estimated to have been about 2.1 m long and 0.6 m wide, and four smaller fragments of it have survived (now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and the Petrie Museum, University College London). We have no information about its original ﬁndspot, since the main fragment appeared on the antiquities market in 1866, but without provenance. The text comprises the annals of the kings of Lower Egypt. It begins with many thousands of years taken up by mythological rulers up to the time of Horus who is then said to have given the throne to Menes. His successors are listed up to the 5th Dynasty. The text is divided into a series of horizontal registers divided up by vertical lines, incurved at the top, to represent the hieroglyph for regnal year (renpet). Into each compartment was written memorable events for that year and the height of the inundation. The events recorded were mostly religious festivals, wars, and the creation of particular statues. The name of the ruler concerned is written above the relevant block of compartments. It is frustrating to know that a record detailing every ruler up until the end of Dynasty 5, along with the lengths of their reigns, once existed but that only fragments of it are within our grasp. Another tantalizing surviving fragment is the ‘Mitrahina day-book’, which is a reused Old Kingdom relief block inscribed with the earliest known example of Middle Kingdom royal annals. This section of annals from the reign of the 12th-Dynasty pharaoh Amenemhat II was itself later reused in the New Kingdom temple of Ptah, near the modern village of Mitrahina, which occupies part of the site of the ancient capital city of Memphis. Unlike the Palermo Stone, which simply summarizes events (many of them probably rituals) for each year of the various kings’ reigns, the Mitrahina inscription provides quite detailed information for parts of two years of Amenemhat II’s reign.