THE TURIN PAPYRUS

THE TURIN PAPYRUS

The Turin Papyrus (also known as the Turin Royal Canon) was a simple list of rulers compiled in the reign of the 19th-Dynasty ruler Ramesses II (1290–1224), giving the precise duration of each reign, and occasionally a summary of the number of years that had elapsed since the time of Menes, whom the Egyptians seem to have regarded as the ﬁrst ruler of the pharaonic period. This hieratic papyrus, now in the Museo Egizio, Turin, was removed from Egypt by Bernardino Drovetti. It was then almost complete, but it suffered badly before entering the Turin collection and, like other king-lists, is now incomplete. The work of such mid-19th-century Egyptologists as Jean Francois Champollion and Gustavus Seyffarth led to the numerous fragments being placed in the correct order, although many lacunae still remain.

Originally it must have contained around 300 names, even including the Asiatic ‘Hyksos’ rulers of the Second Intermediate Period (although with a sign to indicate that they were foreigners, and no royal cartouche shape around the names), and ending with Ramesses II. Like the Palermo Stone, the list attempted to go back beyond the reigns of known kings and to assign reign lengths to the unnamed spirits and gods who had supposedly ruled before the coming of the ﬁrst pharaoh. The severe damage done to this extremely signiﬁcant document is another great tragedy.
The ﬁve principal monumental king-lists also date to the early 19th Dynasty: these are the two Abydos King-lists (found in the Abydos temples of Seti I and Ramesses II respectively, the latter now in the British Museum), the Karnak King-list (now in the Louvre), the Saqqara Tablet, which derives from the tomb of Thuneroy, a high ofﬁcial of Ramesses II (now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo), and a scene in the tomb of the priest Amenmes at Thebes (TT373, c.1300 bc), showing him venerating the statues of 13 previous rulers. There are also a few much briefer king-lists, such as a grafﬁto at the mining and quarrying site of Wadi Hammamat, dated palaeographically to the 12th Dynasty (1991–1783), which consists of the names of ﬁve 4th-Dynasty rulers and princes. A seal impression discovered by German archaeologists at Umm el-Qa’ab in 1985 is one of the shortest surviving king-lists, but it shows just how useful texts of this kind can be. It lists six rulers in the following order: Narmer, Aha, Djer, Djet, Den, and Merneith, thus providing another crucial piece of evidence that the king depicted on the Narmer Palette was probably the earliest in the sequence of 1st Dynasty rulers.