Turin King List: Did Gods Rule Egypt Before the Pharaohs?

A crumbling papyrus from the age of Ramesses II that lists Egypt's rulers back past the first pharaohs to gods and spirits.

The Turin King List is a papyrus written around 1250 BCE under Ramesses II. It names more than two hundred rulers with reign lengths, and before the first king, Menes, it lists gods ruling Egypt.

The Turin King List, or Turin Royal Canon, is a papyrus written in hieratic script during the reign of Ramesses II, around 1250 BCE. It was written on the back of an old tax register. Bernardino Drovetti acquired it at Egyptian Thebes around 1820, but by the time it reached Turin it had broken into more than 160 fragments, and much is lost. It is kept in the Museo Egizio in Turin.

Unlike temple king lists carved to honor selected ancestors, the Turin papyrus tried to be complete. It named more than two hundred rulers and gave their reign lengths in years, months and days, even for obscure and foreign kings such as the Hyksos. It totals the years between groups, which makes it the backbone of Egyptian chronology for the periods before Ramesses.

Its opening columns are the strangest. Before the first human king, Menes, it lists gods ruling Egypt, including Ptah, Ra, Shu, Geb, Osiris, Seth and Horus, followed by other divine beings and a group often translated as "spirits" and "Followers of Horus," with very long reign totals. The pattern matches what Manetho later reported, and resembles the Sumerian King List.

Scholars such as Alan Gardiner and, more recently, Kim Ryholt have worked to reconstruct the fragments. For lost-civilization readers, it is an official Egyptian document that places a divine dynasty before recorded history. Its surviving numbers for the divine and semi-divine reigns add up to thousands of years. Because so much of the papyrus is missing, even specialists disagree about how to arrange some fragments, and the list remains a puzzle as much as a record.