Thank you to everyone who watched my talk ‘HOW TO READ EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS (and the Abydos Kinglists)’ which was broadcast on YouTube on 5 September 2024 and is available to channel members (Lapis level) to watch any time here and below. To become a member please go here.

This lecture looks at the kinglists of Abydos. Sety I presided over one of the greatest periods in Egypt’s history but as the son of a commoner, the military general and first king of the line, Ramesses I, he clearly felt a need to assert his legitimacy. He did so in a grand temple at the sacred site of Abydos where he depicted himself and his son and successor, Ramesses II, at the head of a long list of kings’ names going back to beginning of time. This was intended to be the definitive list of the rightful rulers of Egypt, with Sety himself at the end of it. Ramesses followed his father by commissioning a very similar inscription in his own temple a short distance away. The kinglists provide both a fascinating insight into the ancient Egyptians’ sense of their own history, and some of the easiest inscriptions you could hope to read. This talk will examine the kinglists in detail and look at how useful they are in helping us to reconstruct Egyptian history and chronology, and what they tell us about the ancient historians’ own biases. And we’ll learn how to read a few of the names in the hope that anyone visiting the lists – in Abydos or in London – can have a go at reading them in person.

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As usual, I’ve made my slides freely available, here. All images in the presentation are my own unless otherwise stated.

The definitive edition of Manetho’s great history of Egypt, Aegyptiaca. from which we take the concept of ‘Dynasties’ is freely accessible via the LacusCurtis website, here.

The printed volumes of the Topographical Bibliography… / ‘Porter & Moss’ from which my plans of the Abydos temples come can be downloaded in PDF form from the Griffith Institute website here.

The pharaoh.se website is a fantastic source of information on royal names and kinglists including the Abydos lists which are here.

The Abydos kinglist of Ramesses II is now in The British Museum which provides further information via its online catalogue, here. The Karnak kinglist (the ‘Chambre des Ancêtres’) is now in the Louvre, which provides further information, here.

Much of my information on the steps taken by Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion was taken from the relevant chapter in Robinson, Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. The same author has also written excellent books on both the main protagonists in the story of the decipherment:

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young
Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion

If there’s anything I’ve missed or you have further questions please let me know!

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