List of pharaohs


The pharaohs were the rulers of Ancient Egypt from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt 3100 BC, with several times of fragmentation and foreign rule. The specific title of "pharaoh" was not used until the New Kingdom, 1400 BC, but it is retroactively applied to all Egyptian kings; the generic term for monarchs was "nesut". In addition to these titles, pharaohs had a complex royal titulary that remained relatively constant during its 3000-year history, having up to five royal names.
Egypt was continually governed, at least in part, by native pharaohs for approximately 2500 years, until it was conquered by the Kingdom of Kush in the late 8th century BC, whose rulers adopted the pharaonic titulature and became the 25th Dynasty. Following 100 years of Kushite rule, Egypt experienced another century of independent native rule before being conquered by the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The last native pharaoh was Nectanebo II of the short-lived 30th Dynasty, which ended when the Persians conquered Egypt for a second time in 342 BC. The Persians were in turn conquered by the Macedonian Greeks of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, after which Egypt was ruled by the Hellenic pharaohs of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Their rule came to an end with the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, and pharaonic Egypt cesased to be an independent monarchy. However, Roman emperors continued to be accorded pharaonic titles by the Egyptians until the reign of Maximinus Daza in 313 AD.
The dates provided for most of Egypt's early history are only approximate and may vary depending on the author, sometimes by centuries. The names and order of kings is mostly based on the Digital Egypt for Universities database developed by the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. For royal titles and hieroglyphs, see the handbook of Jürgen von Beckerath, as well as the website Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, which itself contains extensive bibliography.
Regnal numbers did not exist in Ancient Egypt and is a modern way to distinguish pharaohs who shared the same personal name.

Ancient Egyptian king lists

Royal lists after the Fifth Dynasty give only the throne name of each pharaoh, which has often led to confusion in identifying particular kings. The most detailed king lists, the Abydos, Saqqara and Turin canons, date to the New Kingdom, also known as the Ramesside period. Unfortunately, most of these Ramesside lists are of little value for the early dynasties, as they feature corrupted names and often disagree with contemporary sources. Complete king lists were certainly made after the 20th dynasty, but they have been lost.
The following king list are known:
Before the decipherment of Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century, Manetho's Aegyptiaca, written in Greek in the early 3rd century BC, was the sole source for all ancient Egyptian history. Manetho, himself an Egyptian priest, recorded the entirety of his country's history from mythological times until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BC. He also created the dynastic framework still used by modern scholars, as well as coining the term "dynasty" itself. The original work is now lost and survives only through later epitomes and quotations, chiefly in the writings of Josephus, Julius Africanus, and Eusebius. These summaries transmit primarily chronological data in the form of regnal lists, though Josephus' quotations show that Manetho originally included detailed narratives, regnal lengths in years and months, and even alternate royal names.
Africanus' epitome, which is preserved by George Syncellus, is generally regarded as the most reliable, while that of Eusebius is considered more problematic, having been derived from an incomplete and already corrupted source. All surviving transmissions suffer from errors, inconsistencies in regnal totals, variant name spellings, and a failure to account for contemporaneous dynasties—whether due to Manetho himself or to later copyists. Josephus, Africanus, and Eusebius all used independent, and sometimes contradictory, versions of the same work, each copy adding a new layer of typos and corruptions.
The content of the Aegyptiaca must be treated with caution. Manetho likely blended historical tradition with mythology, and later Christian authors are known to have altered Manetho's figures, especially for the Second Intermediate Period, to accommodate events into the Biblical narrative. Additional distortion arose from the transmission of Egyptian royal names into Greek and from repeated copying over centuries. Despite these limitations, Manetho remains a foundational source for Egyptian chronology, provided his data are critically evaluated and corroborated with archaeological and contemporary evidence.
Some fragments of Egyptian history are also covered by some Greek historians such a Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.

Number of kings

The Turin King List records 207 kings up to the end of Dynasty XVI. In addition, it preserves 16 damaged names that Kim Ryholt associates with the so-called Abydos Dynasty, totaling 223 kings in the preserved papyrus. The original document, however, likely extended until the reign of Ramesses II, just as the Saqqara and Ramesseum king lists. On this basis, the Turin King List probably listed at least 27 additional rulers: nine of Dynasty XVII, fifteen of Dynasty XVIII, and the first three kings of Dynasty XIX, yielding a minimum total of 250 kings.
The papyrus also contains several lacunae, explicit gaps marked by the Ramesside scribes when names in their sources were illegible. Ryholt estimates that these lacunae represent at least 12 missing kings: six for Dynasty XIII, and at least six for Dynasty XIV. In addition, there is a lacuna in Column 5.15 that very likely corresponds to Manetho's Dynasty VII, consisting of 10 additional kings recorded only in the Abydos King List. There are also two instances of fictitious kings, both in Dynasty IV. Taking this into account, the total rises to at least 227 kings up to the end of Dynasty XVI, 243 up to the end of the Abydos Dynasty, and 270 until Ramesses II. Even these figures likely remain conservative, since a small number of ephemeral or disputed rulers —such as Sneferka or Ba at the end of Dynasty I— were probably omitted altogether.
Including the subsequent periods of native and foreign rule, the total of kings reaches more than 300 before the first Persian conquest, which closely aligns with Herodotus' statement that, following Menes, Egypt was ruled by "three hundred and thirty kings, whose names the priests recited from a papyrus roll".:100 Manetho's own total of kings is roughly 360 kings in 5470 years, but the sum of individual reigns amounts to more than 500 kings in 5370 years. Diodorus Siculus writes that mortal kings have ruled Egypt for "a little less than five thousand years".

Royal names and titulature

The first Egyptian kings were known by their Horus name, with additional Nebty and Golden Horus honorifics. From the late First Dynasty onwards, kings began to use a throne name known in English as the prenomen, which was the main name used during the Fourth Dynasty as well as the royal name found in most king-lists. The next dynasty introduced the nomen, which is often understood as a personal name. This is the name used by scholars after the Fifth Dynasty, as well as the name used by Manetho for most pharaohs. Given the confusing nature of royal names, only kings who are recorded with their two cartouche names can be securely identified. Throne names assigned to pre-Fifth Dynasty pharaohs are sometimes referred to as "personal names" by scholars, as there was probably no distinction between throne and personal names at the time. For a listing and description of all royal names, from Predynastic to Ptolemaic times, see.