Manetho

Manetho was an Egyptian priest and historian who wrote in Greek during the early Ptolemaic period, active around 280 BC under Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Ancient notices place him at the temple of Sebennytos in the Nile Delta.

His major work, the Aegyptiaca, arranged the rulers of Egypt into thirty dynasties. That dynastic framework is still the standard division of Egyptian history, though the individual reign lengths recorded under his name are regularly revised against contemporary inscriptions and monuments.

No manuscript of the Aegyptiaca survives. The work is known only through quotation in later writers: Josephus preserved extended passages in Against Apion, and the chronographers Sextus Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George Syncellus transmitted differing versions of the dynastic lists. These witnesses disagree with one another on names, order, and reign lengths, so any figure attributed to Manetho reaches a modern reader through at least one layer of later transmission.

Josephus quotes Manetho at length on the Hyksos, a foreign dynasty that ruled northern Egypt, and argues from those passages that the Hyksos were the ancestors of the Jews. That identification is Josephus’s argument, not a statement of Manetho’s.

Chronologies built on the dynastic totals attributed to Manetho feature in discussions of the date of the Exodus, since Egyptian regnal chronology is one of the anchors used to align Egyptian and biblical history. Confidence: the outline of the dynastic scheme is established; specific reign lengths transmitted under his name are possible at best, given the disagreement among the surviving witnesses.