“The Leading Ones” and “Kings”: What Did Manetho Know About the Political Disintegration of the Second Intermediate Period, and How Did He Express This Knowledge?

Abstract

The paper treats expressions in which Manetho’s narrative about the Hyksos period, known in literal quotation and detailed retelling by Josephus, describes the actors of power in Egypt at different phases of this period. On the eve of Hyksos invasion, according to Manetho, there was one king in Egypt and “the hegemonizing ones” (rulers, leaders) who stand apart from him in the context, and analysis of the text shows that they are the local rulers who performed quasi-independence under the nominal sovereignty of kings of a certain dynasty. In the phase of Hyksos control over all of Egypt, the Hyksos kings of Avaris are depicted as supreme rulers over the “kings of Thebaid” and “[kings] of other Egyptian lands” who are titularly equated with their Hyksos overlords by Manetho; at some point they overthrow the Hyksos yoke and begin the war against Avaris. By the end of this struggle, by Manetho, only the Theban kings are acting on the Egyptian side. This picture largely coincides with real history (the fragmentation of Egypt before the emergence of the Avaris kingdom and at the times of its hegemony; the division of all of Egypt between Avaris kingdom and the Theban kingdom independent of it in the last phase before the fall of Avaris). This reveals Manetho's high awareness of the real situation of the Second Intermediate Period; some primary sources of this awareness were probably inscriptions and literary compositions that directly reflected the interaction between various local rulers contemporaneous to each other.