Historical background

Mummification (the artificial preservation of the body after death) may have been practised in Egypt for more than 4,000 years, and perhaps developed as early as c. 4500 b.c., when Neolithic communities lived in scattered settlements in the Egyptian Delta and along the banks of the Nile. Gradually, these villages merged into larger groups, drawn together by the common need to develop irrigation systems, and eventually, the north and south were ruled as two separate kingdoms. Egyptologists describe this whole era (c. 5000 b.c.–3100 b.c.) as the Predynastic Period.

In c. 3100 b.c., a southern ruler conquered the northern kingdom, unified the two lands, and founded dynastic Egypt. Thousands of years later, an Egyptian priest, Manetho (323–245 b.c.), composed a chronicle of kings who ruled Egypt between c. 3100 b.c. and 332 b.c., and this king-list has survived in the writings of later historians. It divides the reigns of Egyptian kings into thirty dynasties and these, plus a thirty-first dynasty added by a later chronographer, form the basis for the modern chronology of ancient Egypt.

Contemporary historians arrange these dynasties into a series of major periods: the Archaic Period (c. 3100–c. 2686 b.c.), the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–c. 2181 b.c.), the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–1991 b.c.), the Middle Kingdom (1991–1786 b.c.), the Second Intermediate Period (1786–1567 b.c.), the New Kingdom (1567–1085 b.c.), the Third Intermediate Period (1085–668 b.c.), and the Late Period (664–332 b.c.).