The more than 3000 year long history of Ancient Egypt has been divided into 8 or 9 periods, sometimes called Kingdoms. This modern-day division is somewhat arbitrarily based on the country's unity and wealth and the power of the central government. The Ancient Egyptians themselves did not group their rulers according to such criteria. They rather seem to have developed the notion of dynasties throughout their history. The Palermo Stone simply lists the kings one after the other, without any apparent need of grouping them. The Turin Kinglist, which is more recent, has grouped the kings according to their descendance or origin. Thus, Amenemhat I and his descendants, are described as the kings of Itj-Tawi, the capital whence they ruled. We owe the division into 30 dynasties as we use it now to Manetho, the Egyptian priest who lived at the beginning of the Ptolemaic Era. In many cases, however, it is not clear why Manetho has grouped some kings into one dynasty and other kings into another. The 18th Dynasty, for instance, starts with Ahmose, a brother of the last king in Manetho's 17th Dynasty. Theoritically, Ahmose and Kamose should thus have been grouped in the same dynasty. Thutmosis I, on the other hand, does not appear to have been related to his predecessor, Amenhotep I, but still both kings are grouped in the 18th Dynasty.

Palermo Stone is a fragment of diorite or another dark stone containing information from the early dynasties. The largest piece of the stone is now on display at Palermo, hence its name. A second piece is in the Cairo Museum and an even smaller section is in the University College of London.The original is believed to have been approximately 2.2 meters long, 0.61 meters high and 6.5 cm thick. It is inscribed on both sides with a list of kings from Predynastic Egypt to the middle of the 5th Dynasty. From the 4th Dynasty on, the list also contains the foundations and offerings made by the kings. It is thus highly valuable in the study of the foundation of Ancient Egypt.The exact creation date is not known, the earliest possible date being the middle of the 5th Dynasty

The Turin Kinglist, also known as the Turin Royal Canon, is a unique papyrus, written in hieratic, currently in the Egyptian Museum at Turin, to which it owes its modern name. It is broken into over 160 often very small fragments, many of which have been lost. When it was discovered in the Theban necropolis by the Italian traveller Bernardino Drovetti in 1822, it seems to have been largely intact, but by the time it became part of the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, its condition had severely deteriorated. The importance of this papyrus was first recognised by the French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion, who, later followed by Gustavus Seyffarth took up its reconstruction and restoration. Although they succeeded in placing most of the fragments in the correct order, the diligent intervention of these two men came too late and many lacunae to thus important papyrus still remain. Written during the long reign of Ramesses II, the papyrus, now 1.7m long and 0.41m high, comprises on the recto an unknown number of pages that hold a list of names of persons and institutions, along with what appears to be the tax-assessment of each. It is, however, the verso of the papyrus that has attracted the most attention, as it contains a list of gods, demi-gods, spirits, mythical and human kings who ruled Egypt from the beginning of time presumably until the composition of this valuable document. The beginning and ending of the list are now lost, which means that we are missing both the introduction of the list -if ever there was such an introduction- and the enumeration of the kings following the 17th Dynasty. We therefore do not know for certain when after the composition of the tax-list on the recto an unknown scribe used the verso to write down this list of kings. This may have occurred  during the reign of Ramesses II, but a date as late as the 20th Dynasty can not be excluded. The fact that the list was scribbled on the back of an older papyrus may indicate that it was of no great importance to the writer. The Turin Kinglist, on the other hand, does a lot more than simply list some kings: it groups them together and it mentions the duration of their reigns. What’s more, it even takes note of some kings that are omitted from the cultic lists, such as the otherwise quite unpopular Hyksos! Despite the fact that it begins with an enumeration of gods, demi-gods, spirits and mythical that were supposed to have ruled Egypt before the reign of Menes, it was not a cultic list and it does not serve the purpose of showing the current king as the good heir to his "ancestors". The king list of the Turin Kinglist was originally divided over an unknown number of columns or sheets, of which only 11 remain. Columns I to V comprised 25 or 26 lines of text, column VI at least 27 and columns IX and X at least 30. The increasing number of lines as the Canon reaches its end seems to indicate that the scribe realised that he would not have sufficient space on his papyrus to write down all the royal names known to him in 25- or 26-line columns. Most lines give the name of a particular king, written in a cartouche, followed by the number of years he ruled, and in some cases even by the number of months and days. The number of years credited to some kings of the 1st and 2nd Dynasty is so high, that, in those particular cases, they are most likely not correct. It has sometimes been postulated that this high number of years does not reflect the length of a reign but the age at which the king died. Although this possibility can not entirely be overruled, it is strange that the writer should choose to note the age of a king in one case and the length of his reign in another. I would rather suspect that the scribe mistook the year-labels of early kings as representations of different years, whereas it is likely that several labels actually referred to the same year.. For the kings of the first three dynasties, a name is written in a cartouche as well, despite the fact that cartouche-names were not used prior to the rule of the last king of the 3rd Dynasty, Huni. The cartouche-name used for these kings is often similar to the names used for the same kings in the cultic king-lists, but they are quite different from the Horus-name by which they were known officially during their reign. The relationship between the Horus-names of these early kins and the names use din the Turin Kinglist is not certain: for the later 1st Dynasty kings, the name in the kinglists seems to be based on their Nebti-name, but how the earlier kings of the 1st Dynasty and all kings of the 2nd and 3rd Dynasties got their names is not know. The kings are grouped together logically based on the city where they took up residence. These groups do not (entirely) correspond to the dynasties into which the kings were placed by Manetho. This indicates that the notion of dynasties was not present or fully developed before the 19th or 20th Dynasty. Most groups comprise a line of summation that totals the number of years that this particular group has ruled. These summations are sometimes written on 1 line, sometimes divided over 2 lines and sometimes written in 1 line that is so long that it encroaches the next column. In some cases a group is introduced by a heading. The fact that there are far less headings than summations may rather be the result of the fragmentary state of the Canon than an inconsistency on the part of the scribe who wrote or copied the list. Despite its incomplete and fragmentary nature, and despite the fact that the placing of the fragments has been contested from time to time, the Turin Kinglist is one of our most important sources of knowledge about the chronology of Egypt between the 1st and 17th Dynasty.

Manetho, lived in Sebennytos, the capital of Egypt during the 30th Dynasty, and was a priest during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II. He is said to have been involved in the creation of the cult of Serapis - a god added to the Egyptian pantheon with both Hellenistic and Egyptian traits during the reign of Ptolemy I -, but this can not be confirme . He owes his importance to the fact that he wrote the Aegyptiaca, a collection of three books about the history of Ancient Egypt, commissioned by Ptolemy II in his effort to bring together the Egyptian and Hellenistic cultures. In order to do so, Manetho had access to the archives of the temple where he served as a priest. Such archives contained a vast number of different kinds of writings, ranging in contents from mythological texts to official records, from magical formulas to scientific treaties. He thus had all the sources he needed to write down the history of his country. With such sources, however, we may not be surprised to find myths and folk-tale mixed with the facts of the Egyptian history.

A Time Line Of Ancient Egypt History :

The Early Dynastic Period ( 3000 BC - 2575 BC )  The Age of State Formation.

The Old Kingdom ( 2575 BC - 2150 BC ) The Age of the Pyramids.

The First Intermediate Period ( 2150 BC - 2040 BC ) Decline and Civil War.

The Middle Kingdom ( 2040 BC - 1640 BC ) The Classical Era

The Second Intermediate Period ( 1640 BC - 1540 BC ) The Age of Hyksos

The New Kingdom ( 1540 BC - 1070 BC ) The Age Of Empire

The Late Dynastic Period ( 1070 BC - 332 BC ) Decline Of Power

The Greek and Roman Period ( 332 BC - 396 AD ) The Great Temples.