In the study of both Egyptian and Babylonian chronology there has been a tendency of late years to reduce the very early dates that were formerly in fashion.  But in Egypt, while the dynasties of Manetho have been telescoped in places, excavation has thrown light on predynastic periods, and we can now trace the history of culture in the Nile Valley back, through an unbroken sequence, to its neolithic stage.  Quite recently, too, as I mentioned just now, a fresh literary record of these early predynastic periods has been recovered, on a fragment of the famous Palermo Stele, our most valuable monument for early Egyptian history and chronology.  Egypt presents a striking contrast to Babylonia in the comparatively small number of written records which have survived for the reconstruction of her history.  We might well spare much of her religious literature, enshrined in endless temple-inscriptions and papyri, if we could but exchange it for some of the royal annals of Egyptian Pharaohs.  That historical records of this character were compiled by the Egyptian scribes, and that they were as detailed and precise in their information as those we have recovered from Assyrian sources, is clear from the few extracts from the annals of Thothmes III’s wars which are engraved on the walls of the temple at Karnak.(1) As in Babylonia and Assyria, such records must have formed the foundation on which summaries of chronicles of past Egyptian history were based.  In the Palermo Stele it is recognized that we possess a primitive chronicle of this character.

     (1) See Breasted, Ancient Records, I, p. 4, II, pp. 163
     ff.

Drawn up as early as the Vth Dynasty, its historical summary proves that from the beginning of the dynastic age onward a yearly record was kept of the most important achievements of the reigning Pharaoh.  In this fragmentary but invaluable epitome, recording in outline much of the history of the Old Kingdom,(1) some interesting parallels have long been noted with Babylonian usage.  The early system of time-reckoning, for example, was the same in both countries, each year being given an official title from the chief event that occurred in it.  And although in Babylonia we are still without material for tracing the process by which this cumbrous method gave place to that of reckoning by regnal years, the Palermo Stele demonstrates the way in which the latter system was evolved in Egypt.  For the events from which the year was named came gradually to be confined to the fiscal “numberings” of cattle and land.  And when these, which at first had taken place at comparatively long intervals, had become annual events, the numbered sequence of their occurrence corresponded precisely to the years of the king’s reign.  On the stele, during the dynastic period, each regnal year is allotted its own space or rectangle,(2) arranged in horizontal sequence below the name and titles of the ruling king.

(1) Op. cit., I, pp. 57 ff.