Palermo Stone: Ancient Egypt's Earliest Royal Annals

The Palermo Stone is a fragment of a black stone slab carved with the royal annals of ancient Egypt, probably in the Fifth Dynasty around 2450 BC. It records, year by year, the kings of Egypt from the earliest dynasties onward, with notes on festivals, building works, expeditions and the height of the Nile flood. Named after the Sicilian city where its largest piece is kept, it is one of the most important sources for the chronology of Egypt’s early history.

Discovery and the fragments

The main fragment surfaced on the antiquities market in the 19th century; its exact find-spot in Egypt is unknown. It reached Palermo and was presented to the city’s museum, today the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas, in 1877. The piece is roughly 43 centimetres high and 25 centimetres wide, only a small part of the original monument.

Further fragments with the same kind of text appeared in the early 20th century. Five are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and a small piece is in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. Scholars refer to them together as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom. Whether they belonged to a single slab or to several copies is not settled.

Estimates based on the spacing of the surviving entries suggest the complete slab was more than 2 metres long. It may have stood in a temple, possibly at Memphis or Heliopolis, but this remains conjecture.

How the annals are arranged

The inscription runs in horizontal bands on both faces. The top band lists names of rulers before the First Dynasty, shown wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt; whether these were real kings or a legendary tradition is uncertain.

Below, each year of a king’s reign has its own compartment, separated by the hieroglyph for “year”, a notched palm rib. Each compartment names the main events of that year, such as a royal festival or the “appearance of the king”. Under each compartment a short note gives the height reached by the Nile flood, measured in cubits, palms and fingers.

The years are often named after events, especially the regular “count” of cattle and other property, which seems to have been held every two years under some kings. This practice later became the basis of Egyptian dating, which explains why the annals mattered to scribes.

The flood records are especially valuable. The annual rise of the Nile decided how much land could be farmed and taxed, so a low flood meant hunger and a high one could wash away villages. By noting each year’s level, the annals preserve one of the earliest known series of recorded environmental measurements, although modern scholars disagree on exactly how the figures should be read.

What the stone records

The surviving entries cover kings of the First to the Fifth Dynasty, with the latest identifiable king being Neferirkare Kakai. Entries for the Fourth Dynasty king Sneferu are among the best known: they record the arrival of forty ships loaded with conifer wood, often translated as cedar, from abroad, and a raid into Nubia said to have brought back 7,000 captives and 200,000 head of cattle. Such figures are royal claims and may be exaggerated.

Fifth Dynasty entries list gifts of land and offerings to gods and to the new sun temples. Together the records show a state that measured time by its kings, tracked the Nile flood that fed its farms and celebrated its rulers through religious works.

Value and problems

For historians, the Palermo Stone gives the oldest known list of Egyptian kings arranged by years of reign, centuries older than the Turin King List of the 13th century BC. It helps confirm the order of early rulers and gives rough lengths for some reigns.

It also poses problems. Much of the text is broken or worn, readings of some signs are disputed, and the lengths of reigns can only be reconstructed by estimating how many compartments are missing. Some scholars have argued that the slab could be a later copy, possibly from the 25th Dynasty, but most continue to date it to the Fifth Dynasty.

Timeline

• c. 3100-2900 BC: First Dynasty kings, the earliest recorded with year compartments.
• c. 2613-2589 BC: Reign of Sneferu, whose expeditions are recorded on the stone.
• c. 2475-2455 BC: Reign of Neferirkare Kakai, the last king identified on the surviving fragments.
• c. 2450 BC: Probable date when the annals were carved.
• 1877: The main fragment is presented to the museum in Palermo.
• 1902: Heinrich Schäfer publishes a major study of the Palermo fragment.
• 2000: Toby Wilkinson publishes a full edition of all the annal fragments.

Why it matters

The Palermo Stone shows that by the Old Kingdom Egyptians were already keeping official history in year-by-year form, a practice comparable to the Sumerian King List in Mesopotamia. It links the age of Narmer and the unification of Egypt with the builders of the Abusir pyramids, and remains a starting point for any study of early Egyptian chronology.