Kings, Chronicles and Computers: Towards a Computer-assisted Study of Ancient Chronography

Lecture by Eythan Levy, University of Zurich.

Historians and archaeologists reconstruct the ancient past based on a combination of different sources, whether textual (literary and epigraphic sources) or material (stratigraphy and artifacts). For example, the chronology of the Egyptian 26th dynasty was reconstructed by combining literary sources (Manetho, Herodotus), royal inscriptions (providing highest attested regnal years) and private funerary stelae (providing life spans correlated to regnal dates). The combination of such diverse sources into an absolute chronology is usually performed manually by researchers, through lack of adequate software tools.

My talk will highlight techniques for building chronologies in a computer-assisted manner, using ChronoLog, a free interactive software tool for chronological modelling. ChronoLog allows users to encode dynastic sequences, private individuals’ lifetimes, stratigraphic and ceramic sequences (among other types of data) and allows the inclusion of partial chronological knowledge, such as termini post and ante quem, and approximate durations. These data are automatically combined by the software to provide a tightened chronology. ChronoLog also allows users  to perform diverse queries on the model, in order to test its consistency, and to  highlight chronological properties which might otherwise be difficult to spot with the naked eye. The talk will end with perspectives for future research using this approach, especially in the field of ancient Egyptian chronology.