1. In our earlier discussion of the name Necho, which Hebrew scholars assigned to Piankhi, we suggested that they were perhaps making a sarcastic play on words, mimicking some epithet of the 25th dynasty patriarch. We left the matter at that. But the Horus name of Menkheperre Piankhi provides a likely candidate. The epithet "strong bull" was borne by many Egyptian kings, and several included it among their titulary as did Menkheperre. It was a favorite name of Menkheperre. In Egyptian the name translated "strong bull" is Ka Nakht. - literally "bull, the strong one". Inverted, as sounded in English, it would read "Nakht Ka" which would arguably sound like Neco to a foreign ear. It is immaterial whether the Nubian king enunciated the title in reverse order, or whether the Hebrew scribes did so when they parodied the name.
2. See Kitchen, Third Intermediate Period 2nd (1986) sect. 219, 226, and especially 501.
3. Cf. the translation by John A. Wilson in ANET pp. 25-29. This papyrus, found at el-Hibeh in central Egypt, is now stored in the Moscow Museum.
4. Op. cit., table 2.
5. Note that Kitchen reverses the order of kings Psusennes and Amenemnisu (Neferkare), this in order to make sense of the Berlin genealogy described below. Since this king is credited with only 4 years it makes little difference to any argument provided by this paper. We leave it where it stands, though it is probably incorrect.
6. See question 6. in the "Response to Criticism" section of the "Displaced Dynasties" webpage, material soon to be moved and included as an appendix to the earlier book.
7. The Third Intermediate Period, sect. 89.
8. Ibid. sect. 95.
9. In this table we follow those who begin the 23rd dynasty with Takeloth II and who include Osorkon IV as one of its terminal kings. We omit the king Aakheperure Amenhotep, since we cannot prove conclusively that he was a son of Osorkon IV.
10. We assume that the residence city was originally Diospolis Parva, near Thebes. The 20th dynasty kings were entombed in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes. The vast majority of their monuments have been found in the south. Ramses III, who must be dated around the middle of the 8th century, may have fought against the intrusion of the Sea Peoples in the North, but he must have done so in conjunction with the early 21st, and perhaps also the 22nd dynasty kings, depending on specific dates. Development of a more detailed chronology of the 8thcentury must await the third book in this series.
11. Cf. Kitchen, TIP 93 (p.118).
12. Ludwig Borchardt, Quellen Und Forschungen zur Zeitbestimmung der Agyptischen Geschichte (1935) pp. 96-112.
13. We are not the first to speculate on the possibility that the reign of the 20th dynasty pharaoh Ramses XI extended into the time of the Assyrian domination of Egypt. The interested reader is referred to the website of Lisa Liel. It is unfortunate that those who had the insight to place Ramses XI in this time frame did not follow up on their conclusion and place the 21st dynasty Theban branch in the balance of the 7th century. Herihor, the founder of the Theban branch, was a contemporary of Ramses XI.
14. The net effect of all of these reductions is to lower the dates of the Theban kings Herihor, Piankh, Pinudjem and Menkheperre by 409 years from those assigned to these kings by the traditional history..
15. D.M. Dixon, "The Origin of the Kingdom of Kush (Napata-Meroe)," JEA 50 (1964) 121
16. Ibid., p.126. Dixon is here quoting Reisner's comments in Sudan Notes and Records 2 (1919), p. 247.
17. Ibid., p.121.
18. Bruce G. Trigger, Nubia Under the Pharaohs (1976) 139.
19. For the record we should register our opinion that the twentieth dynasty did not end with Ramses XI. We believe that Ramses died in exile in or around the year 661 B.C. and that he was succeeded by one or two descendants. The evidence is largely circumstantial and must be discussed in the appropriate context as occasion arises. Needless to say, none of these descendants ever lived in Egypt and their names may be absent from the monuments in Egypt.
20. It is more likely that Mutemhet Maatkare was the wife of Osorkon II, not Osorkon III, a fact we will argue in the third book of this series. This woman was the daughter of Psusennes I who ruled in the north of Egypt during the first half of the 8th century.
21. Three explanations of the differences in name are possible. If Niku was an Assyrian national, and thus also Nabushezibanni his son, then we must assume that the latter adopted an Egyptian name, a homonym of his birth name, upon taking office. If Niku and Nabushezibanni are native Egyptians, then they may have been assigned Assyrian names by their Assyrian overlords following Esarhaddon's victory, the names chosen because of their phonetic similarity to the Egyptian names. The third possibility is similar to the second. Niku (Nakht ka = ka nakht?) and Nesubanebdjed are the names of the delta kings, and the Assyrian annalist has substituted Assyrian equivalents in his listing, names never borne by either king.
22. We should perhaps qualify our claim that names Piankh and Pinudjem are Nubian. They are not spelled out with consonantal hieroglyphs as are the names of 22nd dynasty kings such as Osorkon, Sheshonk and Takeloth. Instead they are all compounds of the identical Piye with hieroglyphic ideograms "ankh" and "nudjem", signs which mean respectively "life" and "sweet". As such the Pi might be taken as a definite article and the names might be read as "the living one" and the "the sweet one" respectively. Some Egyptologists have read them in roughly this manner and in consequence consider the names to be Egyptian. But the opinion is a minority one, and even if correct, the resulting names are exceptional in structure and quite atypical. The can only be regarded as epithets.
23. Cf. C. F. Nims, JNES 7 (1948) 157-62.
24. If Piankh was in fact a son of Shabataka the Melukkhan king, it is possible that he, rather than his father married a daughter of Osorkon III, and that Rudamon was his son.
25. Jaroslav Cerny, Late Ramesside Letters (Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca XI) (1939).
26. Edward F. Wente, Late Ramesside Letters (SAOC 33) (1967).
27. Some would suggest that "this land" in the relevant passage is a reference to Nubia, where Piankh is engaged in military exercises. But the phrase actually enquires how pharaoh could reach "the land" (p'y t'), not this land, and in context it can only refer to Egypt as Gardiner suggests.
28. The HPA Pinudjem consistently refers to himself as the son of Piankh, confirming a paternal relationship. Without that genealogical addendum there is no way, other than context, of distinguishing Pinudjem I and II, nor, for that matter, of determining whether some other Pinudjem is being referenced.
29. We assume that Masaharta, a brother of Menkheperre, acted as HPA in the first two or three years of Pinudjem's kingship, then died prematurely, yielding the title to Piankhi.
30. BAR 478.
31. It is not necessary to assume that Egypt freed itself from Assyrian suzerainty at this time. Pinudjem might have been acting in league with Assyria to put down insurrection in the Euphrates region.
32. We refer the reader to the arguments put forward by Immanuel Velikovsky in his Peoples of the Sea (1978) 154-155.
33. Immanuel Velikovsky, Peoples of the Sea (1977) 152-53.
34. It is not possible to identify Nesubanebdjed as Smendes, Aakheperre Psebkhannu as Psusennes I and move the entirety of the 21st Tanite sequence into the 7th century. The Berlin genealogy, in and of itself, argues that a king named Psebkhannu ruled for upwards of three decades in the first half of the 8th century. This must be Psusennes I, possibly, though not necessarily, the king with prenomen Tjetkhepperure.
35. There is considerable controversy surrounding the dates of this king. The conjectured reign length can be safely reduced by as much as twenty years without seriously conflicting with monumental evidence.
36. It is possible, though not likely, that the tomb was originally constructed for this Sheshonk and that Psusennes (or those who buried him) merely dispossessed the original occupant, moving his body into the vestibule. But the tomb walls bear no inscriptions of this Sheshonk, suggestive of the fact that his body was a late addition to the tomb. Perhaps this king should be identified with the prince Sheshonk, commander of the army at Busiris at the time when Piankhi invaded the Delta.
37. Kitchen, TIP 93.
38. Pierre Montet, Les Constructions et le Tombeau de Psousennes a Tanis (1951) 46-48
39. Ibid., pp 139-143.
40. Though a search for an Ibashi-Ilou in the late Assyrian period may prove fruitful.
41. Nicholas Reeves & Richard Wilkinson, eds. The Complete Valley of the Kings (1996)172-73.
42. Ibid., p. 173