Dating Creation - Egyptian

Egyptian

The ancient Turin King List lists a mythical predynastic "reign of the gods" which first occurred 36,620 years before Menes (3050 BC), therefore dating the creation to around 39,670 BC. One fragment from Manetho also dates the reign of the first Egyptian God (Ptah) 36,525 years before Menes (FGrH, #610 F2) and so dates the creation to about 39,575 BC. Other fragments from Manetho (Eusebius, George Syncellus and preserved in Felix Jacoby's FGrH), however, list different dates. Eusebius in his Chronicle recorded that:

...These were the first to hold sway in Egypt. Thereafter, the kingship passed from one to another in unbroken succession ... through 13,900 years — ... After the Gods, Demigods reigned for 1,255 years; and again another line of kings held sway for 1,817 years; then came thirty more kings, reigning for 1,790 years; and then again ten kings ruling for 350 years. There followed the rule of the Spirits of the Dead ... for 5,813 years ...

So 13,900 + 1,255 + 1,817 + 1,790 + 350 + 5,813 = 24,950 years, and counting back from Menes (3050 BC) fixes the creation at 28,000 BC. George Syncellus preserved yet another set of figures for the predynastic "reign of the gods", 11,984 years for Gods and 2,646 for demigods producing 14,630 years, thus dating the creation to 17,680 BC. The Book of Sothis also provides another similar figure for the creation.

The ancient Greeks reported similar figures on ancient Egyptian chronology. Diogenes Laertius recorded that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to their first god Hephaestus, who by interpretatio graeca was Ptah. According to Laeretius, Hephaestus (Ptah) lived 48,863 years before Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC), dating the creation to 49,219 BC. Herodotus wrote that the ancient Egyptians had gods who ruled over them before the first dynasty of Egypt, but did not attempt to precisely date their creation by using their chronology:

...Thus far went the record given by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and that in this time this also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests. Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years. Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt...Among the Greeks, Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan are held to be the youngest of the gods. But in Egypt, Pan1 is the most ancient of these and is one of the eight gods who are said to be the earliest of all; Heracles belongs to the second dynasty (that of the so-called twelve gods); and Dionysus to the third, which came after the twelve. How many years there were between Heracles and the reign of Amasis, I have already shown; Pan is said to be earlier still; the years between Dionysus and Amasis are the fewest, and they are reckoned by the Egyptians at fifteen thousand. The Egyptians claim to be sure of all this, since they have reckoned the years and chronicled them in writing.

According to Herodotus the ancient Egyptian demigods began 11,340 years before the reign of Seti I (1290 BC), so 11,340 + 1290 = 12,630 BC, while he listed earlier figures, 15,000 and 17,000, for the reign of the gods. These figures were discussed by Isaac Newton in his The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms (1728) but were dismissed as fabrications. The mathematician and esotericist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, however, in his work Sacred Science, reconstructed these dates to conclude that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to an astronomical (stellar) event some 30,000 years before Herodotus' own time. Martianus Capella, a pagan writer, wrote in his De nuptiis in the 5th century AD that the ancient Egyptians had archives of astronomy which started 40,000 years before his own era. The ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation (or start of their reign of Gods) "a little less than eighteen thousand years" from Ptolemy XII Auletes (117–51 BC).

Apollonius, an Egyptian pagan priest in the 2nd century AD, calculated the cosmos to be 153,075 years old as reported by Theophilus of Antioch.