The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

144 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
As to Psammetichus III, the highest date available for this king
is Year Two. Three documents (papyri) dated to the third, fourth,
and fifth months of his second year have been discovered. And yet,
this is no contradiction to the statement made earlier that the rule
of this king actually covered only six months. How so?
The Egyptians used a nonaccession year system. According to
this system the year in which a king came to power was reckoned as his
first regnal year. Psammetichus III was dethroned by the Persian
king Cambyses during his conquest of Egypt, generally dated to
525 B.C.E. by the authorities. 106 At this time the Egyptian civil
calendar year almost coincided with the Julian calendar year. 107 If
the conquest of Egypt occurred in the sixth month of the reign of
Psammetichus III, this must have been in May or June, 525
B.C.E. 108 With this prerequisite, his six months of rule began at the
end of the previous year, 526 B.C.E., quite possibly only a few days
or weeks before the end of that year. Though he ruled for only a
fraction of that year, this fraction of a few days or weeks was
reckoned as his first regnal year according to the Egyptian
nonaccession year system. Thereby his second regnal year began to
count only a few days or weeks after his accession to the throne.
Thus, although he ruled for only six months, documents dated up
to the fifth month of his second year are, in view of the supporting
evidence, only what we should expect to find. The following
illustration makes the matter plain:
106 Kienitz, op. cit., p. 157, note 2. This date is also accepted by the Watch Tower
Society, as can be seen from Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1 (1988), pp. 698,
699.
107 In the two years 526 and 525 B.C.E. the Egyptian civil calendar year began on
January 2 in the Julian calendar.—Winfried Barta, “Zur Datierungspraxis in
Ägypten unter Kambyses and Dareios I,” Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache and
Altertumskunde, Band 119:2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), p. 84.
108 The exact time of the year for Cambyses’ capture of Egypt is not known. (Compare
Molly Miller, “The earlier Persian dates in Herodotus,” in Klio, Band 37,1959, pp.
30, 31.)—In the nineteenth century E. Revillout, one of the founders of the
scholarly journal Revue Égyptologique in the 1870’s, claimed that Psammetichus
III ruled for at least two years, as one document dated to the fourth year of a king
Psammetichus seemed to be written at the end of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.
(Revue Égyptologique, Vol. 3, Paris, 1885, p. 191; and Vol. 7, 1896, p. 139.) But
since then many new documents have been discovered that make Revillout’s
theory untenable. The document evidently refers either to one of the earlier kings
known by the name of Psammetichus, or to one of the later vassal kings by that
name. There were three kings by the name Psammetichus during the Saite
period, and also two or three vassal kings by that name in the fifth century, and
sometimes it has been difficult to decide which of them is referred to in a text.
Some documents that an earlier generation of Egyptologists dated to the reign of
Psammetichus III have later had to be re-dated. Wolfgang Helck & Wolfhart
Westendorf (eds.), Lexikon der Ägyptologie, Band IV (Wiesbaden, 1982), pp. 1172–
75.