Turin King List (Royal Canon)

Temple walls listed kings too, but they chose whom to remember. On the list carved for Seti I at Abydos, rulers the court preferred to forget are simply missing. This papyrus, written in the reign of his son Ramesses II on the back of an old tax register, works differently. It begins with gods and demigods, then names more than 200 kings, with the length of each reign in years, and for some in months and days. It even includes the Hyksos, foreign rulers of the north, though without the royal ring, the cartouche, around their names.

Bernardino Drovetti acquired it in Egypt, and when it was unpacked in Turin it was a heap of fragments. The old story blames the journey. The museum's papyrus specialists think it was more likely in pieces already, like most papyri from Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders. In 1824 Champollion, the decipherer of hieroglyphs, sorted 47 of some 300 fragments. Two years later the German scholar Gustav Seyffarth placed nearly 200 and mounted them on a backing sheet. Scholars have been rearranging the pieces ever since, and about half of the roll is still missing.