By the beginning of the Nineteenth Dynasty, Tutankhamun had been written out of history, along with all other rulers between the death of Amenhotep III and the accession of Horemheb. This was made concrete in the so-called king lists produced under Sety I and Ramesses II, which placed Amenhotep III and Horemheb directly adjacent to each other. Contemporary records were also now explicitly attributing the span of time occupied by the reigns of the ‘Amarna’ kings to Horemheb; for example, in the account of the long-running legal case of a certain Mose, which dates to the reign of Ramesses II, we find a reference to a ‘Year 59’ of Horemheb. His reign lasted no more than three decades, and thus we can see that the years of his immediate predecessors were now being retrospectively attributed to him.
Although clearly written out of ‘public’ history, it seems that residual records of the Amarna rulers remained, and some chronicles continued to list them. Thus, the work of the third-century BC writer Manetho (as transmitted by the later authors Josephus, Africanus, and Eusebius) includes the ‘excluded’ rulers of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. Manetho’s listings are, however, badly garbled, in part owing to the attempts of a compiler to reconcile a source containing the full set of names with the ‘public’ one that jumped from Amenhotep III to Horemheb.
Until 1822, when the first steps towards a decipherment of hieroglyphs were published by Jean-François Champollion in his Lettre à M. Dacier, Manetho’s material was all that historians had available to them for considering this part of Egyptian history. Even when hieroglyphic sources became available, Manetho’s version continued to be an important reference, which the first study of Tutankhamun indicates.
