ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that a historiography in the sense of a more critical dialectic with the past than was the case in earlier centuries developed during the first part of the first millennium BC and appeared as a feature of Egyptian civilization from the eighth and the seventh centuries BC. Manetho of Sebennytos was a third century BC Egyptian priest who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek. Among the civilizations of the ancient world, Egypt stands out as a culture with a keen sense of its exceptional historical depth: references to past people or events abound both in visual and in written records. While most scholars would probably agree with this generalization when applied to the earlier periods of Egyptian history, the first millennium BC provides a more complex picture that obliges to revisit common assumptions on Ancient Egypt's cultural traits.
