Ancient dynasties (10000 BC–500 BC)

About the Ancient era

Ancient dynastic genealogy is necessarily fragmentary: most names of pre-classical rulers come from king-lists that mix mythology, legend, and history without distinguishing them, and few of the dates are precise to within decades. What survives in Dynastica's catalog of the period is therefore selective — the Egyptian dynasties for which we have monumental evidence and lists of pharaohs, the early Chinese houses (Xia, Shang, Zhou) whose existence is partly archaeological and partly later historiographical reconstruction, and the early Mesopotamian and Aegean royal lineages.

The pages in this era should be read with that uncertainty in mind. Where the historicity of an individual ruler is contested, we list the most-cited reconstruction; where lifetimes are educated guesses, we mark them as such. The cross-dynasty links of the period are limited — bronze-age royal marriages outside one's own culture were rare — but the lineages that survive are remarkable for their longevity. The early Egyptian dynasties span the entire historical record of pharaonic Egypt at intervals; a single royal genealogy here can cover a millennium.