Egyptian and Mesopotamian lists of kings, which give the order of rulers and the number of years they ruled, owe their development to the practical demands of administration and law. They are prefaced, for legitimizing reasons, by mythic elements and speculative ideas about the beginnings of the various series of rulers. In this respect they are to be seen as an expression of an awareness of history and historical ideology.
Sequences of kings with the number of years of their rule were kept in Mesopotamia demonstrably from the early 2nd millennium B…