The reason there are so many options when dating Egyptian history is due to its complexity. Ancient Egypt wasn’t a kingdom that built a bunch of pyramids and was then conquered by the Greeks. What we today call Ancient Egypt was, in fact, a series of kingdoms that rose and fell in the Nile region over several thousand years. They are called the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms by Egyptologists. Separating these kingdoms were dark ages, which Egyptologists call the First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods. Following the Third Intermediate Period, or Third Egyptian Dark Age, was the Late Period when Egypt attempted to rebuild for the fourth time, but then fell under the control of foreigners.

Followers of both the short and long timelines agreed when the New Kingdom was founded, and pretty much everything that happened afterward. The New Kingdom was founded approximately 1580 BC ULT (1549 BC CET) and is the Kingdom of Egypt referenced in the Tanakh (Bible’s Old Testament), where the Jews were apparently enslaved for some time. It is also the Egypt of Greek mythology, where Helen had apparently been during the Battle of Troy, according to Herodotus and later writers. This was also the Egypt that fought the Hittites for control of Canaan, and can, therefore, be found in Hittite, Assyrian, and Babylonian records from that period. Additionally, radiocarbon dating has firmly placed the beginning of the New Kingdom between 1570 and 1544 BC. The dating of this kingdom is simply not in doubt, other than a few decades one way or the other.