Palermo Stone
fragment of a stele known as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt
The Palermo Stone is one of seven surviving fragments of a stele known as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. The stele contained a list of the kings of Egypt from the First Dynasty (c. 3150–2890 BCE) through to the early part of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2498–2345 BCE) and noted significant events in each year of their reigns. It was probably made during the Fifth Dynasty. The Palermo Stone is held in the Regional Archeological Museum Antonio Salinas in the city of Palermo, Italy, from which it derives its name.
The Palermo Stone and other fragments of the Royal Annals preserve what is probably the oldest historical text that has survived from Ancient Egypt and form a key source for Egyptian history in the Old Kingdom.
Description
The Royal Annals stele, of which the Palermo Stone formed part, may originally have been about 60 cm high and 2.1m wide. The fragments are composed of a compact hard black stone, probably a form of basalt.
The Palermo Stone itself is an irregular shield-shaped fragment, 43.5 cm high, 25 cm wide and 6.5 cm thick (maximum dimensions).
“Palermo Stone” enters the record as fragment of a stele known as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Palermo, Stone and fragment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q308855. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Palermo Stone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.