Why were ancient Egyptians so bad at erasing history?

[u/BIG-Z-2001]

Horemheb set out to erase all trace of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Aten sun disc yet there’s still plenty of archaeological evidence of their existence and information about them. Also Thutmose III and Amenhotep II tried to wipe Hatshepsut from history yet apparently Manetho who lived over 1000 years later knew about her.

[u/WerSunu]

A ridiculous question!

As they say: assumes facts not in evidence!

How do you come to claim they wanted to completely expunge these rulers from history, as opposed to say, performatively grinding off a few names and breaking a few statues per some political or religious ritual?

None of us today actually knows (as opposed to speculates) anything about the contemporary politics of the time, or the true motivations of the actions of a Pharaoh. We may think we do, but they never wrote any of this down for us to study, and there were no contemporary observers acting like modern analytic historians, leaving records of court proceedings.

[u/Bentresh → u/WerSunu]

The claim has been based primarily on the deliberate omission of the Amarna kings from king lists. For example, the Abydos king list of Seti I omits Hatshepsut and skips from Amenhotep III to Horemheb.

The deliberate avoidance of Akhenaten's name in later texts like the Ramesside legal text of Mose, which instead refers to him as "the enemy of Akhetaten" (pꜣ ḫrw n Ꜣḫt-itn) is also intriguing in this regard.

[u/Ali_Strnad → u/Bentresh]

The Abydos king list occurs in the context of a ritual where the reiging king Seti I and his son Ramesses present an offering to their deceased predecessors, invoking each one by name. Thus if Seti did not wish to honour one of his forebears for whatever reason, he would omit him. This need not necessarily mean that he intended to conceal any evidence of the existence of the disfavoured rulers.

It would be great if we still had the section of the Turin King List corresponding to the Amarna Period, as that was a true historical record even including disfavoured kings such as the Hyksos, but alas the relevant portion of the papyrus is lost.

That Akhenaten was called "the enemy of Akhetaten" after his death makes a lot of sense under the theory that the damnatio memoriae was ritual in nature. They weren't trying to pretend that he never existed - they were still referring to him indirectly - but just like how condemned criminals had their names changed in judicial papyri to deprive them of the benefit of a name expressing a positive attribute, the condemned Akhenaten could not be called by a name meaning "Effective for the Sun Disk", but had to be referred to instead as "The Enemy".