For the first seventeen dynasties, numbering in Afr. more than 4000 years, a bare statement of their contents and of the monumental evidence would greatly exceed the limits of this article. Perhaps the time is not far distant when the attempt to educe a connected chronology from Manetho (whether for or against the Mosaic numbers) will be abandoned by all sensible men. Full and unprejudiced inquiry can have but one result : for times anterior to 700 B. C. Egypt has no fixed chronology. De Rouge has in two words set the whole matter in its true light : les textes de Manithon sont profondement alteres, et la stfrie des dates monumentales est trey incomplete. The in completeness of the record is palpable: the altera tion of the texts is the result of their having passed through numerous hands, and been re-fashioned according to various intentions, by which the whole inquiry has been complicated to a degree which baffles all attempts to determine what was their original form. These intentions were mainly cyclical. A very brief statement of facts, not rest ing on critical conjecture and questionable com binations, as in the elaborate treatise of Bockh, hut lying on the surface, will place the character and relations of the several texts in a clear light. Menes stands—I. In Africanus (according to Syn cellus's running summation of the numbers in Bk. r) just three complete sothiac cycles, 3x 1460 Julian years, before 1322 B. C. ; 2. In Eusebius, according to the epigraphal sum of Book 1, three cycles before the epoch of Sethosis, dyn. xix. ; 3. In Eusebius, according to the actual sum of Book I, three cycles before the year 978-77 B.C., meant as the goal of the Diospolitan monarchy or epoch of Shishak ; 4. In Syncellus's period of 3555 years (accepted by
Lepsius and Bunsen as the true Manethoric measure from Menes to Neetanebus), two cycles before the same goal; 5. In the Old Chronicle, according to its sothiac form, one cycle before the same goal ; 6. In the Sothis, one cycle before 1322 B. C. ; but here it is contrived that Osiropis, or the commencement of Diospolitan monarchy, stands one cycle before Susakeint = Shishak. The inquirer may easily verify these facts for himself. In the series of papers, Cycles of Egyptian Chronology,' pub lished in Arnold's Meal. Critic, 1851-52, he will find them fully stated with many other like facts, which prove that these chronographies, one and all, are intensely cyclical. But if Manetho, as we have him, is cyclical, then, Lepsius himself con fesses (K B., p. 6, 7), the historical character of his work falls to the ground; for the very fact of Menes beading a sothiac cycle could only be the result of after-contrivance;' and Bunsen (Ars. St., iv. 13) sees that in place of the genuine historical work of Manetho, the venerable priest and con scientious inquirer,' we get a made-up thing, syste matically carved to shape, and therefore really fabulous.' Whether or not the original Manetho,' whatever its authorship and date, was contrived upon a cyclical plan, we have but the lists as they come to us finally from the hands of Annianus and Panodorus through Syncellus. Only, it may be observed, that the cardinal dates given by Dinv archus, which we have from an independent source, imply that the cyclical treatment of Egyptian chronology is at least as old as the alleged time of Manetho (Cycles, etc., U.S., sec. 4, 16, 34, 36).—H. B.