ANCIENT DISTORT. All historical hooks written in hieroglyphics have been lost. Their existence is proved only by fragments of a short extract (a list of kings) on papyrus. preserved in Turin. (See TURIN PAPYRUS.) Manetho. a priest of Sebennytus. under Ptolemy Philadelphus, wrote an Egyptian history in three books. which has also been lost. Epitomes of it are preserved in the works of dosephus. Julius Africanus. Euse bins, and (leorge Syncellu,: but they are incon sistent. and probably unreliable. Some historical material is found in Herodotus, Diodorus. and Eratosthenes, but it is intermingled with many errors. We are therefore compelled to rely chiefly on the inscriptions, which do not always supply adequate information. The greatest difficulty is in the matter of chronology. The them sel•es had no fixed era. but dated by the years of the respective kings. and the inscrip tions alone do not always furnish a reliable con nection between reigns. In the seanty extracts from Alanetho's history, the ehronologieal figures have been largely corrupted. Therefore the dif ferent systet», of modern scholars lack unifor mity. For example, the dates assigned to the first historical reign, that of King Nimes, vary as follows: !Lc. 5702 ( Boekh) : 5013 ( Unger) 5001 (Slariet le) ; 1400 ( Brugseh ) ; 3892 ( Lep sins) ; 3623 (Brunsen) ; 2000 (Sharpe) ; etc. At the present day scholars content themselves with fixing approximate or 'minimal dates; show ing before what year a king must have reigned. though he may have lived a hundred or even a thousand years earlier. Up to the present time, no date before the eighth century n.c. has been fixed with certainty, and a fairly close ap proximation is possible only up to about 11.c. 160o. Mane,lio's division of all the riders of Egypt from the earliest period down to n.e. 342 into thirty dynasties or groups (not strictly families) has been. in general. confirmed. Dy nasties one to Six are called the Old Empire: Eleven to Fourteen, the Middle Empire; with Dynasty Eighteen, the New Emptre begins.
Egypt was apparently a civilized State at as early a date as was Babylonia. The possibility cannot be denied that Egyptian civilization may have been derived from that ancient centre of culture. but the evidence is not sufficient to de cide the question. At any rate, long before B.C. 3000, possessed an independent culture, at least as high as that of Babylonia. The earliest, history is obscure. The later priests filled many thousands of years with the mythical reigns of the different gods, after whieh they placed four thou sand or more years of the demigods or manes. i.e. prehistoric kings. whose names had been lost. The Egyptians considered Menes or Meni from This as the first remarkable historical King. We now possess many objects which seem to date from his time, found chiefly in the two great royal tombs at Naga& and at Abydos, and possibly relies of a few earlier kings, who, even at that time, ruled over all Egypt. The time when Egypt was divided into two kingdoms. the Delta and the Southern Land, has not yet been traced by archaeology. although in the royal titles the re membrauee of that prehistoric division of the 'two countries' was preserved even down to Roman times. The large tombs of the kings of dynasties One and Two were situated near Abydos and This (whence Manetho calls them Thinitie kings) these tombs were examined im perfectly by snkadiseait in IS96, and afterwards thoroughly by Petrie. (Consult his Royal Tombs, London. 1900 et seq.) Thus we can go back to the middle of the fourth millennium 'Le. or ear lier. Of Dynasty Three we know little more than the names of the principal kings. They re sided near Memphis. and their tombs gradually assumed the later. pyramidal form. The earliest example, the step-pyramid near Saki:arab. is the work of Zoser, the lifth King of this dynasty. Under him we find the copp4T-mines near Mount Sinai already being worked by the Egyptians.