The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max

wall of a chamber. Between the two pictures sit sixty-four kings in four rows one over the other. The inscription, "A royal offering for the kings of both Egypts," as well as the position of Tuthmosis, shows that he is offering prayer and sacrifice to his predecessors in the kingdom. Of these sixty-four kings, three are the immediate predecessors of Tuthmosis, Tuthmosis I., II., and Amosis. Before Amosis this table puts fifty-seven kings; the name of Menes is wanting; but in Manetho's list there are nevertheless no fewer than 284 kings,[20] from Menes to Amosis, with whom, in the excerpt of Africanus, the eighteenth dynasty begins. In the great temple built by Sethos I. (1439–1388, B.C.) at Abydus in honour of Osiris, this prince, with his son Ramses, may be seen on the wall of a passage offering prayer and incense to his predecessors in the kingdom. There are seventy-six shields with names, beginning with the shield of Menes. The last is the shield of Sethos, who in this way is represented as offering prayer to himself, among the rest. Down to Amenemha IV., the close of the twelfth dynasty (2179–2171 B.C.), there reigned, according to Manetho's list 104 kings, but the table of Sethos gives sixty-five shields for the interval from Menes to Amenemha IV. From this king to Sethos, the first prince of the nineteenth dynasty, Manetho's list gives 193 kings, excluding the shepherd kings, whereas the table of Sethos shows only ten shields for this interval.[21] Nothing in the way of explanation is to be obtained from the monuments of this kind belonging to the time of Ramses II. (1388–1322 B.C.) On the wall of the portico between the first and second court of the Ramesseum, the great temple built by Ramses II. at Thebes, on the left bank of the Nile, there is a picture in which the statues of thirteen predecessors in the kingdom are carried in procession before the king. There are eleven kings up to Amosis; before him is the figure of Mentuophis; then Menes. In the little temple built by Ramses II. at Abydus in honour of Osiris, there is a tablet, on which Ramses is represented offering adoration to the manes of his predecessors. On this we can make out fifty shields, but only about thirty are sufficiently uninjured to be legible; so far as we can tell this table is only a repetition of the table of Sethos in the great temple of Abydus. A third series of the kings of this period has been discovered in the tombs at Sakkarah. In the tomb of Tunari, the kings' scribe and architect, there is a representation of the sacrifice of Ramses II. for the deceased kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. Here we find fifty-seven shields; immediately before Ramses II. is Sethos, Ramses I., and Horus, then six illegible names; and before these Amosis. Before Amosis are forty-six shields, of which the first can perhaps be compared with the king mentioned in the sixth place after Menes in Manetho's list.[22]

The variations of these tables from the lists may be explained by assuming that it depended on the particular view and peculiar object of the kings who erected these monuments, which of their predecessors they wished to honour, and which they wished to exclude. But even a manuscript list of kings, which has come down to us, exhibits numerous and very considerable variations from Manetho's lists. This list is a papyrus, now in Turin, supposed to belong to the period 1500–1000 B.C. It begins with the rule of the gods; then follow the names of the kings, with the length of their reigns in years, months, and days, down to the time of the Tuthmosis; and thus it includes the first seventeen dynasties of Manetho's list. It has been much damaged, and therefore we can only discover that about 240 names were given, of which, however, about 100 are entirely gone; and of the others the lesser half at least is hardly legible. As has been remarked, Manetho numbers at least 284 kings to the eighteenth dynasty. Moreover, the papyrus does not agree with Manetho in the division of the dynasties; at certain places, which do not coincide with the sections of Manetho, totals are given of the preceding reigns. The first king after the gods is Mena (Menes), but of the names which follow only a few agree with those in Manetho, and a few more with those of the tables of Karnak, Abydus, and Sakkarah.[23] But here also the same names occupy different places in the series.

      If in addition to all these variations and discrepancies we add the fact that even in the contemporary monuments and inscriptions which have come down to us there is no lack of contradictions to Manetho's statements—if too these monuments have not been erected or preserved in sufficient continuity, nor are of a sufficiently ample kind, to form an adequate check upon the papyrus of Turin, or the tables of kings or the list of Manetho—we must give up the hope of ascertaining the antiquity and course of Egyptian history on such data. One thing only comes out clear and irrefragable from the tables of Karnak, Abydus, and Sakkarah, no less than the Turin papyrus. Long before Herodotus was in Egypt, long before Manetho wrote his Egyptian history, in the fifteenth century B.C. Menes was considered the first king of Egypt. Even then lists of the kings were in existence, and the priests had made a sketch of the history of their land, in which the rule of the gods preceded the rule of human kings.

Modern research has attempted in various ways to find the key to the puzzle of these long and confused series of kings made by the Egyptian priests. Assuming that the names of the kings and the length of their reigns, and the number of reigns belonging to each dynasty, has been handed down correctly by Manetho, but that some of these dynasties were contemporaneous, the attempt has been made to give such a selection from the dynasties of Manetho as would supply a continuous thread for Egyptian history. Thus from the dynasties expressly marked as Memphitic, or Theban, a series may be formed which shortens the calculation of Manetho by at least 1,000 years. We might proceed further in this direction, and reduce Manetho's list by 2,000 or 3,000 years. According to the separate items in the excerpts preserved, Manetho's thirty dynasties include a series of 5,366 Egyptian years (from the year 5702 to the year 340 B.C.); nevertheless, Syncellus, in a passage of his Chronology, has observed that the whole period of history treated by Manetho in his three books covered 3,555 years.[24] This observation has been used to prove that Manetho himself arranged several dynasties contemporaneously; and thus, by taking the whole total of years given by Syncellus as a basis, the year 3892 B.C. has been fixed as the first year of the reign of Menes. No doubt a selection may be made from the dynasties of Manetho in such a way that the sum total of the reigns included in it will carry us no farther back than this year.[25] But it is clear from the accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus that the series of kings made by the Egyptian priests were strictly successive; and this fact is abundantly confirmed by the Turin papyrus and the excerpts preserved from Manetho himself. The 3,555 years which Syncellus brings forward cannot, in the face of his own excerpt, be taken as a number really derived from Manetho, and with this number all the calculations founded upon it fall to the ground.[26]

A second path, which has lately been struck out for the reduction of Manetho's dynasties, is based upon the list of Eratosthenes. The thirty-eight kings enumerated in this list are placed beside the first fourteen dynasties of Manetho. It is assumed that only the names quoted in Eratosthenes are the names of real monarchs, and that we must look for similar names in the list of Manetho. By this assumption, it is true, we are compelled to set aside several of Manetho's dynasties, and even to throw away the greater part of the kings of the dynasties which are allowed to count in the series.[27] But even when we have overcome all the difficulties in the way of this system, we are still without the means to define accurately the duration of the rule of the alien kings, which, as has been already remarked, according to the various excerpts from the list of Manetho, continued 953, or 511, or 103 years; nor is there any fixed point immediately before the alien monarchy to enable us to succeed in establishing the antiquity and commencement of the Egyptian series of kings.

All attempts to arrive at the antiquity of the civilisation and history of Egypt by these means are the more doubtful, because in Egypt there is no fixed era to form a basis for calculation. The time is reckoned by the reigns of the kings. In such a case even the most cautious inquiry of the priests could hardly have arrived at a satisfactory chronology for the oldest period. Though they had before them far more numerous monuments than we have, and though the lists of the various dominant