The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max
and heroes first ruled over Egypt for something less than 18,000 years. The last of these was Horus, the son of Isis. After these came 470 native kings, of whom the first was Menes, before the time of the Macedonian and Persian rule, and also four Ethiopian kings and five queens. The Ethiopians did not immediately succeed each other, but at intervals, and their united reigns amounted to a little less than thirty-six years. "Of all these kings the priests have sketches in their holy books, handed down through successive generations from extreme antiquity, showing how tall each king was, what he was like, and what he accomplished in his reign." If we place the reign of Menes 479 generations before Cambyses, this computation, on the reckoning of Herodotus, would place the accession of Menes in the year 16492 B.C.; taking a shorter average length for the generations, we may bring it to the year 12500 B.C. But Diodorus shows from other accounts that this mode of computation is inadmissible. He tells us that the priests of Egypt numbered about 23,000[8] years from the reign of Helius or Hephæstus, who, according to other priests, was the first of the gods to reign,[9] till the entrance of Alexander into Asia (334 B.C.). If of this total we allow about 18,000 years to the gods, the accession of Menes would have to be placed about the year 5300 B.C.[10] But as Diodorus also says that something less than 5,000 years had elapsed since the first human king to his arrival in Egypt, Menes' reign would fall about the year 5000 B.C. Diodorus fixes the accession of this king even more closely when he remarks, in a third passage, that the Egyptians assured him that, "for more than 4,700 years, kings, mostly natives, had ruled, and the land had prospered greatly under them."[11] With this agrees the further account given by Diodorus, that according to some the largest pyramid was built 3,400 years before his time. According to this Menes cannot be carried back further than 4,800 years B.C.
If Menes founded the kingdom of Egypt 4,800 years B.C., it continued for 4,275 years under native kings; and if in this period 346 kings ascended the throne, as Herodotus says, or 479, as Diodorus, the average duration of each reign would be in the first case more than twelve years, in the second less than nine, which contradicts all credible history. The lowest average of oriental reigns is fifteen years.
Still, from these accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus it is clear that the priests of Egypt possessed lists of the kings in long series, and that, according to their view, gods and demigods had ruled over Egypt for thousands of years before the earliest of these kings. After Greek princes had ascended the throne of the Pharaohs, and Egypt with its monuments and writings was opened to the research of the Greeks, Eratosthenes, who was the head of the library at Alexandria in the second half of the third century B.C., studied the history of these old kings—at "the royal request," as Georgius Syncellus tells us—in the old annals and lists of the Egyptians, and transcribed these lists in the Hellenic language.[12] This compilation of Eratosthenes contained the names and reigns of thirty-eight kings of Thebes. Syncellus repeats the list, and adds: "Here ended the rule of the thirty-eight kings who were called Theban in Egypt, whose names Eratosthenes collected out of the sacred books of Thebes and translated into the Hellenic language. The names of the fifty-three Theban kings who followed these have been also preserved by Apollodorus; but we consider it superfluous to add them, for even the list of the first is of no use."[13] Thus the researches of the Alexandrine Greeks had brought together a list of ninety-one kings, ninety successors of Menes, out of the writings of the priests of Thebes. As early as the time of Eratosthenes the Egyptians assisted the researches of the Greeks. About the middle of the third century B.C., that is, in the time of the second and third Ptolemy, an Egyptian named Manetho (Ma-n-thoth = "loved by Thoth"), of Sebennytus, and apparently scribe to the temple at Thebes,[14] composed in Greek a work on the history of Egypt in three books. "Obviously possessed of Hellenic culture"—so we find it in Josephus—"Manetho wrote the history of his country in Greek, translating it, as he tells us, from the sacred writings; he undertook to interpret Egyptian history from the sacred writings."[15] This work of Manetho was lost at an early period; all that remains is the list of the dynasties, a third part of the names of the kings, and a few fragments; and even these remnants we possess only in excerpts by a second or third hand. Manetho begins his history of Egypt with the rule of the gods. First came Ptah, the creative god of light, and the great gods, then the demigods, and Manes. After these had ruled over Egypt for 24,857 Egyptian years, according to the excerpt of Africanus, that is for 24,820 Julian years, the rule of human kings begins with Menes, and these continued through thirty dynasties for 5,366 years. As Manetho closes his list of the kings of Egypt with the last year of Nectanebos, who rebelled against Artaxerxes Ochus—i.e. with the year 340 B.C.—Menes must have founded the kingdom in the year 5706 B.C., or rather, if we reduce the Egyptian years of Manetho's reckoning to Julian years, in the year 5702 B.C.[16] This statement carries us back to a far less remote antiquity than the computation of the date of Menes by 346 generations previous to Cambyses; on the other hand, it goes 900 years higher than the date which we deduced from Diodorus.
What amount of authority should be ascribed to the lists of Manetho? Did the priests really possess sketches of kings and accounts of their reigns reaching back more than 5,000 years? In order to believe this, must we not allow that at such a remote time as the reign of Menes, or soon after it, writing was known and in use in Egypt? And granting this, must not the first beginning of culture in Egypt be carried back at least 500 years before Menes? Moreover, the lists do not correspond with the number of the kings given by Herodotus, or by Diodorus. Herodotus, as we said, put 346 generations before the time of Cambyses, Diodorus gave 479 kings before the same date. The excerpt of Africanus from Manetho, even if we substitute the smaller numbers given in the excerpt of Eusebius in all the dynasties, of which only the total sum of the rulers is stated, still gives us 388 kings from Menes to Cambyses.[17] If these discrepancies awaken the suspicion that the number and the succession of the kings was not agreed upon even by the priests themselves, the suspicion is increased by the fact that the lists do not tally in the various excerpts in which they have come down to us. What weight can be given to a list which, in the excerpt from Africanus, allows 953 years (or 802 at the least) to the rule of the Hyksos, and in the excerpt of Eusebius allows 103 years, and again 511 years in the excerpt of Josephus? Still greater discrepancies appear if we compare the list of Eratosthenes with the names and numbers handed down to us from Manetho's work. Both lists begin with Menes; both allow him a reign of sixty-two years; but Eratosthenes describes his thirty-eight kings as of Theban origin or race, while in Manetho the first Theban dynasty began to reign 2,240 years after Menes.[18] Nevertheless the names of the first three or four rulers in Eratosthenes agree with those in Manetho. Then the coincidence breaks off till the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth names in Eratosthenes, to which corresponding names are found in Manetho's list, but in the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth places; and from this point to the end of the list of Eratosthenes there are only two or three names to which corresponding names are found in Manetho, and these occur at far greater intervals in the series. The last name in Eratosthenes nearly corresponds to the name of the king, in Manetho, under whom the invasion of the Hyksos took place. If, therefore, we assume that the list of Eratosthenes was intended to enumerate the kings who ruled over Egypt to this date, we find thirty-eight kings who must have reigned through 1076 years; and, as parallel to these, we find in Manetho fourteen dynasties with at least 241 kings, occupying a period of 3,084 years.
Scarcely less striking are the contradictions in the monuments themselves. In the temple of Ammon at Karnak, which was extended on a magnificent scale by Tuthmosis III. (1591–1565 B.C.),[19] the king is delineated twice in a colossal