shorter chronologies
given in the list.[113] That of Bunsen is liable to very grave
objections; more especially as he adds to it other views, altogether
unsupported by historical evidence, which would carry back the deluge
to 10,000 years B.C. It rests wholly on the chronology of Manetho, who
lived 300 years B.C.; and who, even if the Egyptians then possessed
authentic documents extending 3700 years before his time, may have
erred in his rendering of them; and is farther liable to grave
suspicions of having merely grouped the names on the monuments of his
country arbitrarily in Sothic cycles. Farther, they rest on an
interpretation of Manetho, which supposes his early dynasties to have
been successive, while good reasons have been found to prove that many
of them consist of contemporaneous petty sovereigns of parts of Egypt.
The early parts of Manetho's lists are purely mythical, and it is
impossible to fix the point where his authentic history commences. He
copied from monuments which have no consecutive dates, the precise age
of which could only be vaguely known even in his time, and which are
different in their statements in different localities. It is only by
making due allowance for these uncertainties that any historical value
can be attached to these earlier dynasties of Manetho. Yet Bunsen has
built on an uncertain interpretation of this writer, as handed down in
a very fragmentary and evidently garbled condition, and on the equally
or more uncertain chronology of Eratosthenes, a system differing from
all previous belief on the subject, from the Hebrew history, and from
all former interpretations of the monuments and Manetho.[114]
Discarding, therefore, in the mean time, this date, and the still
older one claimed by Mariette,[115] we may roughly estimate the date
of Menes as 2000 to 2500 years B.C.,[116] and proceed to state some of
the facts developed by Egyptologists.

One of the most striking of these is the proof that Egypt was a new
country in the days of Menes and several generations of his
successors. The monuments of this period show little of the
complicated idolatry, ritual, and caste system of later times, and are
deficient in evidence of the refinement and variety of art afterward
attained. They also show that these early monarchs were principally
engaged in dyking, and otherwise reclaiming the alluvial flats; an
evidence precisely of the same character with that which every
traveller sees in the m