first Pharaoh, the good
outweighed the evil. He was worshipped in Memphis, side by side with
Phtah and Ramses II.; his name figured at the head of the royal lists,
and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies.

[Footnote 21: The burned tile showing the impression of the stylus, made
on the clay while plastic.--ED.]

His immediate successors have only a semblance of reality, such as he
had. The lists give the order of succession, it is true, with the years
of their reigns almost to a day, sometimes the length of their lives,
but we may well ask whence the chroniclers procured so much precise
information. They were in the same position as ourselves with regard to
these ancient kings: they knew them by a tradition of a later age, by a
fragment papyrus fortuitously preserved in a temple, by accidentally
coming across some monument bearing their name, and were reduced, as it
were, to put together the few facts which they possessed, or to supply
such as were wanting by conjectures, often in a very improbable manner.
It is quite possible that they were unable to gather from the memory of
the past the names of those individuals of which they made up the first
two dynasties. The forms of these names are curt and rugged, and
indicative of a rude and savage state, harmonizing with the
semi-barbaric period to which they are relegated: Ati the Wrestler, Teti
the Runner, Qeunqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for a people the
first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to
strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.

The inscriptions supply us with proofs that some of these princes lived
and reigned:--Sondi, who is classed in the II dynasty, received a
continuous worship toward the end of the III dynasty. But did all those
who preceded him, and those who followed him, exist as he did? And if
they existed, do the order and relation agree with actual truth? The
different lists do not contain the same names in the same position;
certain Pharaohs are added or suppressed without appreciable reason.
Where Manetho inscribes Kenkenes and Ouenephes, the tables of the time
of Seti I give us Ati and Ata; Manetho reckons nine kings to the II
dynasty, while they register only five. The monuments, indeed, show us
that Egypt in the past obeyed princes whom her annalists were unable to
classify: for instance, they associated with Sondi a Pirsenu, who is not
mentioned in the annals. We must, th