e education of
the Egyptians; and the third had regulated, in all its minutiae, the
religious constitution of the country. When there was nothing more
demanding supernatural strength or intelligence to establish it, the
gods returned to heaven, and were succeeded on the throne by mortal men.
One tradition maintained dogmatically that the first human king whose
memory it preserved, followed immediately after the last of the gods,
who, in quitting the palace, had made over the crown to man as his heir,
and that the change of nature had not entailed any interruption in the
line of sovereigns. Another tradition would not allow that the contact
between the human and divine series had been so close. Between the
Ennead and Menes, it intercalated one or more lines of Theban or Thinite
kings; but these were of so formless, shadowy, and undefined an aspect,
that they were called Manes, and there was attributed to them at most
only a passive existence, as of persons who had always been in the
condition of the dead, and had never been subjected to the trouble of
passing through life. Menes was the first in order of those who were
actually living. From his time, the Egyptians claimed to possess an
uninterrupted list of the Pharaohs who had ruled over the Nile valley.
As far back as the XVIIIth dynasty this list was written upon papyrus,
and furnished the number of years that each prince occupied the throne,
or the length of his life.[*]

* The only one of these lists which we possess, the "Turin
Royal Papyrus," was bought, nearly intact, at Thebes, by
Drovetti, about 1818, but was accidentally injured by him in
bringing home. The fragments of it were acquired, together
with the rest of the collection, by the Piedmontese
Government in 1820, and placed in the Turin Museum, where
Champollion saw and drew attention to them in 1824.
Seyffarth carefully collected and arranged them in the order
in which they now are; subsequently Lepsius gave a facsimile
of them in 1840, in his _Auswahl der wichtigsten Urhunden_,
pls. i.-vi., but this did not include the verso;
Champollion-Figeac edited in 1847, in the _Revue
Archeologique_, 1st series, vol. vi., the tracings taken by
the younger Champollion before Seyffarth's arrangement;
lastly, Wilkinson published the whole in detail in 1851.
Since then, the document has been the subject of continuous
investigation: E