sacrifices; the god arose, opened his eyes, panted and
cried aloud, "I am Khnumu who created thee!" and promised him a speedy
return of a high Nile and the cessation of the famine. Pharaoh was
touched by the benevolence which his divine father had shown him; he
forthwith made a decree by which he ceded to the temple all his rights
of suzerainty over the neighbouring nomes within a radius of twenty
miles. Henceforward the entire population, tillers and vinedressers,
fishermen and hunters, had to yield the tithe of their incomes to the
priests; the quarries could not be worked without the consent of Khnumu,
and the payment of a suitable indemnity into his coffers, and finally,
all metals and precious woods shipped thence for Egypt had to submit to
a toll on behalf of the temple. Did the daily life forced the necessity
upon them; it teaches us at the same time how that fabulous chronicle
was elaborated, whose remains have been preserved for us by classical
writers. Every prodigy, every fact related by Manetho, was taken from
some document analogous to the supposed inscription of Zosiri.[*]

* The legend of the yawning gulf at Bubastis must be
connected with the gifts supposed to have been offered by
King Boethos to the temple of that town, to repair the
losses sustained by the goddess on that occasion; the legend
of the pestilence and famine is traceable to some relief
given by a local god, and for which Semempses and Uenephes
might have shown their gratitude in the same way as Zosiri.
The tradition of the successive restorations of Denderah
accounts for the constructions attributed to Teti I. and to
Tosorthros; finally, the prete tided discoveries of sacred
books, dealt with elsewhere, show how Manetho was enabled to
attribute to his Pharaohs the authorship of works on
medicine or theology.

The real history of the early centuries, therefore, eludes our
researches, and no contemporary record traces for us those vicissitudes
which Egypt passed through before being consolidated into a single
kingdom, under the rule of one man. Many names, apparently of powerful
and illustrious princes, had survived in the memory of the people;
these were collected, classified, and grouped in a regular manner into
dynasties, but the people were ignorant of any exact facts connected
with the names, and the historians, on their own account, were reduced
to collect apocryphal t