d, both of horse, foot, and armed
chariots; intendants in all the provinces; overseers or guardians of the
public granaries; wise and exact dispensers of the corn lodged in them; a
court composed of great officers of the crown, a captain of his guards, a
chief cup-bearer, a master of his pantry; in a word, all things that
compose a prince's household, and constitute a magnificent court. But
above all these, the readers will admire the fear in which the
threatenings of God were held, the inspector of all actions, and the judge
of kings themselves; and the horror the Egyptians had for adultery, which
was acknowledged to be a crime of so heinous a nature, that it alone was
capable of bringing destruction on a nation.(399)

Part The Third. The History of the Kings of Egypt.

No part of ancient history is more obscure or uncertain, than that of the
first kings of Egypt. This proud nation, fondly conceited of its antiquity
and nobility, thought it glorious to lose itself in an abyss of infinite
ages, which seemed to carry its pretensions backward to eternity.
According to its own historians,(400) first, gods, and afterwards demigods
or heroes, governed it successively, through a series of more than twenty
thousand years. But the absurdity of this vain and fabulous claim is
easily discovered.

To gods and demigods, men succeeded as rulers or kings in Egypt, of whom
Manetho has left us thirty dynasties or principalities. This Manetho was
an Egyptian high priest, and keeper of the sacred archives of Egypt, and
had been instructed in the Grecian learning: he wrote a history of Egypt,
which he pretended to have extracted from the writings of Mercurius, and
other ancient memoirs, preserved in the archives of the Egyptian temples.
He drew up this history under the reign, and at the command of Ptolemy
Philadelphus. If his thirty dynasties are allowed to be successive, they
make up a series of time, of more than five thousand three hundred years,
to the reign of Alexander the Great; but this is a manifest forgery.
Besides, we find in Eratosthenes,(401) who was invited to Alexandria by
Ptolemy Euergetes, a catalogue of thirty-eight kings of Thebes, all
different from those of Manetho. The clearing up of these difficulties has
put the learned to a great deal of trouble and labour. The most effectual
way to reconcile such contradictions, is to suppose, with almost all the
modern writers upon this subject, that the kings of these