irly said that Manetho is
confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science,
that nearly all his Kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have
existed, and that, successively." [54]

What is needed for the validity of this argument is a concurrence, which
could not possibly be fortuitous, between the clear and undoubted
testimony of Manetho and of the monuments. But first of all, what sort
of probability is there left of our possessing anything approximately
like the results of Manetho: and if we had them, of their historical
accuracy? Secondly, is it at all credible that so fragmentary and
fortuitous a record as survives in monuments (allowing again their very
dubious historical worth) should just happen to coincide with the
surviving fragments of our patch-work Manetho, king for king and dynasty
for dynasty, as Mr. Laing would have us believe? On the contrary,
nothing would throw more suspicion on the interpretation of these
monuments than the assertion of such an improbable coincidence. What,
then, is the force of this argument from Egyptology? _If_ the records
from which Manetho compiled were historically accurate; _if_ he was
perfectly competent to understand them; _if_ he was scrupulously honest
and critical; _if_ from the tampered-with fragments in the Christian
Fathers we can arrive at a reliable and accurate knowledge of his
results; and _if_ the Bible in the original text--whatever that may
be--undoubtedly asserts that man was not created till 4000 B.C., then
according to certain Egyptologists (Boeck), Menes reigned fifteen
hundred years previously, and according to others (Wilkinson), one
thousand years subsequently. Similarly as to the argument from
coincidence: _if_, as before, we possess Manetho's genuine list intact,
and _if_ we have the clear testimony of the monuments giving a precisely
similar record, this coincidence, apart from all independent value to be
given to Manetho or to the monuments, is an effect demanding a cause,
for which the most probable is the objective truth from which both these
veracious records have been copied. But the monuments are not written in
plain English, and need a key; and we must be first assured that
Manetho's list has not been used for this purpose. We are told; for
example, [55] that the name "Snefura," deciphered on a tablet found at
the copper-mines of Wady Magerah, is the name of a King of the third
dynasty, who reigned about 4000 B.C. Now