non Aegypticus, Ebraicus, Graecus,
et Disquisitiones, London, 1672. For La Peyrere, see especially
Quatrefarges, in Revue de Deux Mondes for 1861; also other chapters in
this work. For Jackson, Hales, and others, see Wallace's True Age of
the World. For Wilkinson, see various editions of his work on Egypt. For
Vignolles, see Leblois, vol. iii, p. 617. As to the declaration in favor
of the recent origin of man, sanctioned by Popes Gregory XIII and Urban
VIII, see Strachius, cited in Wallace, p. 97. For the general agreement
of Church authorities, as stated, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, as
above. As to difficulties of scriptural chronology, see Ewald, History
of Israel, English translation, London, 1883, pp. 204 et seq.

II. THE NEW CHRONOLOGY.

But all investigators were not so docile as Wilkinson, and there soon
came a new train of scientific thought which rapidly undermined all this
theological chronology. Not to speak of other noted men, we have early
in the present century Young, Champollion, and Rosellini, beginning a
new epoch in the study of the Egyptian monuments. Nothing could be more
cautious than their procedure, but the evidence was soon overwhelming in
favour of a vastly longer existence of man in the Nile Valley than
could be made to agree with even the longest duration then allowed by
theologians. For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like Wilkinson,
it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural chronology was
adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing civilization at a period
before the "Flood of Noah," and that no such flood had ever interrupted
it. This was bad, but worse remained behind: it was soon clear that
the civilization of Egypt began earlier than the time assigned for
the creation of man, even according to the most liberal of the sacred
chronologists.

As time went on, this became more and more evident. The long duration
assigned to human civilization in the fragments of Manetho, the Egyptian
scribe at Thebes in the third century B.C., was discovered to be more
accordant with truth than the chronologies of the great theologians;
and, as the present century has gone on, scientific results have
been reached absolutely fatal to the chronological view based by the
universal Church upon Scripture for nearly two thousand years.

As is well known, the first of the Egyptian kings of whom mention is
made upon the monuments of the Nile Valley is Mena, or Menes. Manetho
ha