ossible, and each king's courtiers lost no
opportunity of showing that they believed him to be the greatest king
who had sat on the throne of Egypt. To magnify the deeds of his
ancestors was neither politic nor safe, nor did it lead to favours or
promotion. In no inscription of their descendants do we find the mighty
deeds and great conquests of Amenemhat III, or of Usertsen III, or of
Thothmes III, praised or described, and no court scribe ever dared to
draft a text stating that these were truly three of the greatest kings
of Egypt. When a local chief succeeded in making himself king of All
Egypt he did not concern himself with preserving records of the great
deeds of the king whose throne he had seized. When foreign foes invaded
Egypt and conquered it their followers raided the towns, burnt and
destroyed all that could be got rid of, and smashed the monuments
recording the prowess of the king they had overthrown. The net result of
all this is that the history of Egypt can only be partially constructed,
and that the sources of our information are a series of texts that were
written to glorify individual kings, and not to describe the history of
a dynasty, or the general development of the country, or the working out
of a policy. In attempting to draw up a connected account of a reign or
period the funerary inscriptions of high officials are often more useful
than the royal inscriptions. In the following pages are given extracts
from annals, building inscriptions, narratives of conquests, and
"triumph inscriptions" of an official character; specimens of the
funerary inscriptions that describe military expeditions, and supply
valuable information about the general history of events, will be given
in the chapter on Biographical Inscriptions.

The earliest known annals are found on a stone which is preserved in the
Museum at Palermo, and which for this reason is called "The Palermo
Stone"; the Egyptian text was first published by Signor A. Pellegrini in
1896. How the principal events of certain years of the reigns of kings
from the Predynastic Period to the middle of the fifth dynasty are noted
is shown by the following:

[Reign of] SENEFERU. Year ...

The building of Tuataua ships of _mer_ wood of a hundred capacity,
and 60 royal boats of sixteen capacity.

Raid in the Land of the Blacks (_i.e._ the Sudan), and the bringing
in of seven thousand prisoners, men and women, and twenty thousand
catt