l have to suppose that, as early as the fourteenth century B.C., the
nations of Southern Europe were so far advanced as to launch fleets upon
the Mediterranean, to enter into a regular league with an African
prince, and in conjunction with him to make an attack on one of the
chief civilized monarchies of the world, the old kingdom of the
Pharaohs. We shall have to imagine the Achaeans of the Peloponnese, a
century before the time of Agamemnon, braving the perils of the Levant
in their cockle-shells of ships, and not merely plundering the coasts,
but landing large bodies of men on the North African shore to take part
in a regular campaign. We shall have to picture to ourselves the
Laconians--the people of Menelaues--about the time of his grandfather,
Atreus, or his great-grandfather, Pelops, similarly employed, and
contending with the Pharaoh of the Exodus on the soil of the Delta. Nay,
we shall have to antedate the rise of the Tyrsenians to naval greatness
by about seven hundred years, and to suppose that the Sicels and Sardi,
whom the Greeks and Romans found living the life of savages in Sicily
and Sardinia, when they first visited their shores, about B.C. 750-600,
were flourishing peoples and skilful navigators half a millennium
earlier. The picture which we thus obtain of the ancient world is very
surprising, and quite unlike anything that could be gathered from the
literature of the Greeks; but it is not to be regarded as beyond the
range of possibility, since nations are quite as apt to lapse from
civilization into barbarism as to emerge out of barbarism into
civilization. It is quite conceivable that the nations of South-Eastern
Europe were more advanced in civilization and the arts of life about
B.C. 1400-1300 than they are found to have been six centuries later, the
false dawn having been succeeded by a time of darkness before the true
dawn came.

However this may have been, it is certain that Menephthah, in the fifth
year of his reign, had to meet a formidable, and apparently unprovoked,
attack from a combination of nations, the like of which we do not again
meet with in Egyptian history, either earlier or later. Marmaiu, son of
Deid, led against him a confederate army, consisting of three principal
tribes of the Tahennu--- the Lubu (Libyans), the Mashuash (Maxyes), and
the Kahaka--together with auxiliaries from five other tribes or peoples,
the Akausha, the Luku, the Tursha, the Shartana, and the Sheklusha. The