(Menes) was found in two tombs, one at Nagada north of Thebes and
nearly opposite the road to the Red Sea, the other at Abydos. Manetho
makes the Ist Dynasty Thinite, this being the capital of the nome in
which Abydos lay. Upper Egypt always had precedence over Lower Egypt,
and it seems clear that Menes came from the former and conquered the
latter. According to tradition he founded Memphis which lay on the
frontier of his conquest; probably he resided there as well as at
Abydos; at any rate relics of one of the later kings of the Ist Dynasty
have already been recognized in its vast necropolis. Of the eight kings
of the Ist Dynasty, three--the fifth, sixth and seventh in the Ramesside
list of Abydos--are positively identified by tomb-remains from Abydos,
and others are scarcely less certain. Two of the kings have also left
tablets at the copper and turquoise mines of Wadi Maghara in Sinai. The
royal tombs are built of brick, but one of them, that of Usaphais, had
its floor of granite from Elephantine. They must have been filled with
magnificent furniture and provisions of every kind, including annual
record-tablets of the reigns, carved in ivory and ebony. From a fragment
on the Palermo stone it is clear that material existed as late as the
Vth Dynasty for a brief note of the height of the Nile and other
particulars in each year of the reign of these kings.

The IInd Dynasty of Manetho appears to have been separated from the Ist
even on the Palermo stone; it also was Thinite, and the tombs of several
of its nine (?) kings were found at Abydos. The IIIrd Dynasty is given
as Memphite by Manetho. Two of the kings built huge mastaba-tombs at Bet
Khallaf near Abydos, but the architect and learned scribe Imhotp
designed for one of these two kings, named Zoser, a second and mightier
monument at Memphis, the great step-pyramid of Sakkara. In Ptolemaic
times Imhotp was deified, and the traditional importance of Zoser is
shown by a forged grant of the Dodecaschoenus to the cataract god Khnum,
purporting to be from his reign, but in reality dating from the
Ptolemaic age. With Snefru, at the end of this dynasty, we reach the
beginning of Egyptian history as it was known before the recent
discoveries. Monuments and written records are henceforth more numerous
and important, and the Palermo annals show a fuller scale of record. The
events in the three years that are preserved include a successful raid
upon the negroes, and the constr