at Abydos
after it had been ransacked by Mariette, and had been for the last four
years in the hands of the Mission Amelineau. My only reason was that
the extreme importance of results from there led to a wish to ascertain
everything possible about the early royal tombs after they were done
with by others, and to search even for fragments of the pottery. To work
at Abydos had been my aim for years past; but it was only after it
was abandoned by the Mission Amelineau that at last, on my fourth
application for it, I was permitted to rescue for historical study the
results that are here shown.

"Nothing is more disheartening than being obliged to gather results out
of the fraction left behind by past plunderers. In these royal tombs
there had been not only the plundering of the precious metals and the
larger valuables by the wreckers of early ages; there was after that the
systematic destruction of monuments by the vile fanaticism of the Kopts,
which crushed everything beautiful and everything noble that mere greed
had spared; and worst of all, for history, came the active search in the
last four years for everything that could have a value in the eyes of
purchasers, or be sold for profit regardless of its source; a search in
which whatever was not removed was deliberately and avowedly destroyed
in order to enhance the intended profits of European speculators. The
results are therefore only the remains which have escaped the lust
of gold, the fury of fanaticism, and the greed of speculators in this
ransacked spot.

"A rich harvest of history has come from the site which was said to be
exhausted; and in place of the disordered confusion of names without any
historical connection, which was all that was known from the _Mission
Amelineau_, we now have the complete sequence of kings from the middle
of the dynasty before Mena to probably the close of the second dynasty,
and we can trace in detail the fluctuations of art throughout these
reigns."*

At the time when Professor Maspero brought his history of Egypt to a
close, the earliest known historical ruler of Egypt was King Mena or
Menes.**

* "The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty," Parts I.-II.
(Eighteenth and Twenty-first Memoirs of the Egypt
Exploration Fund), London, 1900-1902.

** See Volume I., page 322, et seq.

Mena is the first king on the fragmentary list of Manetho, and the
general accuracy of Manetho was supported by the accounts of Hero