f the historian. Lists of kings
found on the temple wall at Abydos, in the fragments of the Turin
papyrus and elsewhere, have cleared up many doubtful points in the lists
of Manetho, and at the same time, as Professor Petrie has pointed out,
have proved to us how true a historian that much-discussed writer was.
Manetho, it will be recalled, was the Egyptian who wrote the history of
Egypt in Greek in the time of the Ptolemies. His work in the original
unfortunately perished, and all that we know of it we learn through
excerpts made by a few later classical writers. These fragments have
until recently, however, given us our only clue to the earlier periods
of Egyptian history. Until corroboration was found in the Egyptian
inscriptions themselves, not only were Manetho's lists in doubt, but
scepticism had been carried to the point of denying that Manetho himself
had ever existed. This is only one of many cases where the
investigations of the archaeologist have proved not iconoclastic but
reconstructive, tending to restore confidence in classical traditions
which the scientific historians of the age of Niebuhr and George
Cornewall Lewis regarded with scepticism.

As to the exact dates of early Egyptian history there is rather more of
vagueness than for the corresponding periods of Mesopotamia. Indeed,
approximate accuracy is not attained until we are within sixteen hundred
years of our own era; but the sequence of events of a period preceding
this by two thousand years is well established, and the recent
discoveries of Professor Petrie carry back the record to a period which
cannot well be less than five thousand, perhaps not less than six
thousand years B.C. Both from Egypt and Mesopotamia, then, the records
of the archaeologist have brought us evidence of the existence of a
highly developed civilization for a period exceeding by hundreds,
perhaps by thousands, of years the term which had hitherto been
considered the full period of man's existence.

We may note at once how these new figures disturb the historical
balance. If our forerunners of eight or nine thousand years ago were in
a noonday glare of civilization, where shall we look for the
much-talked-of "dawnings of history"? By this new standard the Romans
seem our contemporaries in latter-day civilization; the "Golden Age" of
Greece is but of yesterday; the pyramid-builders are only relatively
remote. The men who built the temple of Bel at Nippur, in the year (say)