Heracleopolitan. The table of Abydos is incomplete, and the Turin
Papyrus, in the absence of other documents, too mutilated to furnish
us with any exact information; the contemporaries of the Ptolemies were
almost entirely ignorant of what took place between the end of the VIth
and the beginning of the XIIth dynasty; and Egyptologists, not finding
any monuments which they could attribute to this period, thereupon
concluded that Egypt had passed through some formidable crisis out of
which she with difficulty extricated herself.*

* Marsham (_Canon Chronicus_, edition, of Leipzig, 1676, p.
29) had already declared in the seventeenth century that he
felt no hesitation in considering the Heracleopolites as
identical with the successors of Menes-Misraim, who reigned
over the Mestraea, that is, over the Delta only. The idea of
an Asiatic invasion, analogous to that of the Hyksos, which
was put forward by Mariette, and accepted by Fr. Lenormant,
has found its chief supporters in Germany. Bunsen made of
the Heracleopolitan two subordinate dynasties reigning
simultaneously in Lower Egypt, and originating at
Heracleopolis in the Delta: they were supposed to have been
contemporaries of the last Memphite and first Theban
dynasties. Lepsius accepted and recognized in the
Heracleopolitans of the Delta the predecessors of the
Hyksos, an idea defended by Ebers, and developed by Krall in
his identification of the unknown invaders with the Hiru-
Shaitu: it has been adopted by Ed. Meyer, and by Petrie.

The so-called Heracleopolites of Manetho were assumed to have been the
chiefs of a barbaric people of Asiatic origin, those same "Lords of the
Sands" so roughly handled by Uni, but who are considered to have invaded
the Delta soon after, settled themselves in Heracleopolis Parva as their
capital, and from thence held sway over the whole valley. They appeared
to have destroyed much and built nothing; the state of barbarism into
which they sank, and to which they reduced the vanquished, explaining
the absence of any monuments to mark their occupation. This hypothesis,
however, is unsupported by any direct proof: even the dearth of
monuments which has been cited as an argument in favour of the
theory, is no longer a fact. The sequence of reigns and details of the
revolutions are wanting; but many of the kings and certain facts in
their history are known, a