ent a fleet down the Red
Sea as far as Punt or Somaliland. And if the Egyptians, by no means
a great seafaring race, were able to do such things at this period
of their history, surely an island race, whose sole pathway to the
outer world lay across the sea, would not be behind them. There can
scarcely be any question that, by the time of the Pyramid builders
at latest, Cretan galleys were making the voyage to the Nile mouths,
and unloading at the quays of Memphis, under the shadow of the new
Pyramids, their primitive wares, among them the rude, hand-burnished
black pottery, in return for which they carried back some of the
wonderful fabric of the Egyptian stone-workers.

But supposing that the connection between the primitive Minoan
civilization and the earliest Dynasties of Egypt is a thing established,
what does this enable us to assert as to the date to which we are to
ascribe the dawn of the earliest culture that can be called European?
Here, unfortunately, we are at once involved in a controversy in
which centuries are unconsidered trifles, and a millennium is no
more than a respectable, but by no means formidable, quantity.
Egyptian chronology may be regarded as practically settled from the
beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty downwards. There is a general
consent of authority that Aahmes, the founder of that Dynasty, began
to reign about 1580 B.C., and the dates assigned by the various
schools of chronology to the subsequent Dynasties differ only by
quantities so small as to be practically negligible. But when we
attempt to trace the chronology upwards from 1580 B.C., the consent
of authorities immediately vanishes, and is replaced by a gulf of
divergence which there is no possibility of bridging. The great
divergence occurs in the well-known dark period of Egyptian history
between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Dynasties, where monumental
evidence is extremely scanty, almost non-existent, and where historians
have to grope for facts with no better light to guide them than
is afforded by the History of Manetho, and the torn fragments of
the Turin Papyrus. The traditional dating used to place the end
of the Twelfth Dynasty somewhere around 2500 B.C., allowing thus
some 900 odd years for the intervening dynasties before the rise
of the Eighteenth. The modern German school, however, represented
by Erman, Mahler, Meyer, and the American, Professor Breasted,
arguing from the astronomical evidence of the Kahun Papyrus