used by the Ancient Egyptians. ' 179 



delphus or Evergetes. The latter of the two was evidently the one of whom 

 Tacitus was thinking, when he said that between Ptolemy and Tiberius there 

 were less than 250 years ; though this observation is incorrect, even in reference 

 to Evergetes, unless we count from the end of his reign to the beginning of that 

 of Tiberius. We should, however, recollect that Tacitus is here copying the 

 words of some other writer, and that he may have considered Alexander as the 

 first Macedonian sovereign of Egypt, though Tacitus overlooked him as such. 

 The writer of the article in Eraser's Magazine conceives that apocatastatic cycles 

 of 1460 years terminated at the several epochs, at which Tacitus places the 

 appearance of a phoenix ; and he thinks that one of those cycles commenced at 

 the chronological epoch of the eighteenth century before Christ, and ended in 

 the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. This might be readily admitted ; but at 

 what chronological epoch can we fix the commencement of that cycle, which 

 terminated A. D. 34 ? or that, which terminated in the reign of Amasis ; 1461 

 years before which, the year of 365 days was not in use, according to this gen- 

 tleman's system, any more than according to that, which I have endeavoured to 

 establish in opposition to it ? Besides, Tacitus evidently intimates, by what he 

 says of the interval between Ptolemy and Tiberius, that these appearances had 

 been recorded by the author whom he follows, as a connected series, and not as 

 a number of independent ones. 



On these grounds, I concluded that a series of cycles, of some sort or other, 

 must have terminated A. D. 34. The origin of them I could only fix at the 

 reformation of the calendar in the eighteenth century before Christ ; and what 

 I had to do in order to ascertain their number, was merely, by comparing some 

 one of the epochs mentioned by Tacitus with A. D. 34, to obtain such narrow 

 limits for the length of the cycle, as that there could only be a single integral 

 quotient, when this length should be made to divide the entire interval, which 

 I had already restricted within the limits 1833 and 1793 years. 



Of the three epochs which Tacitus mentions, the first was of no use to me, 

 because even the age at which Sesostris lived is not among the data of chro- 

 nology. Still less could the limits of his reign be so. The last was likewise 

 insufficient for my purpose ; for the possible limits, which it gives for the appear- 

 ance of the phoenix, are 285 B. C, the beginning of the reign of Philadelphus, 

 and 222 B. C, the end of the reign of Evergetes. The limits of the interval 



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