CHAP. xix. AND ITS DATES. 381 



as the Egyptians must have required to emerge slowly from 

 primeval barbarism, and reach, long before the first Olympiad, 

 so high a degree of power and civilisation. 



Sir Greorge Come wall Lewis, in his recent e Historical Sur 

 vey of the Astronomy of the Ancients,' * says, that ' taking 

 into consideration all the evidence respecting the buildings 

 and great works of Egypt extant in the time of Herodotus, we 

 may come to the conclusion that there is no sufficient ground 

 for placing them at a date anterior to the building of the 

 temple of Solomon, or 1012, B.C.' The same author has 

 reminded us that Homer, in the Iliad, speaks of ' Egyptian 

 Thebes, with its hundred gates, through each of which two 

 hundred chariots went forth to battle,' and that we may form 

 an idea of the size which the great poet intended to ascribe to 

 Thebes in Egypt, from the fact that Thebes in Bceotia was 

 supposed to have only seven gates. Homer is believed to 

 have flourished about eight centuries before the Christian 

 era. At so early a period, therefore, the magnificence of 

 Thebes had attracted the attention of the Greeks. But in 

 the opinion of Egyptologists, there were great cities of still 

 older date than Thebes ; as, for example, Memphis, which, 

 from the names of the kings on the oldest monuments now 

 extant there as compared with those in Thebes, is inferred 

 to go back to remoter times. As to the speculations of Ari 

 stotle, in his 'Meteorics' (1, 14), that Memphis was probably 

 the less ancient of the two, because the ground on which it 

 stood was nearer the Mediterranean, and would therefore, at 

 a later period, be first redeemed from a watery and marshy 

 state, this argument, if it were available, would give an 

 extremely high antiquity to both cities, seeing the small 

 progress which the delta and alluvial deposits of the Nile 

 have made in the last two or three thousand years. It is only 



* London, 1862, p. 440. 



