EGYPTOLOGICAL AND ASSYEIOLOGICAL RESEARCH. 



257 



his royal predecessors, whose names are given. 

 At Abydos, Seti I, together with his son Rame- 

 ses, then heir-apparent, offers incense to no 

 less than seventy-six kings. It will be remem- 

 bered that the Israelites in bondage are said to 

 have been employed in building the treasure 

 cities, as the Hebrew meschenoth is commonly 

 translated, or rather sanctuaries, of Pithotn 

 and Rameses. It may be considered* abso- 

 lutely certain that no place in Egypt ever had 

 the name of Rameses till the appearance of 

 the celebrated hero of that name, who is 

 actually represented on this monument as the 

 son and heir-apparent of Seti I ; neither will 

 any instance or occurrence of the name ever 

 be found, it is believed, more ancient than that 

 of Rameses I, the grandfather of the great 

 conqueror. Now, if this tablet of Abydos is 

 correct, seventy-six kings that is, very many 

 more kings than can be counted in English 

 history must have reigned over Egypt before 

 the first books of the Bible were written. But 

 if we go back in English history to Ethelred 

 II, in 976, we shall find that not more than 

 forty-four sovereigns have reigned during a 

 thousand years, and the average length of an 

 Egyptian king's reign can not be shown to be 

 shorter than that of an English sovereign. 



TABLET OF ABYDOS. But are the names on 

 the tablet of Abydos those of real personages 

 or of imaginary ones? There is but one way of 

 settling this question, and that is by looking out 

 for evidence which will confirm or contradict 

 these royal lists. As far as the test of verifi- 

 cation has been applied to these lists, there is 

 no reason whatever for distrusting them. In- 

 stead of admitting the names of sovereigns 

 who have never lived, they have, for certain 

 reasons, omitted the names of many the exist- 

 ence of whom is quite certain. The intention 

 of the tablets was not historical or chronolog- 

 ical, but simply devotional, and the selection 

 and arrangement of names consequently vary, 

 though the most considerable names are the 

 same in all. M. de Rouge has carefully studied 

 all the monuments which belong to the first 

 six dynasties, t The earliest monuments that 

 can be found belong to King Senefru, the twen- 

 tieth on the list of Abydos; and from this 

 king till the thirty-eighth on the list the evi- 

 dence is complete, and the order of succession 

 thoroughly established by independent inscrip- 

 tions contemporaneous with the sovereigns 

 of whom they speak. The same truth may be 

 asserted of the twelfth dynasty, which in the 

 tablet of Abydos is represented by numbers 

 59 to 65. The number of monuments accu- 

 rately dated belonging to this period is very 

 considerable. They are all perfectly consistent 

 with one another, and leave no doubt as to the 

 length of each reign, and of the whole dynasty. 



But it is important to notice the omissions 

 of this tablet. The most beautiful monuments 



* Le Page Renouf on the religion of ancient Egrypt. 

 t " Recherches sur les monuments qu'on peut attribuer 

 aux six premieres dynasties de Manethon," Paris, 18G6. 

 VOL. xxii. 17 A 



of the eighteenth dynasty were constructed by 

 the powerful queen Hatasu, sometimes called 

 Hashop, daughter of Thothmes I, who asso- 

 ciated her with him. She reigned for some 

 years, either alone or in conjunction with her 

 brothers, Thothmes II and III, successively; 

 but her name and memory were persecuted by 

 the latter, who resented her dominion over 

 him during his minority. Her name does not 

 appear in the tablet of Abydos. There is also 

 an interval between the reigns of Amenhotep 

 III and Hor-em-heb, which chronologically is 

 filled up by the period of the sun-disk worship- 

 pers. The former was followed by a king, the 

 fourth of the same name, who dropped it when 

 he assumed that of Chut-en-Aten, as the found- 

 er of a new religion, which had a short-lived 

 success. His attempts at reformation led to 

 his exclusion from the lists of the legitimate 

 kings. There is monumental evidence of one 

 or two reigns of short duration before that of 

 Hor-em-heb. The omission of the heretical 

 sovereigns is easily accounted for. But no 

 satisfactory explanation has yet been given of 

 the omission of a large number of names be- 

 tween the end of the twelfth and the begin- 

 ning of the eighteenth dynasty. The immedi- 

 ate passage on the tablet from one of these 

 dynasties to the other can not mean that the 

 king numbered 65 was followed by the king 

 numbered 66, who is Aahmes I. King Sek- 

 enen-Ra was his predecessor, and there were 

 even three kings of that name, and their tombs 

 have been found at Thebes. The tablet of 

 Ameniseub, in the Louvre, belongs to the 

 reign of a king anterior to the eighteenth dy- 

 nasty, but later than the twelfth. The inter- 

 val between these dynasties must have been 

 very considerable. The time immediately pre- 

 ceding the eighteenth dynasty was the period 

 of the foreign domination, generally known as 

 that of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings. But it 

 is impossible to ascertain from Egyptian records 

 when this period began, and how long it lasted. 

 The 511 years ascribed to it by Manetho, as 

 quoted by Josephus, must remain subject to 

 future verification. The only evidence from 

 Egyptian sources is a monument of Rameses 

 II, dated from the four hundredth year of one 

 of these kings of foreign origin. But a con- 

 siderable number of native kings must have 

 reigned between the last king of the twelfth 

 dynasty and the beginning of the foreign in- 

 vasion. Perhaps the most interesting monu- 

 ment of this period is the colossal statue of the 

 king Semench-ka-Ra (the eighteenth king of 

 the thirteenth dynasty, according to the royal 

 Turin papyrus), on the right shoulder of which 

 one of the foreign kings has had his name en- 

 graved in hieroglyphic characters. Of the 

 kings of the eleventh dynasty only two, num- 

 bers 57 and 58, appear on the tablet of Abydos. 

 Very interesting inscriptions belonging to their 

 reigns are still extant, but other kings of the 

 same names are known not only by inscrip- 

 tions, but by their coffins. Of one of them, 



