36 " JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



translated into Greek the Septuagint version of the Jewish 

 Scriptures, and a work on the reUgion and chronicles of Egypt. 

 For that work he secured the services of an Egyptian priest named 

 Manetho, the beloved of Thoth. It was this Chronicle of the 

 Egyptian Kings which the priests of Memphis had permitted 

 Herodotus to see. His works have been lost, one poem perhaps 

 excepted, and the list of the kings as imperfectly transmitted by 

 Josephus, Eusebius, and Julius Africanus. No country has such 

 ancient records as those of Egypt. The monuments were built to 

 defy time, and the papyri and embalmed dead, by the dry climate 

 and desert sands, are hermetically sealed against decay. As Prof. 

 Whitney says : " The oldest writings by man are held by dead hands 

 in the valley of the Nile." But with these advantages there remains 

 a wide gulf between Egyptologists regarding Egyptian chronology. 

 From 1842 till his death in 1884, Lepsius devoted himself to the 

 study of Egyptology, and made a methodical comparison of the lists 

 of Manetho with the ancient monuments and papyri, especially with 

 a papyrus at Turin, which is in fragments from age, and is held in 

 high repute. The chronology adopted by Lepsius has not escaped 

 criticism, although with minor modifications it has been widely 

 adopted. He places the age of Menes, of the First Dynasty, at 

 3892 B. C, and the end of the XXX Dynasty, the closing reign of 

 the Persian kings, at 345 B. C. The Greek, Roman, Byzantian and 

 Mohammedan periods of Egyptian rule which followed are not in 

 dispute. 



Difference of opinion regarding Egyptian chronology has mainly 

 arisen in this way. Some scholars regard the kings given in the list 

 of Manetho as reigning in succession, and take the sum of their 

 collective reigns to be the true time elapsed from the first to the 

 last on the list. Others contend that several of the kings mentioned 

 reigned in different parts of Egypt at the same time, and must be 

 reckoned as contemporaries to rightly compute the time covered by 

 all the dynasties. It is not strange that knowledge concerning 

 Egypt is incomplete, as it was only to the last generation of scholars 

 that Egyptian records ceased to be sealed books. The burning of 

 the Alexandrine libraries and the extinction of the priesthood destroyed 

 the old learning. The written speech of the Egyptians was changed 

 and carried on in Greek characters, with half-a-dozen of the old 

 letters for sounds the Greek alphabet could not express, and, known 



