958 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ^lAGAZINE 



his wonderful instinct for a promising 

 site, and the astonishing amount of in- 

 teresting material which he accumulated 

 during his explorations, this devoted ex- 

 plorer had not the genius of patience and 

 orderliness, the sense of relation, and the 

 conviction of the importance of all facts 

 and things, however small, which char- 

 acterize the modern scientific spirit. His 

 undeniably important work was done in 

 a big, broad, and also somewhat loose 

 and wasteful fashion ; and while we can 

 see and acknowledge how much he dis- 

 covered and preserved, we can only con- 

 jecture how much was overlaid and lost 

 in the process. 



The meshes of his wide-flung net were 

 too large to deal with the smaller spoil 

 of the archeologist, and he could not 

 understand that from the point of view 

 of knowledge to be gained from it a 

 potsherd may be more important than 

 a pyramid. Modern investigation no 

 longer proceeds on his somewhat slap- 

 dash and wasteful methods. It holds 

 no site to have been really explored 

 till every scrap of pottery which it 

 yields has been collected, numbered, and 

 studied, ana the very earth and sand 

 have been painfully riddled through a 

 sieve. 



The result of all this laborious inves- 

 tigation is that instead of being con- 

 fronted with a confused mass of facts, 

 wonderful enough individually, but un- 

 related and perplexing, we are gradually 

 being presented with a coherent picture 

 of the history and the life of the various 

 periods of the ancient Egyptian nation- 

 ality from its earliest days down to his- 

 toric times. 



Modern exploration has not, of course, 

 followed and could not follow a strictly 

 chronological order in its researches. 

 Explorers had to take and to interpret 

 whatever a site yielded to them, whether 

 it belonged to the first dynasty or the 

 thirtieth, or to both. As a matter of fact, 

 perhaps the greatest impulse was given, 

 as certainly the greatest popular interest 

 was excited, by a discovery whose fruits 

 belong largely to what must be consid- 

 ered a comparatively late period of 

 Egyptian history — the discovery of the 



cache of royal mummies at Deir-el-Ba- 

 hari. 



But our purpose will best be served by 

 disregarding the order of time in which 

 the discoveries have been made and trac- 

 ing the growth of modern knowledge 

 concerning the various historical periods, 

 beginning with the earliest dynasties. 



THK HISTORY Q]^ MANI:TH0 VKRII^IED 



We owe the framework into which we 

 try to fit the facts of Egyptian history 

 to the ancient historian, Manetho, scat- 

 tered fragments of whose history of 

 Egypt, dating from the reign of Ptolemy 

 Philadelphus, in the third century B. C., 

 have come down to us in the works of 

 various ancient authors. He recognized 

 thirty dynasties of Egyptian monarchs, 

 and he has left lists of the names of the 

 kings in each of these dynasties, together 

 with occasional notes upon matters of 

 historical interest in particular reigns. 



It has long been known that, whatever 

 problems and difficulties might be con- 

 nected with Manetho's later king lists 

 (and these difficulties are neither few 

 nor small), we at least began to get into 

 touch with actual historic realities at the 

 point where his fourth dynasty com- 

 mences ; for it was recognized that in his 

 Souphis, Saphis, and Mencheres we had 

 corruptions of the names of Khufu, 

 Khafra, and Menkaura, the builders of 

 the three largest pyramids (see pages 

 960, 961, 964, 966, and 967). 



Beyond that point, however, history 

 seemed to vanish into the mists. The 

 kings of the earlier dynasties, Menes and 

 the rest of them, were shadowy, unreal 

 figures, who perhaps never existed save 

 in the imagination of the historian — mere 

 creatures of legend, such as we find at 

 the beginning of all national histories. 

 But if there has been one thing which 

 modern investigation has taught us 

 clearly, it is that the legends which de- 

 scribe the beginnings of national history 

 are never mere figments of the imagina- 

 tion. 



, The generation which has seen the 

 Labyrinth of Minos and the dancing- 

 ground of Ariadne rise from the earth 

 at Knossos may be held to have learned 



