103 ox THE REVOLUTIONS OF 



their solemn procession. Clemens Alexandrinus * enumerates them 

 in number fort5^-t\vo ; and there is not amongst them, as with the 

 Brahmins, one epic, or one book which has the pretension of bein^ a 

 narrative, or of fixing in any way any great action or any event. 



The learned researches of M. Champollion, junior, and his aston- 

 ishing discoveries concerning the language of hieroglyphics f , confirm 

 rather than destroy these surmises. This ingenious antiquary has 

 read in a series of hieroglyphical pictures of the temple of Abydos | 

 the praenomina of a certain number of kings placed in order, one after 

 the other ; and a portion of these prsenomina (the ten last) being found 

 on many other monuments, accompanied with proper names, he con- 

 cludes that they are those of kings, who bore those proper names, 

 which has given him nearly the same kings, and in the same order, 

 as those of which Manetho composed his eighteenth dynasty, that 

 which drove out the pastoral kings or shepherds. The concordance, 

 however, is not complete : in the painting of Abydos, six of the names 

 found in. Manetho's list are wanting ; there are others which do not 

 resemble them ; and, unfortunately, there is a break before the most 

 remarkable of all — the Rhameses, who appears the same as the king 

 represented on so many of the finest monuments, with the attributes 

 of a great conqueror. It should be, according to M. Champollion in 

 Manetho's list, the Sethos, chief of the nineteenth dynasty, who, in 

 fact, is pointed out as potent in ships and horsemen, and as having 

 carried his arms into Cyprus, Media and Persia. M. Champollion 

 thinks, with Marsham and many others, that it is Rhameses or this 

 Sethos, who is the Sesostris or Sesoosis of the Greeks ; and this sup- 

 position is probable, in the sense that the representations of the victo- 

 ries of Rhameses, obtained probably over the wandering tribes near 

 Egypt, or, at farthest, over Scythia, have given rise to the fabulous 

 tales of the vast conquests, attributed by some confusion to a Sesos- 

 tris ; but in Manetho it is in the twelfth dynasty, and not in the 

 eighteenth, which has a prince named Sesostris, marked as the con- 

 queror of Asia and Thrace §. Marsham pretends that this twelfth || 

 dynasty and the eighteenth form only one. Manetho could not then 

 have comprehended the lists which he copied. In fact, if we entirely 

 receive both the historical truth of this bas-relief of Abydos and its 



* Stromat. lib. vi. p. 633. 



■f See the ' Precis du Syst^me Heroglyphiqiie des anciens Egyptians,' par M. Cham- 

 pollion le jeune, page 245 ; and his ' Lettre a M. le Due de Blacas,' p. 15, et seq. 



X This important bas-relief is engraved in the ' Voyage :\ Mero(^,' by M. CaiJlaud, 

 V. 2, plate xxxii. 

 § Syncell. p. 59. II Canon, p. 353. 



