DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.12609#0070
54
CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT EGYPT.
the copyists are obscure and discordant. Can these
transcribed fragments then be deemed of sufficient
authority to outweigh the concurrent testimony of
two of the best historians of antiquity, especially as
to events which these writers place in the later ages
of Egyptian history?* Herodotus wrote about two
centuries before Manetho, and within four centuries
of the period to which he assigns the founder of the
Third Pyramid. The discrepancy between the Greek
and Egyptian historians is at once explained by
the supposition that the names of this hated race
had been expunged from the registers, a conjecture
strongly supported by the entire omission of their
dynasty, and the period of its duration, in the Old
Chronicle. Manetho, compiling his history from the
national records, would naturally so far follow them
as not to introduce Cheops and his successors in their
right place; yet wanting all, and more than all, the
kings who had ever reigned in Egypt to fill up his
thirty-one dynasties, he Avould introduce them else-
where in the succession. In fact, the Egyptian chro-
nicler himself seems to hint at the transposition. Of
this dynasty he observes, they were Memphites " of a
different race." This remark, which is made of no
other of the thirty-one dynasties, appears to isolate it
from those before and after it. That a succession of
* It is true Diodorus notices an obscure tradition that the
pyramids were the work of a much earlier age, but he lays little
tress on it.
CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT EGYPT.
the copyists are obscure and discordant. Can these
transcribed fragments then be deemed of sufficient
authority to outweigh the concurrent testimony of
two of the best historians of antiquity, especially as
to events which these writers place in the later ages
of Egyptian history?* Herodotus wrote about two
centuries before Manetho, and within four centuries
of the period to which he assigns the founder of the
Third Pyramid. The discrepancy between the Greek
and Egyptian historians is at once explained by
the supposition that the names of this hated race
had been expunged from the registers, a conjecture
strongly supported by the entire omission of their
dynasty, and the period of its duration, in the Old
Chronicle. Manetho, compiling his history from the
national records, would naturally so far follow them
as not to introduce Cheops and his successors in their
right place; yet wanting all, and more than all, the
kings who had ever reigned in Egypt to fill up his
thirty-one dynasties, he Avould introduce them else-
where in the succession. In fact, the Egyptian chro-
nicler himself seems to hint at the transposition. Of
this dynasty he observes, they were Memphites " of a
different race." This remark, which is made of no
other of the thirty-one dynasties, appears to isolate it
from those before and after it. That a succession of
* It is true Diodorus notices an obscure tradition that the
pyramids were the work of a much earlier age, but he lays little
tress on it.