Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/25

 ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND SEMITIC EMPIRES 13 vailing division, the first ten dynasties are known as the Old .Empire, the next seven as the Middle Empire, and the remainder, including the last independent sovereigns, as the New Empire. Now Egyptian history becomes much more precise, and its compilers had much more information to depend on after the year 1580 B.C. than before. This date starts the i Br aelin eighteenth dynasty, which begins the New Empire, Egypt, and it marks the time of the expulsion from Egypt of a foreign race which had ruled there probably for some two hundred years. These foreigners are known as the Hyksos or shepherd kings, Semitic invaders who came from Arabia. The time of the prosperity of the Semitic Israelites in Egypt was the time of their rule. The other king who ' knew not Joseph ' probably refers to the restoration of a genuine Egyptian dynasty. The 1 Exodus ' was what we may call the last act in the expulsion of the Hyksos or Semites. Although the information supplied to Herodotus and Manetho regarding the earlier period was comparatively meagre and legendary, still the priests who gave it had informa- The Pyramid- tion of their own derived both from tradition and builders, from their knowledge of the actual inscriptions which Egyptologists are deciphering again now ; and in its main lines, what Manetho and Herodotus tell us is correct. Some of the oldest monu- ments in the world are the Pyramids, and Pyramid-builders are positively identified with monarchs of the third and fourth dynasties, Tjeser and Sneferu, Khufu and Khafra, and others ; these two last names appearing in Herodotus as Cheops and Chephren, the builders of the biggest Pyramids. The modern authorities place their date somewhere between 3500 and 4000 b.c, the latest date assigned being 3000 B.C. Sneferu was the last king of the third dynasty, and until quite recently he was the earliest whose own actual inscriptions on rock had been identified. Now, there are known inscriptions left by his predecessors. These apparently take us back to the 'First Dynasty ' — there are eminent authorities who think they take us back to a dynasty before that which is called the first — and give the impression that Menes, the first king, was a somewhat mythical personage, a composite of two or three first-dynasty kings. At