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23. The Thirty-One Dynasties; the Old, the Middle, and the New Empire.—The Pharaohs, or kings, that reigned in Egypt from Menes till the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great (332 B.C.) are grouped into thirty-one dynasties. Thirty of these we find in the lists of Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived in the third century B.C., and who compiled in the Greek language a chronicle of the kings of the country from the manuscripts kept in the Egyptian temples.

The first ten of these dynasties comprise what is known to Egyptologists as the Old Empire; the next seven cover the period of the so-called Middle Empire; and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth what is designated as the New Empire. The remaining dynasties represent mainly the rule of foreigners or conquerors. The history of these thirty-one dynasties covers a period of upwards of four thousand years. Three millenniums of this history lie back of the beginning of the historic age in Greece and Italy.

24. Menes, and the First Three Dynasties (about 4500–3700 ).—Menes was the founder of the so-called First Dynasty.