Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/357

 MAXKTIIO AND THE SOTIIIAC PKEIOD 3U Natali, c. 21 ; Itleler, Handbuch der Chronologic, vol. i, Abschn. 1, pp. 125- 138.) The name Sothis, or Thoth, was tlic Egyptian name for Sirius or the Dog-star, the heliacal rising of which was an important phenomenon in that country, as coinciding nearly with the commencement of the overflowing of the Nile. Boeckh has analyzed, with great care and ability, the fragmentary, par tial, and in many particulars conflicting, versions of the dynasties of Manetho which have come down to us: after all, we know them very imperfectly, and it is clear that they have been much falsified and interpolated. He pre- fers, for the most part, the version reported as that of Africantis. The number of years included in the Egyptian chronology has been always a difficulty with critics, some of whom have eluded it by the supposition that the dynasties mentioned as successive were really simultaneous, while others have supposed that the years enumerated were not full years, but rears of one month or three months ; nor have there been wanting other efforts of ingenuity to reconcile Manetho with the biblical chronology. Manetho constructs his history of the past upon views purely Egyptian, applying to past time the measure of the Sothiac period or 1460 Julian years (= 1461 Egyptian years), and beginning both the divine history of Egypt, and the human history which succeeds it, each at the beginning of one of these Sothiac periods. Knowing as we do from Censorinus that a Sothiac period ended in 139 A. D., and, of course, began in 1322 B.C. we also know that the third preceding Sothiac period must have begun in 5702 B. c. (1322 +1460 -f- 1460 +1460 = 5702). Now the year 5702 B. c. coincides with that in which Manetho places Menes, the first human king of Egypt ; .or his thirty-one dynasties end with the first year of Alexander the Great, 332 B. c., and include 5366 years in the aggregate, giving for the beginning of the series of dynasties, or accession of Menes, the date 5702 B. c. Prior to Menes he gives a long series of years as the time of the government of gods and demigods : this long time comprehends 24.837 years, or seventeen Sothiac periods of 1461 Egyptian years each. We see. therefore, that Man- etho (or perhaps the sacerdotal avaypa^al which he followed) constructed a system of Egyptian history and chronology out of twenty full Sothiac pe- riods, in addition to that fraction of the twenty -first which had elapsed down to the time of Alexander, about three-quarters of a century anterior to Manetho himself, if we suppose him to have lived during the time of Ptole- my Philadelphus, which, though not certain, is yet probable (Boeckh, p. 11 ). These results have not been brought out without some corrections of Mane- tho's figures, corrections which are, for the most part, justified on reasona- ble grounds, and, where not so justified, are unimportant in amount ; so that the approximation is quite sufficient to give a high degree of plausibility to Boeckh's hypothesis : see pp. 142-145. Though there is no doubt that in the time of Manetho the Sothiac period was familiar to the Egyptian priests, yet as to the time at which it first be- came known we have no certain information : we do not know the time at which they first began to take notice of the fact that their year of 365 dayj