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476  yet be answered. With all reverence for the scholarship that has attempted it, the difference of opinion proves that the date of the oldest Egyptian monuments must still remain blank. The cause may be explained in a few words which the student would do well to ponder lest he waste his strength on the unknowable to the loss of more fruitful research.

The Egyptians had no era, no reckoning from the building of Memphis or from the institution of a festival. They had at least one astronomical cycle, a vast period of fourteen hundred and sixty-one wandering years of three hundred and sixty-five days each, a cycle pyramid-like in its dimensions, but we do not find that they dated by it. Their reckoning was by kings' reigns, each year being called the first or second and so forth of the king from the current year in which he began to reign. There is one known instance in which a long period, from one reign to a later one, is stated, and unfortunately we only know the historical place of the later of the two kings mentioned. The Egyptians do not seem to have recorded eclipses, and their stellar observations are unintelligible, as we find a star-rising recorded year after year on the same day of the wandering year of three hundred and sixty-five days, when it must have moved a day later every four years. They rarely recorded long genealogies. The succession of kings is broken by dire chasms in the series of monuments — ages almost without records — of which it is not possible even to conjecture the length. Our chief authority is still the historian Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who, under the first or second Ptolemy, wrote in Greek the list of the native dynasties, thirty in number, from Menes to Nectanebes II., overthrown by Artaxerxes Ochus. His numbers are shown by the monuments to be untrustworthy in their present state, and he does not tell us whether the royal houses were all successive or some contemporary. The monuments, with the aid of a fragmentary ancient list on papyrus, and for the latest period that of Hebrew, Assyrian, and Greek documents, enable us in many cases to correct Manetho; and we have for the later part of Egyptian history a chronology, which, reckoning upwards, is first nearly exact, then roughly true, and at last merely approximative within a century, perhaps more, until we reach the first or most recent chasm.

If we reckon upwards from the overthrow of Nectanebes II. (dynasty xxx.), 340 (?) to the accession of the first Ethiopian monarch Sabaco (dynasty xxv.),  cir. 715, the dates are nearly exact. From Sabaco to Sheshonk I., the Shishak of the Bible (dynasty xxii.), cir. 967, probably there is not an error of more than thirty years. Thenceforward to the beginning of the empire (dynasty xviii.), cir. 1600—1550, there is an increasing obscurity in chronology. We now find ourselves on the nearer side of the first chasm, the age during which Egypt was ruled by the Shepherd Kings, Eastern strangers, whose rule began after or during that of the later Theban kings of the old line (dynasty xiii.), and is generally held to have lasted, inclusive of a period of war at its close, for five centuries or a little more. This theory, however, rests upon a solitary passage of Manetho, cited by one only of his copyists, and if it seems supported by numbers in the dynastic lists given by this and the other copyists, we must remember the fatal facility with which numbers seem to lend themselves to the theories of chronologers. On the other side of the chasm we have all or a part of the old Theban kingdom (dynasties xi., xii., and part or the whole of xiii.). Then comes another chasm, characterized by the rule of a line of kings of another capital. We then once more reach a period illuminated by the light of contemporary monuments, the age of the Memphite kings, the pyramid-builders (last king of dynasty iii. and dynasties iv., v., vi.), which probably lasted six or seven centuries. Between this time and the rule of Menes stretches yet another great chasm, the age before monuments, to which a conjectural length of seven or eight centuries may be assigned. The reckoning, therefore, stands thus: —


 * Pre-monumental age (dynasties i.—iii.,part) 800 or 700 years (?).
 * Memphite kingdom under pyramid-builders (iii., part, iv., v., vi.), 700 or 600 (?).
 * Doubtful period (vii., viii., ix., x.).
 * Theban kingdom (xi., xii., xiii., part?) 250 years or more.
 * Shepherd rule (xiii., part? xiv., xv., xvi., xvii.).
 * The empire (xviii., xix., xx., part), 1600—1500 to 1200—1100.
 * Fall of empire (xx., part, xxi.).
 * Sheshonk I., or Shishak (xxii.), cir. 967.
 * Shebek, or Sabaco (xxv.), cir. 715.