Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/466

 458 EGYPT monuments, that is, on the temples, tombs, and other buildings of ancient date. From works written on rolls of papyrus, found in the tombs, information has also been derived by recent Egyptologists. From the Scriptures we learn that the Hebrew patriarch Abraham went into Egypt with his family because of a famine that prevailed in Canaan. He found the country ruled by a Pharaoh, the Egyptian term for king. The date of Abraham's visit, according to Usher's chronology of the He- brew text of the Bible, was about 1920 B. 0. ; according to the Septuagint, about 2550 ; while Bunsen fixes it at 2876. Nearly two centuries later Joseph, a descendant of Abraham, was sold into Egypt as a slave to the captain of the guards of another Pharaoh, whose prime min- ister or grand vizier the young Hebrew even- tually became. Joseph's father, Jacob, and his family, to the number of 70, accompanied, as Bunsen conjectures, by 1,000 or 2,000 depen- dants, followed their fortunate kinsman into Egypt, where they settled in a district called the land of Goshen. There they remained until their numbers had multiplied into two or three millions, when under the lead of Moses they revolted and quitted Egypt to conquer and possess the neighboring land of Canaan. The date of their exodus, according to Usher, was 1491 B. C., after a sojourn in Egypt of about 210, or at most of 430 years. Bunsen assigns the date to 1320, and maintains the duration of the sojourn in Egypt to have been 1,434 years. The most recent Egyptologists generally agree that it occurred about 1300 B. 0., and identify the Pharaoh of the exodus with Merneptah I. (pronounced Mernephtah in Lower Egypt), the Menephthes of Manetho, one of the last kings of the 19th dynasty. From the exodus, for several centuries, the relations between the He- brews and the Egyptians appear to have been generally friendly, until in the 5th year of the reign of Eehoboam, about 970, Shishak, king of Egypt, conquered and plundered Jerusalem, an event the occurrence of which is attested and confirmed by the monuments. The first of the Greek authorities upon Egypt, Herodotus, visited the country about the middle of the 5th century B. 0. His knowledge of its his- tory was derived from conversation with the priests of various cities, with whom he talked by means of interpreters. He did not himself understand the language, and his Greek guides appear to have told him many vulgar fables and legends, while what he gathered from the priests he seems to have imperfectly un- derstood. They told him, he says, that Menes was the first king of Egypt, and was suc- ceeded by 330 monarchs, of whom one, Nito- cris, was a queen. None of them were distin- guished, and none of them left any monuments worthy of note, except Moeris, the last of the 330, who constructed the artificial lake which bears his name. He was succeeded by Sesos- tris, who conquered Ethiopia and the greater part of Europe and Asia. His successors were Pheron, Proteus (who was contemporary with the Trojan war), Rbampsinitus, Cheops, Ceph- ren, and Mycerinus. The last three kings built the three great pyramids. Mycerinus was suc- ceeded by Asychis, and Asychis by Anysis, in whose reign Egypt was conquered by the Ethi- opians, who held it for 50 years under King Sabaco. At the expiration of the half century they voluntarily abandoned the country and retired to Ethiopia. The next king of Egypt was Sethos, between whom and the first king Menes, the priests told Herodotus, there had been 341 generations, a period of 11,340 years. Sethos was succeeded by 12 kings, who reigned jointly, and together built the labyrinth, which Herodotus thought surpassed all the works of the Greeks, and was even more wonderful than the pyramids themselves. Af- ter the lapse of some years, Psammetichus, one of the 12 kings, dethroned the others and made himself sole sovereign of Egypt. He was succeeded by Necho, Psammis, and Apries, the last of whom Herodotus calls the most prosperous king that ever ruled over Egypt. But in the 25th year of his reign a rebellion broke out which was headed by Amasis. Apries was defeated and put to death, and Amasis became king. Amasis was succeeded by his son Psammenitus, at the very beginning of whose reign (525) Egypt was invaded and conquered by the Persians under Cambyses. Diodorus, the next of our Greek authorities, was in Egypt about 20 B. C. Like Herodotus, he begins the line of Egyptian kings with Menes, who, he says, was succeeded by 52 monarchs, reigning 1,400 years. These were succeeded by Bush-is I., and seven or eight generations later by Busiris II., who built Thebes. Later still reigned Osymandyas, and after eight more generations Uchoreus, who built Memphis, and after 15 more generations was succeeded by Myris or Moeris. Diodorus also relates the exploits of the great conqueror Sesostris, whom he calls Sesoosis. He com- putes the whole number of native sovereigns of Egypt at 470 kings and 5 queens, and the duration of the native monarchy at 4,700 years. Eratosthenes, who died about 196 B. C., was a native of Gyrene, and was made librarian of the Alexandrian library by Ptolemy III. He wrote a work on universal chronology, frag- ments of which have been preserved by Syn- cellus and others. His computation of Egyp- tian chronology, so far as it goes, has been adopted by Bunsen. Manetho was high priest of Sebennytus about 280 B. C. He wrote a history of Egypt for the information of the Greeks, of which only some extracts have reached us in the works of later writers, who do not agree in their transcription of the most important part of these remains, which is a list of the dynasties and sovereigns of Egypt from the earliest period to the end of the Persian rule. But notwithstanding the occasional dis- crepancies produced by careless or fraudulent copyists, these " dynasties " of Manetho are