Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/47



Egyptian Chronology depends upon Monuments recording Contemporary Facts.

to explain the kind of evidence which compels us to assign a very remote antiquity to Egyptian civilization—so remote indeed as to appear simply fabulous to men whose studies of ancient history have been confined to Greece and Rome, and who know very soon historical evidence fails at the distance of a few centuries from the Christian era. Such men are not unnaturally inclined to suspect us of uncritically attaching importance to exaggerated or even fictitious numbers handed down by untrustworthy authorities. Such a suspicion is entirely without foundation. There is not a single Egyptian monument known which in its bearings upon chronology is liable to the charge of numerical exaggeration. The monuments, as a rule,