of it will ever be found more ancient than that of Rameses I., the grandfather of the great conqueror. Now if this tablet of Abydos is correct, seventy-six kings, that is, very many more kings than can be counted in English history, must have reigned over Egypt before the first books of the Bible were written. But if we go back in English history to Ethelred II. in 976, we shall find that not more than forty-four sovereigns have reigned during a thousand years, and the average length of an Egyptian king's reign cannot be shown to be shorter than that of an English sovereign.

Evidence of the Reality of Sovereigns named.

But are the names on the tablet of Abydos names of real personages, or are they (or at least some of them) as imaginary as the kings of Britain, beginning with Brutus, as reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth, or the kings of Scotland, beginning with Fergus I., whose portraits adorn the walls of Holyrood? There is but one way of settling the question, and that is by looking out for evidence which will confirm or contradict that given by these royal lists. As far as the test of verification has been applied to these lists, there is no reason whatever for distrusting them. Instead of admitting sovereigns who have never lived, they have for certain reasons omitted many, the existence of whom

is quite certain. The intention of the tablets was not historical or chronological, but simply devotional, and the selection and arrangement of names consequently vary, though the most considerable names are the same in all.

1

M. de Rougé has carefully studied all the monuments which belong to the first six dynasties. The earliest monuments that can be found belong to king Seneferu, the 20th on the list of Abydos; and from this king till the 38th on the list, the evidence is complete, and the order of succession thoroughly established by independent inscriptions contemporaneous with the sovereigns of whom they speak. There is, for instance, the tomb at Gizeh of a queen who graced the courts of king Seneferu and the two kings who followed him. Two officers have left inscriptions which say that they had served the kings Unas and Teta. The great inscription of Una2 begins by saying that this officer served Teta, and ends with his services under Merenrā. This king was succeeded by his brother Neferkara (No. 38 of the list). The tomb of the mother of these royal brothers still exists. She was the wife of Pepi-Merira (No. 36), several monuments of whom are known; one of them, in Wádi Maghārah in the peninsula of Mount Sinai, is dated in the eighteenth year of his reign.

1 "Recherches sur les monuments qu'on peut attribuer aux six premières dynasties de Manethon:" Paris, 1866.

2 "Records of the Past," Vol. II. p. 1.

No period in any history that can be named is better authenticated by contemporary monuments.

The same truth may be asserted of the twelfth dynasty, which in the tablet of Abydos is represented by Nos. 59 to 65. The number of monuments accurately dated belonging to this period is very considerable. They are all perfectly consistent with one another, and leave no doubt as to the length of each reign and of the whole dynasty. It is to this dynasty that the splendid tomb of Nahre-se-Chnumhotep at Benihassan belongs. His inscription mentions the first four sovereigns as having honoured three successive generations of his family.

Omissions of this List.

Let me now speak of the omissions of this tablet, which I have selected in preference to others in consequence of its being the longest and the most intelligible as to its arrangement.

The most beautiful monuments of the eighteenth dynasty were raised by the powerful queen Hatasu,1 daughter of Tehutimes I., who associated her with him. She reigned for some years either alone or in conjunction with her brothers Tehutimes II. and Tehutimes III.

1 Of late very generally called Hashop, in simple forgetfulness of the most undisputed rules of hieroglyphic decipherment. When an error of this kind is once admitted, it is almost impossible to eradicate it.

successively; but her name and memory were persecuted by the latter, who resented her dominion over him during the years of his minority. Her name does not appear on the tablet of Abydos. There is also an interval between the reigns of Amenhotep III. and Hor-em-heb, which chronologically is filled up by the period of the sun-disk worshippers. Amenhotep III. was followed by a king, the fourth of the same name, who dropped it when he assumed that of Chut-en-Aten, as the founder of a new religion, which had but a very partial and short-lived success. His attempts at reformation led to his exclusion from the lists of the legitimate kings. There is monumental evidence of one or two reigns of short duration before that of Hor-em-heb, who broke up the monuments of Chut-en-Aten, and used them in the construction of his own. It is not out of place to mention the fact that the first information we obtained about this abortive attempt at the transformation of the Egyptian religion, was derived from blocks of one of the propyla of Karnak, which Mohammed Ali had brutally pulled down, that the stones might be broken up and roasted to quick-lime, in order to furnish stucco for his saltpetre works. Mr. Perring, an English architect, who was there, was surprised to find that the faces of the stones which had been placed inwards and covered with cement were sculptured with hieroglyphics of the same perfect execution as those which had been engraved on them after

their arrangement in the new building. This appropriation, of which there are many instances, by one sovereign of materials bearing the name and inscriptions of one of his predecessors, is always of value as determining the question of priority in time.

The omission of the heretical sovereigns is easily accounted for, and Seti may have shared the dislike of Tehutimes for queen Hatasu. But no satisfactory explanation has yet been given of the omission of a large number of names between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty. The immediate passage on the tablet from one of these dynasties to the other, cannot mean that the king numbered 65 was followed by the king numbered 66, who is Aahmes I. The important inscription of the naval officer Aahmes, son of Abana, which has already been quoted, mentions king Sekenen-Ra as the predecessor of Aahmes I. Sekenen-Ra is as thoroughly historical a personage as any one of our own sovereigns. There were even three kings of the name, and their tombs. have actually been found at Thebes. On the other hand, the tablet of Ameni-senb, now in the Louvre, belongs to the reign of a king anterior to the eighteenth dynasty, but later than the twelfth, as it records the restoration of a temple at Abydos founded by Usertsen I.1

1 Commonly called Usertesen, or still more erroneously Usirtasen. Usert is a feminine noun, and sen is a pronominal suffix, in allusion to the child's parents, like ef, es and ári.