The archæology of Egypt, as given in the first book of Diodorus, is so much blended with Grecian mythes, and so much colored over with Grecian motive, philosophy, and sentiment, as to serve little purpose in illustrating the native Egyptian turn of thought. Even in Herodotus, though his stories are in the main genuine Egyptian, we find a certain infusion of Hellenism which the priests themselves had in his day acquired, and which probably would not have been found in their communications with Solon, or with the poet Alkæus, a century and a half earlier. Still, his stories (for the tenor of which Diodorus unduly censures him, i, 69) are really illustrative of the national mind; but the narratives coined by Grecian fancy out of Egyptian materials, and idealizing Egyptian kings and priests so as to form a pleasing picture for the Grecian reader, are mere romance, which has rarely even the merit of amusing. Most of the intellectual Greeks had some tendency thus to dress up Egyptian history, and Plato manifests it considerably; but the Greeks who crowded into Egypt under the Ptolemies carried it still further. Hekatæus of Abdêra, from whom Diodorus greatly copied (i, 46), is to be numbered among them, and from him, perhaps, come the eponymous kings Ægyptus (i, 51) and Neileus (i, 63), the latter of whom was said to have given to the river its name of Nile, whereas it had before been called Ægyptus (this to save the credit of Homer, who calls it Αἴγυπτος ποταμὸς, Odyss. xiv, 258): also Macedon, Prometheus, Triptolemus, etc., largely blended with Egyptian antiquities, in Diodorus, (i, 18, 19, etc.). It appears that the name of king Neilos occurred in the list of Egyptian kings in Dikæarchus (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv, 272; Dikæarch. Fragment, p. 100, ed. Fuhr).

That the ἀναγραφαὶ in the temples of Egypt reached to a vast antiquity and contained a list of names, human, semi-divine, and divine, very long indeed,—there is no reason to doubt. Herodotus, in giving the number of years between Dionysus and Amasis as 1500, expressly says that “the priests told him they knew this accurately, since they always kept an account, and always wrote down the number of years,”—καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶν ἐπίστασθαι, αἰεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ αἰεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα (ii. 145): compare Diodor. i, 44. He tells us that the priests read to him out of a manuscript of papyrus (ἔκ βύβλου, ii, 100) the names of the 330 successive kings from father to son, between Mên or Menês and Mœris; and the 341 colossal statues of chief priests, each succeeding his father, down to Sethos priest of Hephæstos and king (ii, 142), which were shown to him in the temple of Hephæstos at Memphis, afford a sort of monumental evidence analogous in its nature to a written list. So also the long period of 23,000 years given by Diodorus, from the rule of Hêlios down to the expedition of Alexander against Asia, 18,000 of which were occupied by the government of gods and demigods (i, 26, 24, 44,—his numbers do not all agree with one another), may probably be drawn from an ἀναγραφή. Many temples in Egypt probably had such tablets or inscriptions, some differing from others. But this only shows us that such ἀναγραφαὶ or other temple monuments do not of themselves carry any authority, unless in cases where there is fair reason to presume them nearly contemporary with the facts or persons which they are produced to avouch. It is plain that the temple inscriptions represent the ideas of Egyptian priests (of some unknown date anterior to Herodotus) respecting the entire range of Egyptian past history and chronology.

What the proportion of historical items may be, included in this aggregate, we have no means of testing, nor are the monuments in Egyptian temples in themselves a proof of the reality of the persons or events which they are placed to commemorate, any more than the Centauromachia or Amazonomachia on the frieze of a Grecian temple proves that there really existed Centaurs or Amazons. But it is interesting to penetrate, so far as we are enabled, into the scheme upon which the Egyptians themselves conceived and constructed their own past history, of which the gods form quite as essential an element as the human kings; for we depart from the Egyptian point of view when we treat the gods as belonging to Egyptian religion and the human kings to Egyptian history,—both are parts of the same series.

It is difficult to trace the information which Herodotus received from the Egyptian priests to any intelligible scheme of chronology; but this may be done in regard to Manetho with much plausibility, as the recent valuable and elaborate analysis of Boeckh (Manetho und die Hundssternperiode, Berlin, 1845) has shown. He gives good reason for believing that the dynasties of Manetho have been so arranged as to fill up an exact number of Sothiac cycles (or periods of the star Sirius, each comprehending 1460 Julian years = 1461 Egyptian years). The Egyptian calender recognized a year of 365 days exactly, taking no note of the six hours additional which go to make up the solar year: they had twelve months of thirty days, with five epagomens or additional days, and their year always began with the first of the month Thoth (Soth, Sothis). Their year being thus six hours shorter (or one day for every four years) than the Julian year with its recurrent leap-year, the first of the Egyptian month Thoth fell back every four years one day in the Julian calender, and in the course of 1460 years it fell successively on every day of the Julian year, coming back again to the same day from which it had started. This period of 1460 years was called a Sothiac period, and was reckoned from the year in which the first of the Egyptian month Thoth coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius in Egypt; that is, (for an interval from 2700 B. C. down to the Christian era) on the 20th July of the Julian year. We know from Censorinus that the particular revolution of the Sothiac period, in which both Herodotus and Manetho were included, ended in the year 139 after the Christian era, in which year the first of the Egyptian month Thoth fell on the 20th July, or coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius in Egypt: knowing in what year this period ended, we also know that it must have begun in 1322 B. C., and that the period immediately preceding it must have begun in 2782 B. C. (Censorinus, De Die Natali, c. 21; Ideler, Handbuch der Chronologie, vol. i, Abschn. 1, pp. 125-138.) The name Sothis, or Thoth, was the 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, partial, 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 prefers, for the most part, the version reported as that of Africanus. 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 years 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 + 1460 + 1460 = 5702). Now the year 5702 B. C. coincides with that in which Manetho places Menês, the first human king of Egypt; for 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 Menês, the date 5702 B. C. Prior to Menês 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 Manetho (or perhaps the sacerdotal ἀναγραφαὶ which he followed) constructed a system of Egyptian history and chronology out of twenty full Sothiac periods, 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 Ptolemy Philadelphus, which, though not certain, is yet probable (Boeckh, p. 11). These results have not been brought out without some corrections of Manetho’s figures,—corrections which are, for the most part, justified on reasonable 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 became 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 days was six hours too short. According to the statement of Herodotus (ii, 4), the priests of Heliopolis represented the year of 365 days (which they said that the Egyptians had first discovered) as if it were an exact recurrence of the seasons, without any reference to the remaining six hours. This passage of Herodotus, our oldest informant, is perplexing. Geminus (Isagogê in Arati Phænomena, c. 6) says that the Egyptians intentionally refrained from putting in the six hours by any intercalation, because they preferred that their months, and the religious ceremonies connected with them, should from time to time come round at different seasons,—which has much more the air of an ingenious after-thought, than of a determining reason.

Respecting the principle on which the Egyptian chronology of Herodotus is put together, see the remarks of M. Bunsen, Ægyptens Stellung in der Welt-geschichte, vol. i, p. 145.