Another myth had for its subject the proposed destruction of mankind by Ra, the Sun-god.  Ra had succeeded Phthah as king of Egypt, and had reigned for a long term of years in peace, contented with his subjects and they with him.  But a time came when they grew headstrong and unruly; they uttered words against Ra; they plotted evil things; they grievously offended him.  So Ra called the council of the gods together and asked them to advise him what he should do.  They said mankind must be destroyed, and committed the task of destruction to Athor and Sekhet, who proceeded to smite the men over the whole land.  But now fear came upon mankind; and the men of Elephantine made haste, and extracted the juice from the best of their fruits, and mingled it with human blood, and filled seven thousand jars, and brought them as an offering to the offended god.  Ra drank and was content, and ordered the liquor that remained in the jars to be poured out; and, lo! it was an inundation which covered the whole land of Egypt; and when Athor went forth the next day to destroy, she saw no men in the fields, but only water, which she drank, and it pleased her, and she went away satisfied.

It would require another Euhemerus to find any groundwork of history in these narratives.  We must turn away from the “shadow-land” which the Egyptians called the time of the gods on earth, if we would find trace of the real doings of men in the Nile valley, and put before our readers actual human beings in the place of airy phantoms.  The Egyptians themselves taught that the first man of whom they had any record was a king called M’na, a name which the Greeks represented by Men or Menes.  M’na was born at Tena (This or Thinis) in Upper Egypt, where his ancestors had borne sway before him.  He was the first to master the Lower country, and thus to unite under a single sceptre the “two Egypts”—­the long narrow Nile valley and the broad Delta plain.  Having placed on his head the double crown which thenceforth symbolized dominion over both tracts, his first thought was that a new capital was needed.  Egypt could not, he felt, be ruled conveniently from the latitude of Thebes, or from any site in the Upper country; it required a capital which should abut on both regions, and so command both.  Nature pointed out one only fit locality, the junction of the plain with the vale—­“the balance of the two regions,” as the Egyptians called it; the place where the narrow “Upper Country” terminates, and Egypt opens out into the wide smiling plain that thence spreads itself on every side to the sea.  Hence there would be easy access to both regions; both would be, in a way, commanded; here, too, was a readily defensible position, one assailable only in front.  Experience has shown that the instinct of the first founder was right, or that his political and strategic foresight was extraordinary.  Though circumstances, once and again, transferred the seat of government to Thebes or Alexandria, yet such removals were short-lived.  The force of geographic fact was too strong to be permanently overcome, and after a few centuries power gravitated back to the centre pointed out by nature.