nation.  The jejune stories told about them by Manetho seemed to confirm this idea.  Mena, the reputed founder of the monarchy, was generally regarded as a historical figure, owing to the persistence of his name in all ancient literary accounts of the beginnings of Egyptian history; for it was but natural to suppose that the name of the man who unified Egypt and founded Memphis would endure in the mouths of the people.  But with regard to his successors no such supposition seemed probable, until the time of Sneferu and the pyramid-builders.

This was the critical view.  Another school of historians accepted all the kings of the lists as historical en bloc, simply because the Egyptians had registered their names as kings.  To them Teta, Ateth, and Ata were as historical as Mena.

Modern discovery has altered our view, and truth is seen to lie between the opposing schools, as usual.  The kings after Mena do not seem to be such entirely unhistorical figures as the extreme critics thought; the names of several of them, e.g.  Merpeba, of the Ist Dynasty, are correctly given in the later lists, and those of others were simply misread, e. g. that of Semti of the same dynasty, misread “Hesepti” by the list-makers.  On the other hand, Mena himself has become a somewhat doubtful quantity.  The real names of most of the early monarchs of Egypt have been recovered for us by the latest excavations, and we can now see when the list-makers of the XIXth Dynasty were right and when they were wrong, and can distinguish what is legendary in their work from what is really historical.  It is true that they very often appear to have been wrong, but, on the other hand, they were sometimes unexpectedly near the mark, and the general number and arrangement of their kings seems correct; so that we can still go to them for assistance in the arrangement of the names which are communicated to us by the newly discovered monuments.  Manetho’s help, too, need never be despised because he was a copyist of copyists; we can still use him to direct our investigations, and his arrangement of dynasties must still remain the framework of our chronological scheme, though he does not seem to have been always correct as to the places in which the dynasties originated.

More than the names of the kings have the new discoveries communicated to us.  They have shed a flood of light on the beginnings of Egyptian civilization and art, supplementing the recently ascertained facts concerning the prehistoric age which have been described in the preceding chapter.  The impulse to these discoveries was given by the work of M. de Morgan, who excavated sites of the early dynastic as well as of the predynastic age.  Among these was a great mastaba-tomb at Nakada, which proved to be that of a very early king who bore the name of Aha, “the Fighter.”  The walls of this tomb are crenelated like those of the early Babylonian palaces and the forts of the Northerners, already referred to.