It is said that the spirit of the Southern Pyramid never appears abroad, except in the form of a naked woman, who is very beautiful, but whose manner of acting is such, that when she desires to make people fall in love with her, and lose their wits, she smiles upon them, and immediately they draw near to her, and she attracts them towards her, and makes them infatuated with love; so that they at once lose their wits, and wander aimlessly about the country.  Many have seen her moving round the pyramid about midday and towards sunset.  It is Nitokris still haunting the monument of her shame and her magnificence.*

     * The lists of the VIth dynasty, with the approximate dates
     of the kings, are as follows:—­

[Illustration:  289.jpg TABLE OF THE DATES OF THE KINGS VITH DYNASTY]

After her, even tradition is silent, and the history of Egypt remains a mere blank for several centuries.  Manetho admits the existence of two other Memphite dynasties, of which the first contains seventy kings during as many days.  Akhthoes, the most cruel of tyrants, followed next, and oppressed his subjects for a long period:  he was at last the victim of raving madness, and met with his death from the jaws of a crocodile.  It is related that he was of Heracleopolite extraction, and the two dynasties which succeeded him, the IXth and the Xth, were also Heracleopolitan.  The table of Abydos is incomplete, and the Turin Papyrus, in the absence of other documents, too mutilated to furnish us with any exact information; the contemporaries of the Ptolemies were almost entirely ignorant of what took place between the end of the VIth and the beginning of the XIIth dynasty; and Egyptologists, not finding any monuments which they could attribute to this period, thereupon concluded that Egypt had passed through some formidable crisis out of which she with difficulty extricated herself.*

* Marsham (Canon Chronicus, edition, of Leipzig, 1676, p. 29) had already declared in the seventeenth century that he felt no hesitation in considering the Heracleopolites as identical with the successors of Menes-Misraim, who reigned over the Mestraea, that is, over the Delta only.  The idea of an Asiatic invasion, analogous to that of the Hyksos, which was put forward by Mariette, and accepted by Fr. Lenormant, has found its chief supporters in Germany.  Bunsen made of the Heracleopolitan two subordinate dynasties reigning simultaneously in Lower Egypt, and originating at Heracleopolis in the Delta:  they were supposed to have been contemporaries of the last Memphite and first Theban dynasties.  Lepsius accepted and recognized in the Heracleopolitans of the Delta the predecessors of the Hyksos, an idea defended by Ebers, and developed by Krall in his identification of the unknown invaders with the Hiru- Shaitu:  it has been adopted by Ed. Meyer, and by Petrie.

The so-called Heracleopolites of Manetho were assumed