It is perhaps possible, as Monsieur Foucart suggests, that missing portions of the text may have carried the record back through purely mythical periods to Ptah and the Creation.  In that case we should have, as we shall see, a striking parallel to early Sumerian tradition.  But in the first extant portions of the Palermo text we are already in the realm of genuine tradition.  The names preserved appear to be those of individuals, not of mythological creations, and we may assume that their owners really existed.  For though the invention of writing had not at that time been achieved, its place was probably taken by oral tradition.  We know that with certain tribes of Africa at the present day, who possess no knowledge of writing, there are functionaries charged with the duty of preserving tribal traditions, who transmit orally to their successors a remembrance of past chiefs and some details of events that occurred centuries before.(1) The predynastic Egyptians may well have adopted similar means for preserving a remembrance of their past history.

(1) M. Foucart illustrates this point by citing the case of the Bushongos, who have in this way preserved a list of no less than a hundred and twenty-one of their past kings; op. cit., p. 182, and cf.  Tordey and Joyce, “Les Bushongos”, in Annales du Musee du Congo Belge, ser.  III, t.  II, fasc. i (Brussels, 1911).

Moreover, the new text furnishes fresh proof of the general accuracy of Manetho, even when dealing with traditions of this prehistoric age.  On the stele there is no definite indication that these two sets of predynastic kings were contemporaneous rulers of Lower and Upper Egypt respectively; and since elsewhere the lists assign a single sovereign to each epoch, it has been suggested that we should regard them as successive representatives of the legitimate kingdom.(1) Now Manetho, after his dynasties of gods and demi-gods, states that thirty Memphite kings reigned for 1,790 years, and were followed by ten Thinite kings whose reigns covered a period of 350 years.  Neglecting the figures as obviously erroneous, we may well admit that the Greek historian here alludes to our two pre-Menite dynasties.  But the fact that he should regard them as ruling consecutively does not preclude the other alternative.  The modern convention of arranging lines of contemporaneous rulers in parallel columns had not been evolved in antiquity, and without some such method of distinction contemporaneous rulers, when enumerated in a list, can only be registered consecutively.  It would be natural to assume that, before the unification of Egypt by the founder of the Ist Dynasty, the rulers of North and South were independent princes, possessing no traditions of a united throne on which any claim to hegemony could be based.  On the assumption that this was so, their arrangement in a consecutive series would not have deceived their immediate successors.  But it would undoubtedly tend in course of time to obliterate