the tradition of their true order, which even at the period of the Vth Dynasty may have been completely forgotten.  Manetho would thus have introduced no strange or novel confusion; and this explanation would of course apply to other sections of his system where the dynasties he enumerates appear to be too many for their period.  But his reproduction of two lines of predynastic rulers, supported as it now is by the early evidence of the Palermo text, only serves to increase our confidence in the general accuracy of his sources, while at the same time it illustrates very effectively the way in which possible inaccuracies, deduced from independent data, may have arisen in quite early times.

     (1) Foucart, loc. cit.

In contrast to the dynasties of Manetho, those of Berossus are so imperfectly preserved that they have never formed the basis of Babylonian chronology.(1) But here too, in the chronological scheme, a similar process of reduction has taken place.  Certain dynasties, recovered from native sources and at one time regarded as consecutive, were proved to have been contemporaneous; and archaeological evidence suggested that some of the great gaps, so freely assumed in the royal sequence, had no right to be there.  As a result, the succession of known rulers was thrown into truer perspective, and such gaps as remained were being partially filled by later discoveries.  Among the latter the most important find was that of an early list of kings, recently published by Pere Scheil(2) and subsequently purchased by the British Museum shortly before the war.  This had helped us to fill in the gap between the famous Sargon of Akkad and the later dynasties, but it did not carry us far beyond Sargon’s own time.  Our archaeological evidence also comes suddenly to an end.  Thus the earliest picture we have hitherto obtained of the Sumerians has been that of a race employing an advanced system of writing and possessed of a knowledge of metal.  We have found, in short, abundant remains of a bronze-age culture, but no traces of preceding ages of development such as meet us on early Egyptian sites.  It was a natural inference that the advent of the Sumerians in the Euphrates Valley was sudden, and that they had brought their highly developed culture with them from some region of Central or Southern Asia.

(1) While the evidence of Herodotus is extraordinarily valuable for the details he gives of the civilizations of both Egypt and Babylonia, and is especially full in the case of the former, it is of little practical use for the chronology.  In Egypt his report of the early history is confused, and he hardly attempts one for Babylonia.  It is probable that on such subjects he sometimes misunderstood his informants, the priests, whose traditions were more accurately reproduced by the later native writers Manetho and Berossus.  For a detailed comparison of classical authorities in relation to both countries, see Griffith in Hogarth’s Authority and Archaeology, pp. 161 ff.

     (2) See Comptes rendus, 1911 (Oct.), pp. 606 ff., and
     Rev. d’Assyr., IX (1912), p. 69.