Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/355

MAXKTIIO AND TIIE SOTHIAC PERIOD. 339 APPENDIX. THE archaeology of Egypt, as given in the first book of Diodorus, is so much blended with Grecian mythes, and so much colored over with Grecian motive, philosophy, and sentiment, as to serve little purpose in illustrating the native Egyptian turn of thought. Even in Herodotus, though his stories are in the main genuine Egyptian, we find a certain infusion of Hellenism which the priests themselves had in his day acquired, and which probably would not have been found in their communications with Solon, or with the poet Al- ka'tts, a century and a half earlier. Still, his stories (for the tenor of which Diodorus unduly censures him, i, 69) are really illustrative of the national mind ; but the narratives coined by Grecian fancy out of Egyptian materials, and idealizing Egyptian kings and priests so as to form a pleasing picture for the Grecian reader, are mere romance, which has rarely even the merit of amusing. Most of the intellectual Greeks had some tendency thus to dress up Egyptian history, and Plato manifests it considerably ; but the Greeks who crowded into Egypt under the Ptolemies carried it still further. Hekataeus of Abdera, from whom Diodorus greatly copied (i, 46), is to bo numbered among them, and from him, perhaps, come the eponymous kings ./Egypt us (i, 51) and Neilens (i, 63), the latter of whom was said to have given to the river its name of iY(7e, whereas it had before been called *sgyp- /MS (this to save the credit of Homer, who calls it AZyvjrrof 7rora/i6c, Odyss. xiv, 258): also Macedon, Prometheus, Triptolemus, etc., largely blended with Egyptian antiquities, in Diodorus, (i, 18, 19, etc.) It appears that the nama of king Neilos occurred in the list of Egyptian kings in Diksearchus (ap Sv'hol. Apoll. Rhod. iv, 272 ; Dikaearch. Fragment, p. 100, ed. Fuhr). That the uvaypafyal in the temples of Egypt reached to a vast antiquity mid contained a list of names, human, semi-divine, and divine, ver}- long indeed. there is no reason to doubt. Herodotus, in giving the number of years between Dionysus and Amasis as 1500, expressly says that " the priests told him they knew this accurately, since they always kept an account, and always wrote down the number of years," not ravra tdyimnoi urpeKeuf yaalv i~iara<j$ai aiei TS ?.o-yi$6/j.evoi KOI alei uTroypaQouevoi ~u erea (ii. 145): compare Diodor. i, 44. He tells us that the priests read to him out of a manuscript of papyrus (EK pi'3/.ov, ii, 100) the names of the 330 successive kings from father to son, between Men or Mcncs and Mceris ; and the 3,41 colossal statues of chief priests, each succeeding his father, down to Sethos priest of Hephaestos and king (ii, 142), which were shown to him in the tem- ple of Hephaestos at Memphis, afford a sort of monumental evidence anal- ogous in its nature to a written list. So also the long period of 23,000 years given by Diodorus, from the rule of Helios down to the expedition of Alex ander against Asia, 18.000 of which were occupied by the government of gods and demigods (i, 26, 24. 44, his numbers do not all agree with one another), may probably be drawn from an uvaypatyT). Many temples ip