conqueror.
Forty-seven royal tombs were mentioned in the records of the priests,
of which the entrances had been covered up with earth, and hidden in
the sloping sides of the hills, in the hope that they might remain
undisturbed and unplundered, and might keep safe the embalmed bodies
of the kings till they should rise again at the end of the world; and
seventeen of these had already been found out and broken open. Hecataeus
was told that the other tombs had been before destroyed; and we owe it,
perhaps, to this mistake that they remained unopened for more than two
thousand years longer, to reward the searches of modern travellers, and
to unfold to us the history of their builders.

The Memnonium, the great palace of Ramses II., was then standing; and
though it had been plundered by the Persians, the building itself was
unhurt. Its massive walls had scarcely felt the wear of the centuries
which had rolled over them. Hecataaus measured its rooms, its
courtyards, and its avenue of sphinxes; and by his measurements we can
now distinguish its ruins from those of the other palaces of Thebes. One
of its rooms, perhaps after the days of its builder, had been fitted up
as a library, and held the histories and records of the priests; but the
golden zodiac, or circle, on which were engraved the days of the year,
with the celestial bodies seen to rise at sunrise and set at sunset,
by which each day was known, had been taken away by Cambyses. Hecataaus
also saw the three other palace-temples of Thebes, which we now call
by the names of the villages in which they stand, namely, of Luxor, of
Karnak, and of Medinet-Habu. But the Greeks, in their accounts of
Egypt, have sadly puzzled us by their careless alteration of names from
similarity of sound. To Miamun Ramses, they gave the common Greek name
Memnon; and the city of Hahiroth they called Heroopolis, as if it meant
the _city of heroes_. The capital of Upper Egypt, which was called The
City, as a capital is often called, or in Koptic, _Tape or Thabou_, they
named Thebes, and in their mythology they confounded it with Thebes in
Bootia. The city of the god Kneph they called Canopus, and said it
was so named after the pilot of Menelaus. The hill of Toorah opposite
Memphis they called the Trojan mountain. One of the oldest cities in
Egypt, This, or with the prefix for city, Abouthis, they called Abydos,
and then said that it was colonised by Milesians from Abydos in Asia.
In the same ca