ings' names agree with many Egyptian inscriptions. Manetho
owes his reputation to the merit of being the first who distinguished
himself as a writer and critic upon religion and philosophy, as well
as chronology and history, using the Greek language, but drawing his
materials from native sources, especially the Sacred Books. That he was
"skilled in Greek letters": we learn from Josephus, who also declares
that he contradicted many of Herodotus' erroneous statements. Manetho
was better suited for the task of writing a history of Egypt than any of
his contemporaries.

As an Egyptian he could search out and make use of all the native
Egyptian sources, and, thanks to his knowledge of Greek, he could
present them in a form intelligible to the Hellenes. It must be
confessed that he has occasionally fallen into the error of allowing
Greek thoughts and traditions to slip into his work. The great worth
in Manetho's work lies in the fact that he relates the history of Egypt
based on monumental sources and charters preserved in the temples.
Moreover, he treats quite impartially the times of the foreign rulers,
which the form of the Egyptian history employed by Diodorus does not
mention; but above all, Manetho gives us a list of Egyptian rulers
arranged according to a regular system. But however important in
this respect Manetho's work may be, it must not be forgotten what
difficulties he had to contend with in the writing of it, and what
unreliable sources lay in these difficulties. He could not use the
sources in the form in which he found them. He was obliged to re-write
them, and he added to them synchronisms and relations to other peoples
which necessarily exposed him to the dangers of colouring his report
correspondingly.

But a much greater difficulty consisted in the fact that the
chronological reports of the earlier history were all arranged according
to the reigning years of the rulers, so that Manetho was obliged to
construct an era for his work. Boeckh was the first to discover
with certainty the existence and form of this era. According to his
researches, the whole work of Manetho is based upon Sothicycles of 1460
Julianic years. The Egyptian year was movable, and did not need the
extra day every few years, but the consequence was that every year
remained a quarter of a day behind the real year.

[Illustration: 131.jpg MODERN SPHINX-LIKE FACE]

When 1460-1 years had elapsed this chronological error had mounted to