n history even of so comparatively recent
a time as that of Ramses II. (fifteenth century B.C.), and from that
period on there was almost a complete gap until the story was taken
up by the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus. It is true that
the king-lists of the Alexandrian historian, Manetho, were all along
accessible in somewhat garbled copies. But at best they seemed to supply
unintelligible lists of names and dates which no one was disposed
to take seriously. That they were, broadly speaking, true historical
records, and most important historical records at that, was not
recognized by modern scholars until fresh light had been thrown on the
subject from altogether new sources.

These new sources of knowledge of ancient history demand a moment's
consideration. They are all-important because they have been the means
of extending the historical period of Egyptian history (using the word
history in the way just explained) by three or four thousand years. As
just suggested, that historical period carried the scholarship of the
early nineteenth century scarcely beyond the fifteenth century B.C., but
to-day's vision extends with tolerable clearness to about the middle
of the fifth millennium B.C. This change has been brought about chiefly
through study of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphics
constitute, as we now know, a highly developed system of writing; a
system that was practised for some thousands of years, but which fell
utterly into disuse in the later Roman period, and the knowledge of
which passed absolutely from the mind of man. For about two thousand
years no one was able to read, with any degree of explicitness, a single
character of this strange script, and the idea became prevalent that
it did not constitute a real system of writing, but only a more or less
barbaric system of religious symbolism. The falsity of this view was
shown early in the nineteenth century when Dr. Thomas Young was led,
through study of the famous trilingual inscription of the Rosetta stone,
to make the first successful attempt at clearing up the mysteries of the
hieroglyphics.

This is not the place to tell the story of his fascinating discoveries
and those of his successors. That story belongs to nineteenth-century
science, not to the science of the Egyptians. Suffice it here that Young
gained the first clew to a few of the phonetic values of the Egyptian
symbols, and that the work of discovery was carried on and vast