and Champollion solved the secret simultaneously and independently of each other. The translation of other Egyptian texts followed in course; and of late years so great has been the skill attained by scholars that they are able to detect blunders made by ancient scribes. Much uncertainty exists, however, and must ever exist, regarding the proper pronunciation of the language.
Another source of knowledge regarding the civilization of Egypt is the history of Manetho, a native priest, who lived at the beginning of the third century before Christ. His books perished when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, but epitomes survive in the writings of Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George the Syncellus, while fragments are quoted by Josephus. Manetho divided the history of his country into thirty dynasties, and his system constitutes the framework upon which our knowledge of the great Egyptian past has accumulated.
Divergent views exist regarding the value of Manetho's history, and these are invariably expressed with point and vigour. Professor Breasted, the distinguished American Egyptologist, for Instance, characterizes the chronology of the priestly historian as “a late, careless, and uncritical compilation”, and he holds that it “can be proven wrong from the contemporary monuments in the vast majority of cases”. “ Manetho’s dynastic totals”, he says, “are so absurdly high throughout that they are not worthy of a moment’s credence, being often nearly or quite double the maximum drawn from contemporary monuments. Their accuracy is now maintained only by a small and constantly decreasing number of modern scholars.” Breasted goes even further than that by adding; “The compilation of puerile folk tales by Manetho is hardly worthy of the name history".
Professor Flinders Petrie, whose work as an excavator
