Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

A chronicle, named the ancient[149], and which some consider anterior, others posterior, to Manetho, gives still different calculations. The total duration of its kings is 36,525 years, of which the sun reigned 30,000, the other gods 3984, and the demi-gods 217; there remaining for those of the human race only 2339 years. There are thus also but 113 generations, in place of the 340 of Herodotus.

A learned man of an order different from that of Manetho, the astronomer Eratosthenes, discovered and published, in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, about 240 years before Christ, a particular list of thirty-eight kings of Thebes, commencing with Menes, and continuing for a space of 1024 years; of which we have an extract that Syncellus has copied from Apollodorus[150]. Scarcely any of the names found in this list correspond with those of the others.

Diodorus went to Egypt in the reign of Ptolemy Auletes, about sixty years before Christ, consequently two centuries after Manetho, and four after Herodotus. He also collected from the narratives of the priests a history of the country, and his account is again quite different from those of his predecessors[151]. It is no longer Menes who built Memphis, but Uchoræus; and long before his time Busiris the second had built Thebes. The eighth ancestor of Uchoræus, Osymandyas, possessed himself of Bactria, and crushed rebellions in it. Long after him, Sesoosis made still more extensive conquests, having proceeded as far as the Ganges, and returned by Scythia and the Tanais. Unfortunately these names of kings are unknown to all the preceding historians, and none of the nations which they conquered have preserved the slightest traces of them. As to the gods and heroes, their reign, according to Diodorus, extended through a space of 18,000 years, while that of the human sovereigns was 15,000. Four hundred and seventy of the kings were Egyptians, and four Ethiopians, without reckoning the Persians and Macedonians. The fables, besides, with which the whole is intermingled, do not yield in childishness to those of Herodotus.

In the eighteenth year of the Christian era, Germanicus, the nephew of Tiberius, led by the desire of becoming acquainted with the antiquities of this celebrated land, went over to Egypt, at the risk of incurring the displeasure of a prince so suspicious as his uncle, and proceeded up the Nile as far as Thebes. It was no more Sesostris or Osymandyas, of whom the priests spoke to him as a conqueror, but Rhamses, who, at the head of 700,000 men, had invaded Libya, Ethiopia, Media, Persia, Bactria, Scythia, Asia-Minor, and Syria[152].

Lastly, in the celebrated article of Pliny upon the obelisks[153], we find names of kings which are not to be seen elsewhere; Sothies, Mnevis, Zmarreus, Eraphius, Mestires, a Semenpserteus, contemporary of Pythagoras, &c. A Ramises, who might be thought the same as Rhamses, is there made to live at the time of the siege of Troy.

I am not sure whether it has been attempted to reconcile these discordant lists by the supposition that the kings have borne several names. For my own part, when I consider not only the discrepancy of these various accounts, but, above all, the mixture of authentic facts, attested by vast monuments, and of puerile extravagancies, it appears to me much more natural to conclude, that the Egyptian priests possessed no real history whatever; that, inferior still to those of India, they had not even suitable and connected fables; that they preserved only lists more or less defective of their kings, and some remembrances of the more distinguished among them, of those especially who had taken care to have their names inscribed upon the temples and other great edifices which adorned their country; but that these remembrances were confused, that they rested merely upon the traditional explanation which was given to the representations painted or sculptured upon the monuments; explanations founded solely upon hieroglyphical inscriptions, conceived, like that which has been handed down to us[154], in very general terms, and which, passing from mouth to mouth, were altered, as to their details, at the pleasure of those who communicated them to strangers; and that it is consequently impossible to rest any proposition relative to the antiquity of the presently existing continents, upon the shreds of these traditions, so incomplete even in their own times, and become utterly unintelligible under the pen of those who have been the means of transmitting them to us.

Should this assertion require other proofs, they would be found in the list of the sacred works of Hermes, which were carried by the Egyptian priests in their solemn processions. Clement of Alexandria[155] names them all to the number of forty-two, and there is not even found among them, as is the case with the Brahmins, one epic poem, or one book, which has the pretension to be a narrative, or to fix in any way a single great action or a single event.

The interesting researches of M. Champollion the younger, and his astonishing discoveries regarding the language of the hieroglyphics[156], far from overturning these conjectures, on the contrary, confirm them. This ingenious antiquary has read, in a series of hieroglyphic paintings in the temple of Abydos[157], the prenomens of a certain number of kings placed in regular succession one after another; and a part of these prenomens (the last ten) recurring on various other monuments, accompanied with proper names, he has concluded that they are those of kings who bore those proper names, and this has afforded him nearly the same kings, and in the same order, as those of which Manetho composes his eighteenth dynasty, that which expelled the shepherds. The concordance, however, is not complete: in the painting of Abydos, six of the names that appear in Manetho’s list are wanting; there are some, again, which bear no resemblance; and, lastly, there unfortunately occurs a blank before the most remarkable of all, the Rhamses, who appears the same as the king represented on many of the finest monuments, with the attributes of a great conqueror. It would be, according to M. Champollion, in the list of Manetho, the Sethos, the chief of the nineteenth dynasty, who, in fact, is indicated as powerful in ships and in cavalry, and as having carried his arms into Cyprus, Media and Persia. M. Champollion thinks, with Marsham and many others, that it is this Rhamses, or this Sethos, who is the Sesostris, or the Sesoosis of the Greeks; and this opinion possesses some probability, in this respect, that the representations of the victories of Rhamses, probably carried over the wandering tribes in the vicinity of Egypt, or at the most into Syria, have given rise to those fabulous ideas of vast conquests attributed, by some other confusion, to a Sesostris. But, in Manetho, it is in the twelfth dynasty, and not in the eighteenth, that a prince bearing the name of Sesostris is inscribed, who is noted as having conquered Asia and Thrace[158]. Marsham also asserts, that this twelfth dynasty and the eighteenth make but one[159]. Manetho could not himself, therefore, have understood the lists which he copied. Lastly, if we admit in their full degree, both the historical truth of this bas-relief of Abydos, and its accordance, whether with the part of Manetho’s lists that seems to correspond to it, or with the other hieroglyphic inscriptions, this consequence would result, that the pretended eighteenth dynasty, the first regarding which the ancient chronologists begin to manifest some agreement, is also the first which has left traces of its existence upon monuments. Manetho may have consulted this document and others of a like nature; but it is not the less obvious, that a mere list, a series of names or of portraits, as he has throughout, is far from being a history.

Ought not this, then, which is proved and demonstrated with respect to the Indians, and which I have rendered so probable with respect to the inhabitants of the valley of the Nile, be presumed also to be the case with those of the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris? Established, like the Indians[160] and Egyptians, upon a much frequented route of commerce, in vast plains, which they had been obliged to intersect with numerous canals; instructed, like them, by hereditary priests, the pretended depositaries of secret books, the privileged possessors of the sciences, astrologers, builders of pyramids, and other great monuments[161]; should they not also resemble them in other essential points? Should not their history be equally a mere collection of legendary tales? I venture almost to assert, that not only is this probable, but that it is actually demonstrated.