Aegyptiaca (Epitome)
This1 reigned for 62 years. He was carried off by a hippopotamus2 and perished.
2. Athôthis, his son, for 57 years. He built the palace at Memphis;3 and his anatomical works4 are extant, for he was a physician.
3. Kenkenês, his son, for 31 years.
4. Uenephês, his son, for 23 years. In his reign a great famine seized Egypt. He erected the pyramids near Kôchômê.5
5. Usaphaidos,6 his son, for 20 years.
6. Miebidos,6 his son, for 26 years.
7. Semempsês, his son, for 18 years. In his reign a very great calamity befell Egypt.
8. Biênechês, his son, for 26 years.
Total, 253 years.7
Eusebius also sets out the details of the First Dynasty in much the same way as Africanus.
- 1This (Anc. Egyptian Theny), near Girga, about 310 miles S. of Cairo (Baedeker8, p. 231), the capital of the nome of This, and the seat of the First and Second Dynasties. The cemetery of the First Dynasty kings was near Abydos: see Petrie, Royal Tombs, i. and ii., and Baedeker8, p. 260.
- 2For a representation of a king fighting with a hippopotamus, see a seal-impression in Petrie, Royal Tombs, II. vii. 6; and for a hippopotamus-hunt, see a year-name of Udymu, Schäfer, Palermo Stone, p. 20, No. 8. With the whole story, cf. the miraculous deliverance of Mênas by a crocodile in Diodorus Siculus, i. 89.
- 3Building of palace at Memphis—by Min or Mênês, Herodotus, ii. 99, Josephus, Ant. viii. 6, 2, 155; by his son Athôthis, says Manetho; by Uchoreus, Diod. i. 50.
- 4For the later study of anatomy (including, perhaps, the practice of vivisection) by kings of Ptolemaic Egypt, see G. Lumbroso, Glossario, s.v. Ἀνατομική.
- 5Kôchômê has been identified with Sakkâra, and excavations carried out there in the Archaic Cemetery from 1935 by W. B. Emery (assisted by Zaki Saad) have gone far to confirm Manetho. Several tombs which date from the First Dynasty were discovered at Sakkâra in 1937 and 1938. One of these, the tomb of Nebetka under the 5th king of Dynasty I., was found to contain in its interior a stepped-pyramid construction of brickwork: during the building the form of the tomb was altered to a palacefaçade mastaba.
- 6These forms are really the genitives of the names Usaphaïs and Miebis.
- 7The actual total of the items given is 263 years.
DOI: 10.4159/DLCL.manetho-history_egypt.1940