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The Tables of Abydos and of Memphis: Egyptian

The conclusion of all this reasoning is self-apparent. The APPENDIX. history of the Egyptian Kings of the united monarchies of Thebes and Memphis begins with the 12th dynasty; with its accession the tide of Egyptian history brightens; the priests retain without difficulty a remembrance of the kings that had governed the whole country, whereas previously they had seen before them a crowd of local sovereigns, of mere chiefs of cities and of petty kings independent of each other-a confused throng from which they chose whom they pleased according to the different degrees of renown that each of these petty princes had been able to acquire in the different great centres of the theocratic power. Some of these Pharaohs, the most celebrated for instance of those who reared the Pyramids, and the old King Papi, are inscribed, alone and the same time, upon the lists of Upper and Lower Egypt. But the inscription of the name of Menes, the legendary founder of the empire, upon the Theban list of Abydos, and his exclusion from the Memphian list of Sakkara, confirm the opinion that we owe what we have of Egyptian history in form to the labors of the Theban writers belonging to the palmy time of Egyptian literature, the age of the Pharaohs of the dynasty of Rameses. VII.

THE ARMY OF RAMESES II-THE MILITARY CASTE, (p. 98.) THE figures given by Diodorus (Book I., ch. 54) for the army of Sesoosis (Rameses) are 600,000 foot-soldiers, 24,000 horsemen and 27,000 chariots. The only specimen of horsemanship that has been discovered on all the monuments explored in old Egypt, from Memphis to the Cataracts, is a veritable caricature, viz., a terrified fugitive twisting and struggling on the back of a runaway horse. Diodorus says elsewhere (Book I., ch. 31,) that, in his time, the population of Egypt ran up to 3,000,000 of souls, and that it had been APPENDIX. millions under the Ptolemies. This last estimate, without being impossible, seems very small when compared with the cultivable surface of the country, even putting the latter at its highest estimate. The actual number of 2,900,000 already surpasses the average population of France in respect to the extent of its territory. It is true that in the time of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, the cultivable surface of Egypt may have been double what it is now, and this would give us, all proportions carefully observed, a total of 6,000,000 souls. In his "Memoirs Dictated at Saint Helena," the former general of the army of the East pretends that under good administration, when irrigating canals extended from the valley of the Nile to the Oasis of Libya, this number may have risen to 10 millions. But did a foundation for this hypothesis ever really exist?

However that may have been, here is what Herodotus has told us of the military caste in Egypt:

Euterpe CLXIV.