The story of the royal tombs of Egypt begins with the excavation of the Sacred City of Osiris, Abydos. The work there is by no means the earliest in point of time of the series of discoveries which have been made in connection with the burial of royalty, though Abydos was one of the sites excavated by Mariette, who revealed to the world the wonderful XIXth Dynasty work of the temple of Sety I there. Much had been discovered at Thebes and at Memphis before Amélineau and Petrie began at Abydos those researches which have revolutionised our knowledge of early Egyptian history and civilisation, and have given back to us several centuries of the story of human effort which had previously been shrouded in darkness; but it seems best to follow the subject down the line of history rather than to follow the order of discovery with its consequent mixing up of all the dynasties and periods. Up to the nineties of last century, it may be said that practically nothing was known of those earliest Kings of Egypt who reigned before the time of the IVth Dynasty. The history of Egypt began with the Pyramid-builders, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura; and so far as any real knowledge went, Egyptian civilisation sprang, like Athene, full-armed and full grown into being, and offered to the world as its firstfruits the most gigantic structures ever reared by the hand of man. [Illustration: 18. COLONNADE IN TEMPLE OF SETY I, ABYDOS.] Obviously this was an impossibility, for things do not happen thus in real life, and the advance of civilisation is a business, not of leaps and bounds, but of slow and ordered progress; but before the Pyramid-builders there was nothing in Egyptian history but a gulf of misty darkness, in which a few dim and mighty shapes could be faintly discerned through the clouds. Manetho, the Egyptian historian of Sebennytos, preserved in the few fragments of his story which have survived the names, and a few more or less incredible legends, of the great men who had lived and reigned before the Pyramid-period; but they were only shadows, and the bulk of what little he told us of them was too fantastic to command any respect. The chief figure of his story was the king Menes, or Mena, who was said to have founded Memphis, and who seemed to have some semblance of reality among the pale shades of the others; but even he came to us in Manetho’s pages in such a questionable shape as to seem more a figure of romance than of fact.