I do not imagine that the date we are considering was a mere fiction. To invent history was not an Egyptian custom. What might have been rightfully assigned to the time of Sesortosis might not have been rightly understood, and so came to be wrongly described. They had hewn and built with stone centuries before his time. But there was an architectural improvement which must have commenced somewhere about his reign, which we see perfected in the Pyramids, and which the Egyptians ever afterwards retained, and that was the practice of building with enormous blocks of stone, cut and fitted together with the utmost care and precision. We can accept Manetho’s statement, when interpreted to mean this. The Egyptians had already had a long national existence. They were a very observant and thoughtful people. Of all people of whom we know anything, they had the strongest craving to leave behind them grand, and, if possible, everlasting historical monuments. But they observed that all buildings constructed with small stones, sooner or later, but at all events, in a few centuries, passed away without leaving a record. They fell to the ground, or they were taken down to supply materials for new buildings, or the stone they were built of was burnt for lime. The consumption of lime has always been great in Egypt; and although the limestone mountains are not far from the river, and throughout the greater part of the country seldom more than two or three miles from it, old buildings have always been made to supply much material for this purpose. Mehemet Ali, notwithstanding that the limestone ridges of Thebes were close by, threw down one of the magnificent propylæa of Karnak to get lime for some paltry nitre-works he was setting up in the neighbourhood. To secure, then, as far as possible, their great monuments and tombs against these causes of decay and overthrow, they, at about the time of the date we are discussing, changed their method of building, and began to use such large stones, that it would generally be less troublesome and costly to get new stone at the quarries for building and for lime, than to overthrow an enormous structure, which could not be done without some machinery, and much tackle and labour. But their ideas, and the knowledge and the skill shown in these great buildings agree with other considerations in obliging us to carry back the art of building with hewn stone to a very remote epoch, far beyond any contemporary monuments, and far beyond Menes, whose name is the first to appear in the annals of Egypt, and who must have reigned not far from six thousand years ago. At this period, we cannot now entertain any doubts on the subject, civilization in Egypt was in a very advanced state; not very different, indeed, from what we find it at the date of the oldest of the still existing monuments. Upon the earliest of these we see the public and private life of the Egyptians sculptured and painted by their own hands.