Two centuries after Herodotus (about 260 years before Christ) Ptolemy Philadelphus, a prince of a foreign race, wished to become acquainted with the history of the country which events had called him to govern. A priest, called Manetho, was employed to write it for him. It was not from registers or archives that he pretended to compile this work, but from the sacred books of Agathodæmon, the son of the second Hermes, and the father of Tat, who had copied it upon pillars erected before the flood by Tot or the first Hermes, in the Seriadic land[148]. And this second Hermes, this Agathodæmon, this Tat, are personages of whom nothing had ever been said before, any more than of the Seriadic land, or of its pillars. The deluge itself was an event entirely unknown to the Egyptians of preceding times, and concerning which Manetho says nothing in what remains of his dynasties. The product resembles its source; not only is the whole full of absurdities, but they are absurdities peculiar to the work, and utterly irreconcilable with those which the priests of older times had related to Solon and Herodotus. It is Vulcan who commences the series of divine kings. He reigns 9000 years; the gods and demi-gods reign 1985 years. The names, and successions, and dates of Manetho are utterly unlike any thing that was published before or after him; and from the discrepancy of the extracts given by Josephus, Julius Africanus, and Eusebius, we may infer that his narratives were as obscure and confused in themselves, as they were discordant with those of other authors. Even the duration of the respective reigns of his human kings is not settled. According to Julius Africanus, it extended to 5101; according to Eusebius, to 4723; and according to Syncellus, to 3555 years. It might be thought that the differences in the names and cyphers arose from the inaccuracy of copyists; but Josephus quotes a passage at length, the details of which are manifestly in contradiction with the extracts of his successors. 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.