and that the change of nature had not entailed any interruption in the line of sovereigns. Another tradition would not allow that the contact between the human and divine series had been so close. Between the Ennead and Menes, it intercalated one or more lines of Theban or Thinite kings; but these were of so formless, shadowy, and undefined an aspect, that they were called Manes, and there was attributed to them at most only a passive existence, as of persons who had always been in the condition of the dead, and had never been subjected to the trouble of passing through life. Menes was the first in order of those who were actually living. From his time, the Egyptians claimed to possess an uninterrupted list of the Pharaohs who had ruled over the Nile valley. As far back as the XVIIIth dynasty this list was written upon papyrus, and furnished the number of years that each prince occupied the throne, or the length of his life.[*] * The only one of these lists which we possess, the "Turin Royal Papyrus," was bought, nearly intact, at Thebes, by Drovetti, about 1818, but was accidentally injured by him in bringing home. The fragments of it were acquired, together with the rest of the collection, by the Piedmontese Government in 1820, and placed in the Turin Museum, where Champollion saw and drew attention to them in 1824. Seyffarth carefully collected and arranged them in the order in which they now are; subsequently Lepsius gave a facsimile of them in 1840, in his _Auswahl der wichtigsten Urhunden_, pls. i.-vi., but this did not include the verso; Champollion-Figeac edited in 1847, in the _Revue Archeologique_, 1st series, vol. vi., the tracings taken by the younger Champollion before Seyffarth's arrangement; lastly, Wilkinson published the whole in detail in 1851. Since then, the document has been the subject of continuous investigation: E. de Rouge has reconstructed, in an almost conclusive manner, the pages containing the first six dynasties, and Lauth, with less certainty, those which deal with the eight following dynasties. Extracts from it were inscribed in the temples, or even in the tombs of private persons; and three of these abridged catalogues are still extant, two coming from the temples of Seti I. and Ramses II. at Abydos,[*] while the other was discovered in the tomb of a person of rank named Tunari, at Saqqara.[**] They divided this interminable succession of often problematical personages into dynasties, following in this division, rules of which we are ignorant, and which varied in the course of ages. In the time of the Ramessides, names in the list which subsequently under the Lagides formed five groups were made to constitute one single dynasty.[***]