The history of Manetho is unfortunately lost, being probably the greatest loss the world has sustained by the burning of the Alexandrian library, but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus and Syncellus, of whom Eusebius and Africanus profess to give Manetho's lists and dates of dynasties and kings from the first King Menes down to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian fathers, these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies, and in several instances they have obviously been tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament. But enough remains to show that Manetho's lists comprised thirty-one dynasties, and about 370 kings, whose successive reigns extended over a period of about 5500 years, from the accession of Menes to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., making the date of the first historical king who united Upper and Lower Egypt, about 5800 B.C. There may be some doubt as to the precise dates, for the lists, of Manetho have obviously been tampered with to some extent by the Christian fathers who quoted them, but there can be no doubt that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 B.C. The only other historical information as to the history of Ancient Egypt was gleaned from references to it in the extant works of Josephus and of Greek authors, especially Homer, Herodotus, and Diodorus Siculus. Josephus, in his _Antiquity of the Jews_, quotes passages from Manetho, but they only extend to the period of the Hyksos invasion, the Captivity of the Jews, and the Exodus, which are all comparatively recent events in Manetho's annals. Homer's account of hundred-gated Thebes does not carry us back beyond the echo which had reached Ionian Greece of the splendours of the nineteenth dynasty. Herodotus visited Egypt about 450 B.C., and wrote a description of it from what he saw and heard on the spot. It contains a good deal of valuable information, for he was a shrewd observer. But he was credulous, and not very critical in distinguishing between fact and fable, and it is evident that his sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides, and even the more authentic information is so disconnected and mixed with fable, that it can hardly be accepted as material for history. As far as it goes, however, it tends to confirm Manetho, as, for instance, in giving the names correctly of the kings who built the three great pyramids, and in saying that he saw the statues of 342 successive high priests of the great Temple of Heliopolis, which correspond very well with Manetho's lists of 370 kings.