The discussion stood thus when, in the spring of 1897, the fortunate hand of De Morgan, the former Directeur-général des Services des antiquités égyptiennes, succeeded by renewed excavations in Neggadeh in furnishing the connections between the objects found by Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh and those found by Amélineau in Abydos. He discovered, not far from the necropolis, excavated by Petrie, the tomb of a king which, on the one hand, contained pottery and tablets like those found by Petrie, and on the other, objects entirely like those found by Amélineau. Thus it was proved that both Petrie's tombs and those of Amélineau belonged to the same period, and, indeed, the oldest period, of Egyptian history, before the third dynasty. They were older than the most ancient objects which we had thought that we possessed. But it was still impossible to date them exactly. At this point, an epoch-making discovery of Dr. Sethe, privat-docent at the University of Berlin, placed the whole matter at a single stroke on a comparatively sure foundation. He pointed out that the inscriptions on a few unassuming potsherds from Abydos contained not only Banner names of old kings, but also their ordinary names. These names were not inclosed, as later, in cartouches, and even contained many unusual spellings; but they were still too clear to be misunderstood. Sethe succeeded in identifying the names of the fifth, the sixth and the seventh kings of the first Manethonian dynasty, called by the Greek authors Usaphais, Miebais and Semempses. Thus it became extremely probable that all these newly discovered objects were from the first dynasty, but still not absolutely certain; for the three names occurred only on fragments of vases, and absolutely nothing was known of how these fragments were found. The proof that they belonged to the other objects was wanting. A very skeptical investigator might still have said that the other objects were older, that the potsherds had only fallen accidentally into ruined tombs of an older period; or he might have said quite the contrary, that the potsherds were older than the tombs.