Indeed, there is a fact which indicates that this is the case, and that the literary culture of Babylonia had been imported into the valley of the Nile at a time when Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms. At an early epoch an ingenious system of official chronology had been invented in Babylonia. The years were named there after the chief events that had occurred in each of them, among these the accession or death of a king being naturally prominent. At the death of a king a list was drawn up of his regnal years, with their characteristic events, and such lists were from time to time combined into longer chronicles. The Babylonians were preeminently a commercial people, and for purposes of trade it was necessary that contracts and other legal documents should be dated accurately, and that in case of a dispute the date should be easily ascertained. Now an exactly similar system of dating had been adopted in Egypt before the age of the First historical dynasty. A pre-Menic monument dated in this way has been discovered at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, and the same method of reckoning time is found on ivory tablets that have been disinterred at Abydos. The method lasted down to the age of the Fifth dynasty, since the Museum of Palermo contains the fragment of a stone from Heliopolis, on which the chronology of the Egyptian kings is given from Menes onward, each year being named after the event or events from which it had received its official title. The successive reigns are divided from one another as in the Babylonian lists, and the height of the Nile in each year is further added--a note which naturally is of Egyptian origin. It is, therefore, interesting to observe that it is added as a note, independent of the event which gave its name to the year. Nothing could prove more clearly the foreign origin of the whole system of chronology, since, had it been of native invention, the height of the Nile, on which the prosperity of the country depended, would have been the first event to be recorded. After the fall of the Old Empire this ancient Babylonian method of dating seems to have passed out of use like the Babylonian seal-cylinder; at all events we find no further traces of it. It was, in short, an exotic which never took kindly to Egyptian soil. Did the “dynastic” Egyptians bring this method of dating with them, or did they borrow it after their settlement in Egypt? The second supposition is very difficult to entertain, for intimate trade relations between Babylonia and Upper (or Lower)[97] Egypt in the pre-Menic age appear to be out of the question, and are unsupported by any known facts. And literary correspondence, such as was carried on in the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, seems equally out of the question. How, then, did the Egyptians come to learn the peculiar Babylonian system of chronology unless the founders of the culture of which it formed a portion had originally brought it with them from the east?