In one respect, at all events, this mythical history of Egypt is the creation of Herodotos himself and not of his guides. This is the order in which he has arranged the kings. It is the order in which he visited the monuments to which the dragomen attached their names, and it thus throws a welcome light on the course of his movements. With this clue in our hands we can follow him from one part of the temple of Ptah to another, and can trace his footsteps as far as the Fayyûm. It is true he asserts that his list of kings was given on the authority of “the Egyptians and the priests,” and that it was they who reckoned three hundred and forty-one generations from Menes, the founder of the kingdom, to Sethos, the antagonist of Sennacherib, the number of kings and high-priests during the period being exactly equal to the number of generations. But it can easily be shown that the calculation was made by Herodotos himself, and that neither the “Egyptians,” whose language he did not understand, nor the sacristans, whom he dignifies with the title of priests, are in any way responsible for the absurd statement that a generation and a reign are equivalent terms. The number of kings whose names he heard from his dragoman is exactly eleven; in addition to these, he tells us, the names of three hundred and thirty kings were read to him from a papyrus roll by one of the temple scribes; so that the number three hundred and forty-one is obtained by adding the three hundred and thirty names to the eleven which were furnished him by his guides. Among the three hundred and thirty must have been included some of the latter, though the Greek traveller did not know it. At Memphis Herodotos learned that Menes was the first king of united Egypt, though the further statements he records in regard to him are not easily reconcilable one with the other. On the one hand he was informed that in his time all Egypt was a marsh except the Thebaic nome—a piece of information which seemed to Herodotos consonant with fact—on the other hand, that the land on which Memphis was built was a sort of huge embankment reclaimed from the Nile by Menes, who forced the river to leave its old channel under the plateau of Gizeh and to run in its present bed. Mariette believed that the dyke by means of which the first of the Pharaohs effected this change in the course of the river still exists near Kafr el-Ayyât, and it is geologically clear that the Nile once ran along the edge of the Libyan desert, and that the rock out of which the Sphinx was carved must have been one of those which jutted out into the stream. But it was not on account of his engineering works that the name of Menes has been preserved in the histories of Herodotos. It was because he was the founder of the temple of Ptah and the city of Memphis. The temple which was the object of the tourist’s visit owed its origin to him, and the traveller’s sight-seeing naturally began with the mention of his name.