Before Herodotos could be shown round such parts of the sanctuary as were accessible to strangers, it was necessary that he should be introduced to the authorities and receive their permission to visit it. Accordingly he was ushered into what was perhaps the library of the temple, and there a scribe read to him out of a roll the names of the three hundred and thirty kings, beginning with Menes and ending with Mœris. To three only does a story seem to have been attached, either by the scribe or by the interpreter, and only three names therefore did Herodotos enter in his note-book. The first of these was that of Menes, the second that of Nitôkris, the third that of Mœris. Nitôkris was celebrated not only because she was the one native woman who had ruled the country, but also because she had treacherously avenged the death of her brother and then flung herself into the flames. Neit-aker, as she was called in Egyptian, was actually an historical personage; she was the last sovereign of the sixth dynasty, but was very far from being the only queen who had reigned over Egypt. As regards Mœris the statements of Herodotos are only partially correct. He is said to have built the propylæa on the north side of the temple of Ptah, to have dug the great lake of the Fayyûm, and to have erected the pyramids which Herodotos believed he had seen standing in the middle of it. Mœris, however, was not the name of a king, but the Egyptian words Mi ur or “great lake”; the Fayyûm was not created by the excavation of an artificial reservoir, but by banking out the water which had filled the oasis from geological times; and the monuments seen by Herodotos were not pyramids, but statues on pyramidal bases erected by Amon-em-hat III. of the twelfth dynasty in front of an ancient temple. Nor could any educated Egyptian have alleged that a king of the twelfth dynasty, who was not even the last monarch of that dynasty itself, closed the line of the Pharaohs. The whole account must rest on a combination of the Greek historian’s own erroneous conclusions with the misinterpreted statements of the Egyptian “priest.”