The truth may be somewhere near the mean of the shorter chronologies given in the list.[113] That of Bunsen is liable to very grave objections; more especially as he adds to it other views, altogether unsupported by historical evidence, which would carry back the deluge to 10,000 years B.C. It rests wholly on the chronology of Manetho, who lived 300 years B.C.; and who, even if the Egyptians then possessed authentic documents extending 3700 years before his time, may have erred in his rendering of them; and is farther liable to grave suspicions of having merely grouped the names on the monuments of his country arbitrarily in Sothic cycles. Farther, they rest on an interpretation of Manetho, which supposes his early dynasties to have been successive, while good reasons have been found to prove that many of them consist of contemporaneous petty sovereigns of parts of Egypt. The early parts of Manetho's lists are purely mythical, and it is impossible to fix the point where his authentic history commences. He copied from monuments which have no consecutive dates, the precise age of which could only be vaguely known even in his time, and which are different in their statements in different localities. It is only by making due allowance for these uncertainties that any historical value can be attached to these earlier dynasties of Manetho. Yet Bunsen has built on an uncertain interpretation of this writer, as handed down in a very fragmentary and evidently garbled condition, and on the equally or more uncertain chronology of Eratosthenes, a system differing from all previous belief on the subject, from the Hebrew history, and from all former interpretations of the monuments and Manetho.[114] Discarding, therefore, in the mean time, this date, and the still older one claimed by Mariette,[115] we may roughly estimate the date of Menes as 2000 to 2500 years B.C.,[116] and proceed to state some of the facts developed by Egyptologists.