To return to Manetho:—amongst the monarchs of the original Egyptian race there was one named by him Amenophis, (the eighth king of the eighteenth dynasty,) of whom it is stated, in a note of Manetho’s preserved by Syncellus, that he was the Egyptian king whom the Greeks called Memnon. The statue of Memnon at Thebes, celebrated through all antiquity for the melodious sounds which it was said to render at sunrise, is identified in the present day by a multitude of Greek inscriptions; one of which, in particular, records the attestation of Publius Balbinus, who visited the ruins of Thebes in the suite of the empress the wife of Adrian, to his having himself heard the “divine sounds of Memnon or Phamenoph;” which latter name is Amenophis, with the Egyptian masculine article φ prefixed, and omitting the Greek termination. The hieroglyphics carved on the statue, and coeval with its date, had been very carefully copied by the French whilst in possession of Egypt, and were engraved in the splendid work, the _Description de l’Egypte_, to which their researches had given rise. These hieroglyphics contain the alphabetic characters Amnf (being the initial vowel and all the consonants of the name Amenof) inclosed within a ring; a distinction which had been previously observed to take place with the names of the Roman emperors, and of the Grecian kings and queens; and as the rings have hitherto been found to occur in no other instance whatsoever than when containing the names and titles of sovereigns, they are regarded as characteristic signs. It should be remarked, that in the hieroglyphic writing, as in the languages of other eastern nations most nearly connected with Egypt, the vowels are often omitted, and when expressed, have not always a fixed sound. The coincidence of the reading of the hieroglyphic name with that recorded by Manetho, and with the Greek inscription on the statue itself, was so far confirmatory of Manetho’s authority; it was also highly interesting in the evidence it afforded of the employment of the same hieroglyphic alphabet, that was in after use in the times of the Ptolemies and the Cæsars, even in the very early periods of the Egyptian monarchy; for the reign of Amenophis was in the dynasty preceding that of Sesostris: it also indicated the further [p182] advantage to be gained by the application of the alphabet in decyphering other proper names, distinguished by being inclosed in rings, existing on other statues, and in the more ancient temples generally. Considerable progress had been made in reading these, which in several instances had been found to correspond with the names of the kings of the same and of subsequent dynasties to Amenophis, as given by Manetho, when a most important discovery was made of the existence of a genealogical record, in hieroglyphics, of the titles of thirty-nine kings anterior to Sesostris, chronologically arranged. We have already noticed that the