Manetho's History is, however, the chief source of our information as to the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. He was commissioned to compile this History by Ptolemy Philadelphus, "from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information," [50] whose infallibility is taken for granted. He was "eminently qualified for such a task, being," as Mr. Laing will vouch, [51] "a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebbenytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples." Let us by all means read Manetho's History; but where is it? It is "unfortunately lost, ... but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus, and Syncellus.... With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian Fathers" [52] (so different from the learned, judicious, upright priests of the sun), "these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies and in several instances they have been obviously tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament, ... but there can be _no doubt_ that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 B.C." [53] "On the whole, we have to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history." Manetho, however, needed confirmation against the aspersions of the orthodox, who thought he might be deficient in critical delicacy, and prone to exaggerate as even later historians had done. Their casuistic minds also suggested that his list comprised Kings who had ruled different provinces simultaneously. But this "effugium" was cut off by the witness of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. "This has now been done to such an extent that it may be fairly said that Manetho is confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his Kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that, successively." [54]