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33 The priests then showed Herodotus rows of statues representing the successive Pharaohs and related to him various details per- taining to some of these kings and their claims to divine ancestry. "The beings represented by these images were very far indeed from being gods," Herodotus commented; "however," he went on to say: In times preceding them it was otherwise: Then Egypt had gods for its rulers, who dwelt upon the Earth with men, one of them being always supreme above the rest. The last of these was Horus, the son of Osiris, whom the Greeks called Apollo. He deposed Typhon, and ruled over Egypt as its last god-king. In his book Against Apion, the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus quoted as one of his sources on the history of Egypt the writings of an Egyptian priest named Manetho. Such writings were never found; but any doubt regarding the existence of such a historian was dispelled when it was realized that his writ- ings formed the basis for several works by later Greek historians. It is now established with certainty that Manetho (his hieroglyphic name meant "Gift of Thoth"), indeed a high priest and great scholar, compiled the history of Egypt in several volumes at the command of king Ptolemy Philadelphus circa 270 B.C. The origi- nal manuscript was deposited in the great library of Alexandria, only to perish there together with numerous other invaluable docu- ments when the building and its contents were set on fire by Muslim conquerors in A.D. 642. Manetho was the first known historian to have divided the Egyp- tian rulers into dynasties—a practice continued to this day. His King List—names, lengths of reign, order of succession, and some other pertinent information—has been mainly preserved through the writings of Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea (in the third and fourth centuries A.D.). These and other versions based on Manetho agree that he listed as the first ruler of the first dy- nasty of Pharaohs the king Men (Menes in Greek)—the very same king that Herodotus reported, based on his own _ investi- gations in Egypt. This fact has since been confirmed by modem discoveries, such as the Tablet of Abydos (Fig. 7) in which the Pharaoh Seti I, ac- companied by his son, Ramses II, listed the names of seventy-five of his predecessors. The first one to be named is Mena. The Contending of Horus and Seth