C., and the dates assigned by the various
schools of chronology to the subsequent Dynasties differ only by
quantities so small as to be practically negligible. But when we
attempt to trace the chronology upwards from 1580 B.C., the consent
of authorities immediately vanishes, and is replaced by a gulf of
divergence which there is no possibility of bridging. The great
divergence occurs in the well-known dark period of Egyptian history
between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Dynasties, where monumental
evidence is extremely scanty, almost non-existent, and where historians
have to grope for facts with no better light to guide them than
is afforded by the History of Manetho, and the torn fragments of
the Turin Papyrus. The traditional dating used to place the end
of the Twelfth Dynasty somewhere around 2500 B.C., allowing thus
some 900 odd years for the intervening dynasties before the rise
of the Eighteenth. The modern German school, however, represented
by Erman, Mahler, Meyer, and the American, Professor Breasted,
arguing from the astronomical evidence of the Kahun Papyrus, cuts
this allowance short by over 700 years, allowing only 208 years
for the great gap, and proposing to pack the five Dynasties and
the Hyksos domination into that time. Professor Petrie, finally,
accepting, like the German school, the astronomical evidence of
the Kahun Papyrus, interprets it differently, and pushes back the
dates by a complete cycle of 1,460 years, allowing 1,666 years
for the gap between the Twelfth Dynasty and the Eighteenth.
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