Mariette, the eminent French authority, puts the date at 5004 B.C.; Brugsch, the leading German authority, puts it at about 4500 B.C.; and Meyer, the latest and most cautious of the historians of antiquity, declares 3180 B.C.the latest possible date that can be assigned it.

With these dates the foremost English authorities, Sayce and Flinders Petrie, substantially agree.

This view is also confirmed on astronomical grounds by Mr.Lockyer, the Astronomer Royal.

We have it, then, as the result of a century of work by the most acute and trained Egyptologists, and with the inscriptions upon the temples and papyri before them, both of which are now read with as much facility as many medieval manuscripts, that the reign of Mena must be placed more than five thousand years ago.
But the significance of this conclusion can not be fully understood until we bring into connection with it some other facts revealed by the Egyptian monuments.
The first of these is that which struck Sir Walter Raleigh, that, even in the time of the first dynasties in the Nile Valley, a high civilization had already been developed.

Take, first, man himself: we find sculptured upon the early monuments types of the various races--Egyptians, Israelites, negroes, and Libyans--as clearly distinguishable in these paintings and sculptures of from four to six thousand years ago as the same types are at the present day.