Note 148 — KRITIAS.

Plato, Timæus, pp. 22-23. The great knowledge of past history (real or supposed) possessed by the Egyptian priests, and the length of their back chronology, alleged by themselves to depend upon records preserved from a period of 17,000 years, are well known from the interesting narrative of Herodotus (ii. 37-43-77-145) — μνήμην ἀνθρώπων πάντων ἐπασκέοντες (the priests of Egypt) μάλιστα, λογιώτατοί εἰσι μακρῷ τῶν ἐγὼ ἐς διάπειραν ἀφικόμην (ii. 77) … καὶ ταῦτα ἀτρεκέως φασὶν ἐπίστασθαι, αἰεί τε λογιζόμενοι, καὶ αἰεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα (ii. 145). Herodotus (ii. 143) tells us that the Egyptian priests at Thebes held the same language to the historian Hekatæus, as Plato here says that they held to Solon, when he talked about Grecian antiquity in the persons of Phorôneus and Niobê. Hekatæus laid before them his own genealogy — a dignified list of sixteen ancestors, beginning from a God — upon which they out-bid him with a counter-genealogy (ἀντεγενεαλόγησαν) of 345 chief priests, who had succeeded each other from father to son. Plato appears to have contracted great reverence for this long duration of unchanged regulations in Egypt, and for the fixed, consecrated, customs, with minute subdivision of professional castes and employments: the hymns, psalmody, and music, having continued without alteration for 10,000 years (literally 10,000 — οὐχ ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν μυριοστόν, ἀλλ’ ὄντως, Plat. Legg. ii. p. 656 E).