ABSTRACT
TH E frontier is Time, and this chapter is the story ofthe men who pushed it back several thousand years;first M. J. de Morgan, followed by Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), one of the greatest Egyptologists of all time. Petrie published many books on Egypt, including a famous History which is one of the standard works on the subject. In the edition published in 1894, Chapter II, on the first three dynasties, contains the following observations:
When Petrie wrote that, he was making use of the latest material available to him at the time. For him, as for earlier generations of Egyptologists, the time frontier stopped at the reign of Snofru, last king of the Third Dynasty (circa 2740 B.C.). As far back as his reign, historians were on firm ground. History could be traced not only from the written chronicle of Manetho and others, but through the physical existence of tombs, monuments, inscriptions, works of art and antiquities of many kinds. But the period before Snofru was, as Petrie wrote, a blank. There was a handful of earlier monarchs, including the great Menes, founder of the First Dynasty, but of their tombs, their art, their monuments, hardly a thing was known. In fact it was by no means certain that they had
ever existed outside the imagination of later Egyptian chroniclers.
