Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

In addition, we have the testimony of a Heliopolitan priest named Manetho. In the third century BC he compiled a comprehensive and widely respected history of Egypt which provided extensive king lists for the entire dynastic period. Like the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone, Manetho’s history also reached much further back into the past to speak of a distant epoch when gods had ruled in the Nile Valley. Manetho’s complete text has not come down to us, although copies of it seem to have been in circulation as late as the ninth century ad.7 Fortuitously, however, fragments of it were preserved in the writings of the Jewish chronicler Josephus (AD 60) and of Christian writers such as Africanus (AD 300), Eusebius (AD 340) and George Syncellus (AD 800).8 These fragments, in the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman of the University of South Carolina, provide the ‘framework for modern approaches to the study of Egypt’s past’.