palace of Memphis, Ouenephes had built the pyramids of Ko-kome near
Saqqara. Several of the ancient Pharaohs had published books on
theology, or had written treatises on anatomy and medicine; several had
made laws called Kakôû, the male of males, or the bull of bulls. They
explained his name by the statement that he had concerned himself about
the sacred animals; he had proclaimed as gods, Hapis of Memphis, Mnevis
of Heliopolis, and the goat of Mendes.

After him, Binothris had conferred the right of succession upon all
women of the blood-royal. The accession of the III dynasty, a Memphite
one according to Manetho, did not at first change the miraculous
character of this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necherophes,
and the two armies were encamped before each other, when one night the
disk of the moon became immeasurably enlarged, to the great alarm of the
rebels, who recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven,
and yielded without fighting. Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes,
brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection. He
composed, as Teti did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be
identified with the healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these
things seriously, and the Greek writers took them down from their lips
with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the
wise men of Egypt.

What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see,
than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities
or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination,
but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they
dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a
method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the
monuments.