"When sat on the throne of the Pharaohs and it became fashionable to inquire into the past history of the extraordinary country which had been brought willy-nilly within the pale of Hellenism, a learned priest named , "The Gift of " (Manethoth), or possibly "The Gift of " (Manutjo), of in the , was commissioned by to collect all that was known of the Egyptian annals and translate them into Greek as Αἰγυπτιαϰὰ. This was done, and until the discoveries of Manetho's work, half destroyed as it now is, imitated and garbled by generations of ignorant copyists, was, with the exception of the sketches by Herodotus and , the sole Egyptian authority on the history of Egypt. A similar rôle with regard to the history of Mesopotamia was played by the work of a Babylonian priest named , who is said to have been a contemporary of (250 B.C.). ... Like that of Manetho, his work is only known to us through the labours of copyists and compilers."