The ancestors of Menes, named "Horus-people" or "Hawk-people" after an early king who became one of their chief gods, consolidated the disparate southern districts around the First Cataract of Aswan in the Nile Valley into the Upper Kingdom, named for its location upstream on the northward-flowing Nile. The Hawk-people established their center at Theni during the reigns of as many as 50 kings while they gradually fought their way northward (down the Nile) against the "Set-people," presumably a wealthier and more advanced civilization who controlled the enviable farmland in the Fertile Crescent. Besides ideal farmland that never required irrigation, the Delta region also had the advantage of proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, the ancient highway of commerce, for trading with the ancient Syrians and Libyans. In roughly 3400 B.C. after a very long period of war, the Horus-worshipers defeated the north in a battle near Anu (Heliopolis), and established their rule over the Delta region and the entrance to the sea.
By the account of Manetho, recorded three millennia later, the victorious Hawk-king was Menes. Egyptologists in the twentieth century, however, try to give Manetho as little credence as the availability of more reliable evidence allows. J. H. Breasted, the premier Egyptian scholar of the early 20th century, even called Manetho's writings "the compilation of puerile folk-tales ...
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