death of Sardanapalus, supposed to contain about one thousand six hundred ancient years, will fall short of so many Julian years by five days and about a fourth-part of a day in every year; which amounts to one or two and twenty years in the whole time: but I would only hint this here; the uses that may be made of it shall be observed in their proper places. There are many chronological difficulties which the reader will meet with, of another nature; but as I have endeavoured to adjust them in the places where they occur, it would be needless to repeat here what will be found at large in the ensuing pages. I shall, very probably, be thought to have taken great liberty in the accounts I have given of the most ancient profane history; particularly in that which is Antidiluvian, and which I have reduced to an agreement with the history of Moses. It will be said, "take it all together, as it lies in the authors from whom we have it, that it has no such harmony with the sacred writer; and to make a harmony by taking part of what is represented, and such part only as you please,

every thing, or any thing, may be made to agree in this manner; but such an agreement will not be much regarded by the unbiassed." To this I answer: the heathen accounts which we have of these early ages, were taken from the records of either Thyoth the Egyptian, or Sanchoniathon of Berytus; and whatever the original memoirs of these men were, we are sure their accounts were, some time after their decease, corrupted with fable and mystical philosophy. Philo of Biblos in one place seems to think, that Taautus himself wrote his Sacra, and his theology, in a way above the understanding of the common people; in order to create reverence and respect to the subject of which he treated, and that Surmubelus and Theuro, some ages after, endeavoured to explain his works, by stripping them of the allegory, and giving their true meaning. But I cannot think a writer so ancient as Athothes wrote in fable or allegory; the first memoirs or histories. were without doubt short and plain, and

*See Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. 1, c. 10.

men afterwards embellished them with false learning, and in time endeavoured to correct that, and arrive at the true. All therefore that I can collect from this passage of Philo Biblius, is this, that Thyoth's memoirs did not continue such as he left them. Surmubelus and Theuro in some time altered them, and I fear, whoever they were, they altered them for the worse; for such were the alterations which succeeding generations made in the records of their ancestors, as appears from what the same writer further offers." When Saturnus," says he, (now I think Saturnus to be only another name for Mizraim)" went to the South," (i. e. when he removed from the Lower Egypt, into Thebais, which I have taken notice of in its place)" he made Taautus king of all Egypt, and the Cabiri" (who were the sons of Mizraim) "made memoirs of these transactions." Such were the first writings of mankind; short hints or records of what they did, and where they settled: "but the son of Thabio,

See Euseb. ibid.

one of the first interpreters of the Sacra of the Phoenicians, by his comments and interpretations filled these records full of allegory, and mixed his physiological philosophy with them, and so left them to the priests, and they to their successors. With these additions and mixtures they came into the hands of the Greeks, who were men of an abounding fancy, and who, by new applications, and by increasing the number and the extravagancy of the fable, did in time leave but little appearance of any thing like truth in them." We have much the same account of the writings of Sanchoniathon. "Sanchoniathon of Berytus, we are told, wrote his history of the Jewish antiquities with the greatest care and fidelity, having received his facts from Hierombalus, a priest; and having a mind to write a universal history of all nations from the beginning, he took the greatest pains in searching the records of Taautus. But some later writers (probably the persons before-mentioned) had corrupted his

See Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. 1. c. 9.
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remains by their allegorical interpretations, and physical additions; for, (says Philo) the more modern goλoyo, priests, or explainers of the Sacra, had omitted to relate the true factsas they were recorded, instead of which, they had obscured them by invented accounts and mysterious fictions, drawn from their notions of the nature of the universe; so that it was not easy for one to distinguish

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We have an instance in Plutarch, lib. de Iside, p. 355, of the manner in which the ancient records were obscured by fable. The ancient Egyptians had recorded the alteration of the year which I have mentioned, and perhaps observed, that it was caused by the sun's annual course becoming five days longer than it was before, and that the moon's course was proportionably shortened. The mythologic priests turned this account into the following fable: "Rhea," they say, having privately lain with Saturn, beg ged of the Sun that she might bring forth in no month nor year. Mercury hereupon was set to play at dice with the Moon, and won from her the seventy-second part of each day; which being given to the Sun, made the five additional days, over and above the settled months of the year, in one of which Rhea was brought to bed." Five days are the seventy-second part of three hundred and sixty days, which was the length of the ancient year.