Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
The probable date of this monarch has already been shown to synchronize closely with the time assigned by Berosus to the connnencement of his sixth Babylonian dynasty, and by Herodotus to the beginning of his Assyrian Empire. Now Tiglathi-Nin appears in the Inscriptions as the prince who first aspired to transfer to Assyria the supremacy hitherto exercised, or at any rate claimed, by Babylon.
The Sea-God was one of the chief objects of veneration at Ur and elsewhere; and Berosus appears to have preserved an authentic tradition, where he makes the primitive people of the country derive their arts and civilization from "the Red Sea."
Passing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not very conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus. Berosus was a learned priest of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions." Still this "learned priest," though antecedently as competent a critic as Manetho, is so portentously mythical in his accounts, that "no historical value can be attached to them," which must be regretted, since he pushes history back a quarter of a million years prior to the Deluge, and the Deluge itself to about half a million years ago. Here, therefore, we are thrown solely upon the independent value of the monumental evidence, and must drop the argument from coincidence. This evidence, we are told, "is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho, &c.... The date of Sargon I. (3800 B.C.) rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than three thousand years later, and may have been mistaken." "The probability of such a remote date is enhanced by the certainty that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 B.C." If the evidence for the antiquity of Chaldee civilization is "less conclusive" than that for Egyptian, and rests on it for an argument
Fountains everywhere were sacred to him; and so he becomes also the giver of fertility and plenty. Berosus tells us of a mystic being, half man, half fish, who spent his nights in the waters of the gulf, but who would come out of the waters during the day to give instruction to the people, until that time steeped in ignorance and barbarism.
Now the scheme of Berosus gave as the date of the establishment of this dynasty about the year B.C. 1300; and as Berosus undoubtedly placed the fall of the Assyrian Empire in B.C. 625, it may be concluded, and with a near approach to certainty, that he would have assigned the Empire a duration of about 675 years, making it commence with the beginning of the thirteenth century before our era, and terminate midway in the latter half of the seventh.
I am much mistaken if I did not see among them Herodotus, Pliny, Solinus, Berosus, Philostratus, Pomponius Mela, Strabo, and God knows how many other antiquaries.
We have, then, no reason to doubt the figure named by Assurbanipal, and his chronicle may be taken to give the oldest date in the history of Chaldæa, B.C. 2,295, as the year of the Susian conquest. The Elamite dynasty was succeeded, according to Berosus, by a native Chaldæan dynasty.
If this be a true account of the ideas of Berosus, his scheme of Assyrian chronology would have differed only slightly from that of Herodotus; as will be seen if we place the two schemes side by side. In the case of a history so ancient as that of Assyria, we might well be content if our chronology were vague merely to the extent of the variations here indicated.
There is some difference among authors respecting the time of this discovery, as some affirm that it did not take place till the year 1405. August. de Civit. Dic. I. 15. c. 20. The Cape of Good Hope, and the island of Madagascar E. Birmahs Arracan Pompon. Mela, I. 3. Plin. I. 2. c. 67. Joseph: Ant. Jud. I. 1. c. 5. Justin, I. 1. Berosus. Diod. Sic. I. 2. c. 5. Berosus. Gons. Fern. I. 2. c. 3.
HUMBOLDT, Aspects of Nature, vol. i. pp. 77, 78. HERODOTUS, ii. 5. LOFTUS'S Chaldæa and Susiana, p. 282. See STRABO, xvi. 1, § 6; PLINY, H.N. vi. 28; PTOLEMY, v. 20; BEROSUS, pp. 28, 29. For the point where the Euphrates enters on the alluvium, see Fraser's Assyria and Mesopotamia, p. 27. RAWLINSON. The Five Great Monarchies, &c., vol. i., pp. 1-4.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking