Part 18

If the size which Herodotus attributes to the Sea of Asoph, which he makes equal to the Euxine, had been less vaguely indicated, and if we knew precisely what he meant by the Gerrhus, we should there find strong additional proofs of the changes produced by rivers, and the rapidity with which they are made; for the alluvial depositions of rivers alone have, since the time of Herodotus, that is to say, in the course of two thousand and two or three hundred years, reduced the Sea of Asoph to its present comparatively small size, shut up the course of the Gerrhus, or that branch of the Dnieper which had formerly joined the Hypacyris, and discharged its waters along with that river into the gulf called Carcinites, now the Olu-Degnitz, and reduced the Hypacyris itself to almost nothing. We should possess proofs no less strong of the same kind, could we be certain that the Oxus or Sihoun, which at present discharges itself into the lake Aral, formerly reached the Caspian Sea. But we are in possession of facts sufficiently conclusive on the point in question, without adducing such as are doubtful, and without being exposed to the necessity of making the ignorance of the ancients in geography the basis of our physical propositions.

Progress of the Downs.

The downs or hillocks of sand which the sea throws up on low coasts, when its bottom is sandy, have already been mentioned. Wherever human industry has not succeeded in fixing these downs, they advance as irresistibly upon the land as the alluvial depositions of the rivers advance into the sea. In their progress inland, they push before them the large pools formed by the rain which falls upon the neighbouring grounds, and whose communication with the sea is intercepted by them. In many places they proceed with a frightful rapidity, overwhelming forests, buildings, and cultivated fields. Those upon the coast of the Bay of Biscay have already overwhelmed a great number of villages mentioned in the records of the middle age; and at this moment, in the single Department of the Landes, they threaten ten with inevitable destruction. One of these villages, named Mimisan, has been struggling against them these twenty years, with the melancholy prospect of a sand-hill of more than sixty feet perpendicular height visibly approaching it.

In 1802, the pent up pools overwhelmed five fine farming establishments at the village of St Julian. They have long covered up an ancient Roman road leading from Bourdeaux to Bayonne, and which could still be seen forty years ago, when the waters were low. The Adour, which is known to have formerly passed Old Boucaut, to join the sea at Cape Breton, is now turned to the distance of more than two thousand yards.

The late M. Bremontier, inspector of bridges and highways, who conducted extensive operations upon these downs, estimated their progress at sixty feet yearly, and in some places at seventy-two feet. According to this calculation, it will only require two thousand years to enable them to reach Bourdeaux; and, from their present extent, it must have been somewhat more than four thousand years since they began to be formed.

The overwhelming of the cultivated lands of Egypt, by the sterile lands of Libya, which are thrown upon them by the west wind, is a phenomenon of the same nature with the downs. These sands have destroyed a number of cities and villages, whose ruins are still to be seen; and this has happened since the conquest of the country by the Mahometans, for the summits of the minarets of some mosques are seen projecting beyond the sand. With a progress so rapid, they would, without doubt, have filled up the narrow parts of the valley, if so many ages had elapsed since they began to be thrown into it; and there would no longer remain any thing between the Libyan chain and the Nile. Here, then, we have another natural chronometer, of which it would be as easy as interesting to obtain the measure.

Peat-Mosses and Slips.

The turbaries, or peat-mosses, which have been found so generally in the northern parts of Europe, by the accumulation of the remains of sphagna and other aquatic mosses, also afford a measure of time. They increase in height in proportions which are determinate with regard to each place. They thus envelope the small knolls of the lands on which they are formed; and several of these knolls have been covered over within the memory of man. In other places the peat-mosses descend along the valleys, advancing like glaciers, but differing from them in this respect, that, while the glaciers melt at their lower part, the progress of the peat is impeded by nothing. By sounding their depth down to the solid ground, we may estimate their age; and we find, with regard to these peat-mosses, as with regard to the downs, that they cannot have derived their origin from an indefinitely remote period. The same observation may be made with regard to the slips or fallings, which take place with wonderful rapidity at the foot of all steep rocks, and which are still very far from having covered them. But as no precise measures have hitherto been applied to these two agents, we shall not insist upon them at greater length.

From all that has been said, it may be seen that nature uniformly speaks the same language, everywhere informing us that the present order of things cannot have commenced at a very remote period. And, what is very remarkable, mankind everywhere speaks as nature, whether we consult the received traditions of the various nations, or examine their moral and political state, and the intellectual attainments which they had made at the period when their authentic records commence.

The History of Nations confirms the Newness of the Continents.

In fact, although, at the first glance, the traditions of some ancient nations, which extend their origin to so many thousands of ages, appear strongly to contradict this newness of the world, as it exists at present; yet when we examine these traditions more carefully, we soon perceive that they are not sufficiently authenticated. We are, on the contrary, quickly convinced, that true history, deserving that name, and all that has been preserved of positive documents regarding the first establishment of nations, confirm what has been announced by the natural monuments already mentioned.

The chronology of none of the western nations can be traced in a continuous line farther back than 3000 years. None of them afford us, previous to that period, nor even two or three centuries after, a series of facts connected with any degree of probability. The north of Europe possesses no authentic records which bear a remoter date than that of its conversion to Christianity. The history of Spain, of Gaul, and of England, commences only at the period when these countries were conquered by the Romans; that of northern Italy is, at the present day, almost unknown. The Greeks acknowledge that they did not possess the art of writing, until it was taught them by the Phœnicians, fifteen or sixteen centuries before the Christian era; even for a long time after, their history is full of fables; and they do not assign a more remote date than 300 years farther back, to their uniting into distinct tribes. Of the history of Western Asia, we have only a few contradictory extracts, which do not, with any connection, give a greater antiquity than twenty-five centuries; and even if we admit the few historical details which refer to more remote periods, it can scarcely be extended to forty.

Herodotus, the first profane historian whose works have been transmitted to us, has not a greater antiquity than 2300 years. The historians, prior to him, whom he may have consulted, do not date a century before him. We may even judge of what they were by the extravagances handed down to us, extracted from the works of Aristæus of Proconnesus, and some others. Before them we have only poets; and Homer, the most ancient that we possess, Homer the immortal master and model of all the West, flourished only twenty-seven or twenty-eight centuries before the present time.

When these first historians speak of ancient events, whether occurring in their own nation, or in neighbouring countries, they only cite oral traditions, and not public works. It was not until a long time after them, that pretended extracts were given from the Egyptian, Phenician, and Babylonian annals. Berosus wrote only in the reign of Seleucus Nicanor; Hieronymus in that of Antiochus Soter, and Manetho under Ptolemy Philadelphia; the whole three having flourished only in the third century before the Christian era. That Sanconiatho was an author real or supposed, was not known till Philo of Byblos had published a translation of his work in the reign of Adrian, in the second century before Christ; and, when he did become known, there was nothing found in his account of the early ages, as in those of all the authors of this kind, but a puerile theogony, or metaphysical doctrines, so disguised under the form of allegory as to be unintelligible.

One nation alone has preserved annals written in prose before the period of Cyrus, namely, the Jewish people. The part of the Old Testament which is known by the name of the Pentateuch, has existed in its present form, at least since the separation of the ten tribes under Jeroboam, since it was received as authentic by the Samaritans equally as the Jews, which assures us that its actual antiquity is upwards of 2800 years. Besides this, we have no reason to doubt the book of Genesis having been composed by Moses himself, which gives it an antiquity of 500 years more, or of thirty-three centuries; and it is only necessary to read it, to perceive that it has in part been composed of fragments of previously existing works. We cannot, therefore, hesitate to admit, that this is the most ancient writing which has been transmitted to modern times in the West.

Now, this work, and all those which have been composed since, whatever strangers their authors might be to Moses and his people, speak of the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean as of recent origin; they represent them as still in a half savage state some ages before. And, further, they all speak of a general catastrophe, an irruption of the waters, which occasioned an almost total regeneration of the human race; and to this epoch they do not assign a very remote antiquity. Those texts of the Pentateuch, which extend this epoch the longest, do not place it farther back than twenty centuries before Moses, and hence not more than 5400 years before the present day.

In the poetical traditions of the Greeks, from which is derived the whole of our profane history with reference to those remote ages, there is nothing which contradicts the Jewish annals. On the contrary, they have a wonderful agreement with them, by the epoch which they assign to the Egyptian and Phenician colonies, by which the first germs of civilization were carried into Greece. We find that, about the same period when the Israelites took their departure from Egypt, to carry into Palestine the sublime doctrine of the unity of God, other colonies issued from the same country, to carry into Greece a religion less pure, at least in its external character, whatever might have been the secret doctrines which it reserved for the initiated; while others, again, came from Phenicia, and imparted to the Greeks the art of writing, and whatever was connected with navigation and commerce.

It is undoubtedly far from being the case, that we have had since that time a connected history, since we still find, for a long period after these founders of colonies, a multitude of mythological events, and adventures, in which gods and heroes are concerned; and these chiefs are connected with authentic history only by means of genealogies evidently fictitious. And, it is still more certain, that whatever preceded their arrival, could only have been preserved in very imperfect traditions, and supplied by mere fictions, similar to those of our monks of the middle age regarding the origin of the European nations.

Thus, not only should we not be surprised to find, even in ancient times, many doubts and contradictions respecting the epochs of Cecrops, Deucalion, Cadmus and Danaus; and not only would it be childish to attach the smallest importance to any opinion whatever, regarding the precise dates of Inachus or Ogyges; but, if any thing ought to surprise us, it is this,--that an infinitely more remote antiquity had not been assigned to those personages. It is impossible that there has not been in this case some effect of the influence of received traditions, from which the inventors of fables were not able to free themselves. One of the dates assigned to the deluge of Ogyges, even agrees so much with one of those which have been attributed to the deluge of Noah, that it is almost impossible it should not have been derived from some source, where this latter deluge had been the one intended to be spoken of.

As to Deucalion, whether this prince be regarded as a real or fictitious personage, however little we enter into the manner in which his deluge has been introduced into the poems of the Greeks, and the various details with which it becomes successively enriched, we perceive that it was nothing else than a tradition of the great cataclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenians in the period which they also assigned to Deucalion, because he was regarded as the founder of their nation, and because his history is confounded with that of all the chiefs of the renewed nations.

Each of the different colonies of Greece, that had preserved isolated traditions, commenced them with a particular deluge of its own, because some remembrance of the general deluge common to all the nations, was preserved among each of the tribes; and, when it was afterwards attempted to reduce these various traditions to a common chronology, different events were imagined to have been recorded, from the circumstance that dates, in reality uncertain, or perhaps altogether false, although considered as authentic in the countries where they originated, were not found to agree with each other. Thus, in the same manner that the Hellenes had a deluge of Deucalion, because they regarded him as the founder of their nation, the Autochtones of Attica had one of Ogyges, because it was with him that their history commenced. The Pelasgi of Arcadia had that which, according to later authors, compelled Dardanus to retire towards the Hellespont. The island of Samothracia, one of those in which a succession of priests had been more anciently established, together with a regular worship and connected traditions, had also a deluge, which passed for the most ancient of all, and which was attributed to the bursting of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. Some idea of a similar event was preserved in Asia Minor, and in Syria, and to this the Greeks would afterwards naturally attach the name of Deucalion.

But none of these traditions assign a very remote antiquity to this cataclysm; and there is none of them that does not admit of explanation, in so far as its date and other circumstances are concerned, from the variations to which narratives, that are not fixed by writing, must be continually liable.

The very remote Antiquity attributed to certain Nations is not supported by History.

Those who would attribute to the continents and the establishment of nations, a very remote antiquity, are therefore obliged to have recourse to the Indians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians, three nations, in fact, which appear to have been the most anciently civilized of the Caucasian Race, and having a remarkable similarity, not only in their temperament, and in the climate and nature of the countries which they occupied, but also in their political and religious constitution, but whose testimony this almost identical constitution ought to render equally suspected.

These three nations agreed in having each a hereditary caste, to which the care of religion, laws, and science, was exclusively consigned. In all of them, this caste had its allegorical language and secret doctrines; and in all it reserved to itself the privilege of reading and explaining the sacred books, the whole doctrines of which had been revealed by the gods themselves.

We can easily conceive what history would necessarily come to in such hands; but, without having recourse to any great efforts of reason, we may learn it from the fact itself, by examining what it has come to in the only one of these three nations which still exists, namely, the Indians.

The truth is, that history does not exist at all among them. In the midst of that infinity of books on mystical theology and abstract metaphysics which the Brahmins possess, and many of which have been made known to us by the ingenious perseverance of the English, we find no connected account of the origin of their nation, or of the vicissitudes of their society. They even pretend that their religion prohibits them from recording the events of the present time, their age of misfortune.

According to the Vedas, the first revealed works, on which are founded the whole religious opinions of the Hindoos, the literature of this people, like that of the Greeks, had its origin at two great epochs; the Ramaian and the Mahabarat,--a thousand times more monstrous in their wonders than the Iliad and Odyssey, but in which we also perceive some traces of a metaphysical doctrine of that description generally termed sublime. The other poems, which, together with the two mentioned, compose the great body of the Pouranas, are nothing else than metrical legends or romances, written at different periods, and by different authors, and not less extravagant in their fictions than the great poems. It has been imagined that, in some of these writings, events and names of men bearing some resemblance to those spoken of by the Greeks and Latins, might be discovered; and it is chiefly from these resemblances of names that Mr Wilfort has attempted to extract from the Pouranas a kind of concordance with our ancient chronology of the west; a concordance which, in every line, betrays the hypothetical nature of its basis, and which, moreover, can only be admitted by absolutely rejecting the dates given in the Pouranas themselves.