Part 20

It would lead to no result were we now to examine the different accounts respecting Sardanapalus, in which a celebrated writer imagined he had found proofs of the existence of three princes of that name, who were all victims of similar misfortunes; much in the same way as another writer found in the Indian Vicramaditjia, at least three princes, who were equally the heroes of similar adventures.

It is apparently from the want of agreement in all these accounts, that Strabo thought himself justified in saying, that the authority of Herodotus and Ctesias was not equal to that of Homer or Hesiod. Nor has Ctesias been more happy in transcribers than Manetho; and it is very difficult, at the present day, to harmonize the extracts made from his writings by Diodorus, Eusebius, and the Syncelle.

Since there existed such a state of uncertainty in the fifth century before the Christian era, how should it be imagined that Berosus had been able to clear it up in the third century before that era; or how should we repose more confidence in the 430,000 years which he puts before the deluge, or the 35,000 years which he places between the deluge and Semiramis, than in the registers of 150,000 years, which he boasts of having consulted.

Structures raised in remote provinces, and bearing the name of Semiramis, have been spoken of; and columns erected by Sesostris have been pretended to have been seen in Asia Minor, in Thrace. But, in the same way, in Persia, at the present day, the ancient monuments, perhaps even some of the above, bear the name of Roustan; and in Egypt or Arabia, they bear the names of Joseph or Solomon. This is an ancient custom among the eastern nations, and probably among all ignorant people. The peasants of our own country give the name of Cæsar’s Camp to all the remains of Roman entrenchments.

In a word, the more I consider the subject, the more I am persuaded that there existed no ancient history at Babylon or Ecbatan, more than in Egypt and India. And, in place of reducing mythology to history, with Evhemere and Bannier, I am of opinion that a great part of history should be referred to mythology.

It is only at the epoch of what is commonly called the Second Kingdom of Assyria, that the history of the Assyrians and Chaldeans begins to become more intelligible; and this epoch is also that at which the history of the Egyptians undergoes a similar change, when the kings of Nineveh, of Babylon, and of Egypt, commence their conflicts on the theatre of Syria and Palestine.

It appears, nevertheless, that the authors of these countries, or those who had consulted the traditions regarding them, Berosus, and Hieronymus, and Nicholas de Damas, agreed in speaking of a deluge. Berosus has even described it with circumstances so similar to those detailed in the book of Genesis, that it is almost impossible what he says of it should not have been derived from the same sources, even although he removes its epoch a great number of ages back,--insomuch, at least, as we may judge of it, by the confused extracts which Josephus, Eusebius, and Syncellus, have preserved of his writings. But we must remark, and with this observation we shall conclude what we have to say with regard to the Babylonians, that these numerous ages, and this long series of kings, placed between the deluge and Semiramis, are a new thing, entirely peculiar to Berosus, and of which Ctesias, and those who have followed him, had no idea, and which has not even been adopted by any of the profane authors posterior to Berosus. Justin and Velleius consider Ninus as the first of the conquerors, and those who, contrary to all probability, place him highest, only refer him to a period of forty centuries before the present time.

The Armenian authors of the middle age nearly agree with one of the texts of Genesis, when they refer the deluge to a period of 4916 years from their own time; and it might be thought that having collected the old traditions, and perhaps extracted the old chronicles of their country, they form an additional authority in favour of the newness of the nations. But when we reflect that their historical literature commences only in the fifth century, and that they were acquainted with Eusebius, we perceive that they must have accommodated themselves to his authority, and to that of the Bible. Moses of Chorene expressly professes to have followed the Greeks, and we see that his ancient history is moulded after Ctesias.

However, it is certain, that the tradition of the deluge existed in Armenia long before the conversion of its inhabitants to Christianity; and the city, which, according to Josephus, was called the Place of the Descent, still exists at the foot of Mount Ararat, and bears the name of Nachid-chevan, which, in fact, has the same signification.

Along with the Armenians, we include the Arabians, Persians, Turks, Mongolians, and Abyssinians, of the present day. Their ancient books, if they ever had any, no longer exist. They have no ancient history, but that which they have recently made up, and which they have modelled after the Bible; hence, what they say of the deluge is borrowed from Genesis, and adds nothing to the authority of that book.

It were curious to inquire what had been the opinion of the ancient Persians upon this subject, before it was modified by the Christian and Mahomedan creeds. We find it deposited in their Boundehesh, or Cosmogony, a work of the time of Sassanides, (but evidently extracted or translated from more ancient works), and which was discovered by Anquetil du Perron, among the Parsis of India. According to it, the total duration of the world could only be 12,000 years; hence it cannot still be very old. The appearance of Cayoumortz (the bull-man, the first of the human race), is preceded by the creation of a great water.

For the rest, it would be as useless to expect a regular history of ancient times from the Parsis, as from the other eastern nations. The Magi have left none, any more than the Brahmins or Chaldeans. Of this there is nothing more required for proof than the uncertainty which exists regarding the epoch of Zoroaster. It is even asserted, that the little history they may have possessed, that which relates to the Achemenides, the successors of Cyrus to Alexander, had been expressly altered, and this in consequence of an official order to that purpose from a monarch named Sassanides.

In order to discover authentic dates of the commencement of empires, and traces of a general deluge, we must therefore go beyond the great deserts of Tartary. Toward the east and north we find another race of men, who differ from us as much in their institutions and manners as in their form and temperament. Their language consists of monosyllables, and they make use of arbitrary hieroglyphics in writing. They have only a political system of morals, without religion; for the superstitions of Fo were imported among them from India. Their yellow skin, their prominent cheeks, their narrow and oblique eyes, and their scanty beard, render them so different from us, that one is tempted to believe that their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on two different sides. But however this may be, the epoch which they assign to their deluge is nearly the same as ours.

The Chou-king is the most ancient of the Chinese books; it is said to have been compiled by Confucius, about 2255 years ago, from fragments of more ancient works. Two hundred years afterwards, a general persecution of the men of letters, and destruction of the books, is said to have taken place under the emperor Chi-Hoang-ti, whose object in this was to destroy the traces of the feudal government established under the dynasty which preceded his. Forty years after, under the dynasty which had overturned that to which Chi-Hoang-ti belonged, a portion of the Chou-king was restored from memory by an old literatus, and another was discovered in a tomb; but nearly the half of it was for ever lost. Now, this book, the most authentic which the Chinese possess, commences the history of their country with the reign of an emperor named Yao, whom it represents to us as occupied in removing the waters, which, having risen to the skies, still bathed the foot of the higher mountains, covered the less elevated hills, and rendered the plains impassable. According to some, the reign of Yao was 4163 years before the present time; according to others, 3943. The discrepancy in the opinions regarding this epoch even amounts to 284 years.

A few pages farther on we find one Yu, a minister and engineer, re-establishing the courses of the waters, raising embankments, digging canals, and regulating the taxes of all the provinces in China, that is to say, in an empire extending 600 leagues in all directions. But the impossibility of such operations, after such events, shews clearly that the whole is nothing else than a moral and political romance.

More modern Chinese historians have added a series of emperors before Yao, but with a multitude of fabulous circumstances, without venturing to assign them fixed epochs. These writers are at perpetual variance with each other, even regarding the number and names of their emperors, and are not universally approved by their countrymen. Fouhi, with the body of a serpent, the head of an ox, and the teeth of a tortoise, together with his successors, who are not less monstrous, are altogether absurd, and have no more existed than Enceladon and Briareus.

Is it possible that mere chance could have produced so striking a result, as to make the traditional origin of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese monarchies agree in being referred to an epoch of nearly 4000 years from the present period? Would the ideas of nations which have had so little communication with each other, and whose language, religion, and laws are altogether different, have corresponded upon this point, had they not been founded upon truth?

We could not expect precise dates from the natives of America, who had no real writings, and whose oldest traditions extended only to a few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. And yet, even among them, traces of a deluge are imagined to be found in their rude hieroglyphics. They have their Noah, or Deucalion, as well as the Indians, Babylonians, and Greeks.

The Negroes, the most degraded race among men, whose forms approach the nearest to the brutes, and whose intellect has not yet arrived at the institution of regular governments, or at any thing having the least appearance of systematic knowledge, have preserved no sort of annals or traditions. They cannot, therefore, afford us any information on the subject of our present researches, though all their characters clearly shew us that they have escaped from the great catastrophe, at another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races, from which they had perhaps been separated for a long time previous to the occurrence of that catastrophe.

But if the ancients, it is argued, have left no history, their long existence as nations is not the less attested by the advances which they have made in astronomy, by observations whose date is easily determined, and even by monuments which still remain, and which themselves bear their dates. Thus, the length of the year, such as the Egyptians are supposed to have determined it, according to the heliacal rising of Sirius, proves correct for a period comprised between the year 3000 and the year 1000 before Christ, a period to which the traditions of their conquests and of the great prosperity of their empire also refer. This accuracy proves to what perfection they had carried their observations, and shews that they had for many ages applied themselves to such investigations.

In order to determine the force of this argument, it is necessary that we should here enter upon some explanations.

The solstice is the moment of the year at which the rise of the Nile commences, and that which the Egyptians must have observed with most attention. Having, at the beginning, made, from imperfect observations, a civil or sacred year of three hundred and sixty-five days complete, they would preserve it from superstitious motives, even after they had perceived that it did not agree with the natural or tropical year, and did not bring back the seasons to the same days. However, it was this tropical year which it behoved them to mark for the purpose of directing them in their agricultural operations.

They would, therefore, have to search in the heavens for an apparent sign of its return, and they imagined they had found this sign when the sun returned to the same position, relatively to some remarkable star. Thus they applied themselves, like almost all nations who are beginning this inquiry, to observe the heliacal risings and settings of the stars. We know that they chose particularly the heliacal rising of Sirius, at first, doubtless, on account of the beauty of the star; and, especially, because, in those ancient times, this rising of Sirius being nearly coincident with the solstice, and indicative of the inundation, was to them the most important phenomenon of this kind. Hence it was that Sirius, under the name of Sothis, occupied so conspicuous a place in their mythology, and in their religious ceremonies. Supposing, therefore, that the return of the heliacal rising of Sirius and the tropical year were of the same duration, and believing, at length, that this duration was 365 days and a quarter, they would imagine a period after which the tropical year and the old year, the sacred year of 365 days only, would return to the same day; a period which, according to these incorrect data, was necessarily 1461 sacred years, and 1460 of those improved years to which they gave the name of years of Sirius.

They took for the point of departure of this period, which they named the Sothiac or great year, a civil year, the first day of which was, or had been, also that of a heliacal rising of Sirius; and it is known, from the positive testimony of Censorinus, that one of these great years had ended in the 138th year of the Christian era. It had consequently commenced in the 1322d before Christ, and that which preceded it in the 2782d. In fact, the calculations of M. Ideler shew, that Sirius was heliacally risen on the 20th July of the Julian year 139, a day which corresponded that year to the first of Thot, or the first day of the Egyptian sacred year.

But not only is the position of the sun, with relation to the stars of the ecliptic, or the sidereal year different from the tropical year, on account of the precession of the equinoxes. The heliacal year of a star, or the period of its heliacal rising, especially when it is distant from the ecliptic, differs still from the sidereal year, and differs in various degrees according to the latitudes of the places where it is observed. What is very singular, however, and the observation has already been made by Bainbridge and Father Petau, it happens, by a remarkable concurrence in the positions, that, in the latitude of Upper Egypt, at a certain epoch, and during a certain number of ages, the year of Sirius was really within very little of 365 days and a quarter; so that the heliacal rising of this star returned in fact to the same day of the Julian year, the 20th July, in the year 1322 before, and the year 138 after Christ.

From this actual coincidence, at this remote period, M. Fourier, who has confirmed all these accounts by new calculations, concludes, that, since the length of the year of Sirius was so perfectly known to the Egyptians, they must have determined it by observations made during a long series of years, and conducted with great accuracy; observations which must be referred to at least 2500 years before the present time, and which could not have been made long before or long after this interval of time.

This result would assuredly be very striking, had it been directly, and by observations, made upon Sirius itself, that they had fixed the length of the year of Sirius. But experienced astronomers affirm it to be impossible that the heliacal rising of a star could afford a sufficient foundation for exact observations on such a subject, especially in a climate where the circumference of the horizon is constantly so much loaded with vapours, that, in clear nights, stars of the second or third magnitude can never be seen within some degrees of the verge of the horizon, and that the sun itself is completely obscured at its rising and setting. They maintain, that, if the length of the year had not been otherwise ascertained, there would have been a mistake of one or two days. They have no doubt, therefore, that this duration of 365 days and a quarter, is that of the tropical year inaccurately determined by the observation of the shadow, or by that of the point where the sun rose each day, and through ignorance identified with the heliacal year of Sirius; so that it would be mere chance which had fixed with so much accuracy the duration of this latter for the period of which we speak.

Perhaps it will also be judged, that men capable of making observations so exact, and which they had continued during so long a period, would not have attributed so much importance to Sirius, as to pay him religious homage; for they would have seen that the relations of the rising of this star with the tropical year, and with the inundation of the Nile, were merely temporary, and took place only in a determinate latitude. In fact, according to M. Ideler’s calculations, in the year 2782 before Christ, Sirius appeared in Upper Egypt, on the second day after the solstice; in 1322, on the third; and in the year 139 after Christ, on the twenty-sixth. At the present day, its heliacal rising is more than a month after the solstice. The Egyptians would therefore set themselves by preference to finding the period, which would bring about the coincidence of the commencement of the sacred year, with that of the true tropical year, and then they would discover that their great period must have been 1508 sacred years, and not 1461. Now, we assuredly do not find any traces of this period of 1508 years in antiquity.