ciate and understand the tradition transmitted by Justin, which, like all the information about the Phoenicians in his 18th book, was doubtless derived from excellent native sources: That the earliest settlers on the Phoenician coast came from the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, from which they were driven by an earthquake.

This we take to be the historical gist of the passage (xviii. 3.): 187

"The Tyrian people were akin to the Phoenicians, who, being visited by an earthquake, left their homes and settled, first, on the Assyrian Lake, from whence they moved to the sea coast, where they built a city, to which they gave the name of Sidon, owing to the abundance of fish; for Sidon signifies 'fish' in Phœnician."

Now Sidon does not literally mean (6 fish," but "the city of fishermen." The Assyrian inland sea (Assyrium Stagnum) is certainly not the Sea of Galilee, but the Dead Sea. The people who bordered upon it were EDOM, and PHOINIKE is a literal translation of EDOM, the Reddish, Red-a designation which there are several reasons for supposing to be aboriginal. Adam may perhaps be the same name.

188

About the time, therefore, of the immigration of Abraham, the children of Edom were driven away by an earthquake from the Syrian inland sea, the original formation of which, by a subsidence of the ground below the level of the ocean, is a fact belonging to the preAdamite world.

It does not, however, necessarily follow that the authority from which this information was derived made this the original home of the Edomites. If general tradition and the formation of language point

187 This passage will be explained more in detail in the Preface to the Fifth Book.

188 Compare what is said above, under Ramses III., as to the name of Damascus.

alike to the mountains of Armenia as the birthplace of the Arab as well as Canaanitish races, we have probably especial evidence, and that native evidence, to the same effect as regards Edom, and consequently the Phoenicians. Alexander Polyhistor189, the learned freedman and intimate friend of Sylla, quotes the following story out of a work of one of his contemporaries, Apollonius Molon, a native of Caria, a man in his time held in high repute both at Rhodes and at Rome, and whom we learn from Josephus to have been a learned writer, hostile to the Jews, 190 "MAN (anthropos, i. e. Adam, Edom) was driven with his sons, after the Flood, by the inhabitants of the country, from their home in Armenia, and they gradually moved on through the sandy regions, to the then uninhabited mountainous district of Syria. This took place three generations prior to Abraham the Wise, whose name signifies Father's Friend. He had two sons, one by an Egyptian wife, the patriarch of the twelve Arab princes; the other, named Laughter (Gelos, consequently the Laugher, i. e. Isaac), by a native woman. Laughter had eleven sons; and a twelfth, Joseph, from whom the third (of the Patriarchs), Moses, is descended.”

The first explanation of this story is found indeed in the Bible; but it has obviously another derivation, quite independent of that, direct from Phoenician history. Movers very aptly identifies the mountainous district of Syria here mentioned as Southern Judæa, the region of Hebron, the home of the children of Enak, who built there Kiriath-Arba, afterwards called Hebron. At all events we have a pre-Abrahamitic migration of Edom, that is to say, of the ancestors of the Red Men (Phoenicians), to the coast. They held South

189 In Euseb. Præp. Evang. ix. 19., where the reading was Melon before Gaisford's correction.

190 Jos. contra Ap. ii. 7. and several following chapters. Comp. Movers, ii. A. p. 50. seqq.

Judæa, and all the region about the Dead Sea, part even of Arabia and Lower Egypt, perhaps.

In the days of Abraham these children of Edom wandered from the Dead Sea to the coast. A century afterwards we find the old island-shrine of Melkarth in existence, the relation between which and Esau we shall treat of in the Fifth Book.

There is evidence throughout of a connexion between oldest people-histories; and the history of Phoenicia proves at all events that Abraham, if he were an historical personage, cannot have lived later than the foundation of their oldest temples, but more probably about a century earlier.

B.

THE HISTORICAL AND ASTRONOMICAL SYNCHRONISMS OF THE ASSYRIANS AND BABYLONIANS.

I. THE SYNCHRONISM OF NINUS AND SEMIRAMIS WITH THE
TWENTIETH DYNASTY.

NIEBUHR, in his masterly treatise of 1819 on the historical advantages derived from the Armenian translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, has proved that the Dynasty of the Ninyads in Berosus (Berôssos), the great historian of the Babylonians in the third century B.C., in perfect accordance with Herodotus, cannot have been established more than 526 years before the era of Nabonassar. The contrary theory, that the Assyrian empire is of vastly higher antiquity, is based upon the authority of Ctesias, a confused and uncritical writer, whom, moreover, we only know through the version of Diodorus. Unfortunately this view of history has been

so universally adopted in all the school-books, down to the publication of Duncker's work, that historians have not been tempted to denounce it because it has no foundation, nor theologians because it is at variance with Scripture. Generally speaking, indeed, the study of the old people-history of Asia has been totally neglected by German philologers and historians, Movers only, and a few younger scholars, having followed in the track of Niebuhr.

Here we have simply to deal with it as to its bearings on the synchronisms.

The term assigned by Herodotus to the Assyrian dominion in Upper Asia (ii. 145.) is, as we know, 520 years. He does not specify how long the Median anarchy, or their first period of independence, lasted, during which they had no kings.

The accession of Deioces is the first definite date we obtain from him. This took place in 709, which throws back the commencement of the Assyrian dominion beyond the year 1229. But his dates of the kings of Lydia show that his calculations must have gone back far beyond that time, and we glean from them what he considered the date of Ninus, and the length of time that the Median independence lasted. Agron, his first king of Lydia, began to reign in 1221. He was the son of Ninus, to whom the legends of Asia Minor, as we learn from Ctesias, assigned a reign of 52 years. If Herodotus adopted this date, he must have made the accession of Ninus to take place in 1273 (1221+52). Calculating downwards, and deducting the 52 years of the Assyrian dominion, this would make the date of the revolt of the Medes 753. They were the first, he says, who threw off the yoke of the Assyrians, and the other people of Upper Asia soon followed their example. We shall see in the sequel that, according to Berosus, the Babylonians did so in the year 747. The language of Herodotus and the computations of Berosus

are therefore in perfect accordance. In this manner also the date of 1273 is established, and we now know that Herodotus made the term of the Median independence 44 years (753-709).191

Eusebius, in citing from Berosus Alexander Polyhistor's list of the dynasties of Babylon, which we shall examine more closely hereafter, gives, after the dynasty of the Arabs (the fifth), one of 45 kings, who reigned 526 years; among these, and to all appearance at the head of them, stands the name of Semiramis. consequently, an Assyrian dynasty.

It was,

Here, unfortunately, as is generally the case with the careless extracts of Eusebius from Polyhistor, he omits the regular quotation of dynasties and their regnal years. He then proceeds: "After these kings (says Polyhistor) Phul reigned over the Chaldeans; he is mentioned in Jewish history by the same name, and is said to have gone into Judea. He then mentions that Sennakherimos (Sennacherib) reigned." Here an explanation must be found why Sennacherib, the contemporary of Nabonassar, happens to be omitted in the list of Babylonian kings in the Canon of Ptolemy, although his son, Assaradinos (Esarhaddon) is included in it.

The general idea here to be borne in mind, in respect to the connexion between the Assyrian and Babylonian kings, is this:-The meaning of an Assyrian dynasty being dominant in Babylon for 526 years is simply that Nineveh, as the metropolis of the Assyrian empire, then governed Babylon and Media. But these kings of the race of Ninus, or the Derketadæ, naturally did not reside in Babylon, but among their own people at Nineveh, the city of Ninus, on the Tigris, opposite Mosul. Babylon itself, according to the custom of those

191 For further details see researches by Johannes Brandis, executed with admirable clearness and care under the title of Assyriorum Tempora emendata, (1853) p. 3. seqq.