of the Assyrian Monarchy. 307 
veh by the Medes and Babylonians. Yet 
this summary rejection of a history, long and 
minute, however incredible, is not satisfac- 
tory to the mind of an inquirer, because it 
Jeaves unexplained the cause which should 
have prompted to such an extensive fiction. 
A branch that has been stopped in the stream 
may have gradually formed an island with the 
matter which it has arrested ; a particle of sand 
may have been the nucleus of a large incrus- 
tation; but something there must have been 
from the first, or the process could never 
have begun. The analogy will be found to 
hold with respect to the fictions of ancient 
history ; they are not purely arbitrary ; some- 
thing has determined the mind to invention 
in one direction, rather than another; the 
error appears to me to have consisted in sup- 
posing that the basis must always have been 
some historical fact. It will be my object in 
the remainder of this paper, to show that it 
is mythology, not history, which has supplied 
the punctum saliens to which this mass of fic- 
tion owes its existence, and that all the per- 
sons who figure in the Ctesian history are the 
gods of the Assyrians, converted into human 
beings, by an error which we shall find re- 
peated over and over again, in the Rey of 
almost every ancient nation. 
