72 ON THE DATE AND ORIGIN 
Having, therefore, disengaged ourselves from the embarrassments 
of a disputed and suppositious® chronology, and tempered it into a 
more plastic material on which to exercise rational conjecture, ad- 
hering to the first Olympiad (776 B.c.) as the affixum with which to 
compare dates prior and posterior, and holding all anterior know- 
ledge as partaking of the character of tradition, we shall proceed to 
the remaining source from which we draw our knowledge of early 
antiquity, and which constitutes the subject of our inquiry—Letters. 
Letters, not to enter into over-nice distinctions, are, or rather 
were, of two kinds, Symbolic'°® and Phonetic.!* 
It would be idle to demonstrate the difficulty of perpetuating in- 
formation by a symbolical or figure writing ; the inapplicability of 
ven itself is a party, it will appear the more reasonable to distrust chronolo- 
gy on matters of minor importance. ‘Christianity itself had subsisted near 
1200 years before they knew precisely how many years had passed since the 
birth of our Saviour.” ‘ Abbé Dennis the Little, who, in the year 532, was 
the first among the christians to form the era of that grand epoch, and to 
count the years from that time, in order to make their chronology altogether 
christian, erred in his calculation, and led all Europe into his error. They 
count 132 contrary opinions of different authors concerning the year in 
which the Messiah appeared on the earth. M. Vallemont names 64 of them, 
all celebrated writers. Amongst all these authors, however, there is none 
that reckon more than 7000, nor less than 3700 years; but even this differ- 
ence is enormous. The most moderate fix the birth of Christ in the 4000th 
year of the world.”—Jbid. 
° “The historian Timzeus, who flourished in the time of Ptolemy Phila- 
dephus, 280 3.c., first arranged hisnarrative in the order of Olympiads, which 
began 776 8.c.” (i.e. before Augustus closed the temple of Janus, as an em- 
blem of universal peace, our blessed Lord being then five years of age).— 
“ His contemporary Sosibius gave a work entitled yeovw» aveyeugn, Apollodo- 
rus wrote his cuvra%is z¢povixm: and on such chronology rests the credit of all 
later compilers, as well as the Arundelian marbles, which were composed 
264 years B.c.”—Gillies’ Greece, note 3. What were the materials on which 
Timeeus, Sosibius, and Apollodorus, founded their chronologies, we have laid 
before the reader in note 6; we should entertain a humble estimate of the 
inductive powers of him who can receive them otherwise than as the conjec- 
tural chronicles of the Heroic Legends, or as parties of pleasure into the fields 
—of time. 
10 The varieties of this kind of writing, hieroglyphic, symbolic, and hiero- 
grammatic, are descriptive of picture writing, or at least of a method of com- 
munication amongst the priests alone, and never could have merited the 
eulogy of Pliny, applied by him to the phonetic letter, “quo usu maximé 
humanitas, vita, constat et memoria.” 
+1 For the use of those who have not destroyed time in the pursuit of ob- 
solete languages, the word phonetic implies “of or belonging to the voice,” 
Qwyn, phone, 
