94 THE WORLD. 



Romnlus may have been, it was impossible for them to depart 

 greatly from the tropical year; because they .watched the constel- 

 lations, and-connected with their rising and setting the seasons 

 of agriculture, and the times of their religious festivals. Any 

 alterations would be quickly perceived and the very observances 

 of a religion, the gods of which presided over their secular em- 

 ployments, served as a balance-wheel to regulate the movements 

 of their chronology." 



We shall conclude this chapter with some account of the Zodiacs 

 discovered by the scientific men who accompanied the French 

 expedition to Egypt, and which were thought to give an age to 

 the world much greater than the generally received system of 

 chronology. We may here remark, that the 'evidence appears 

 from other sources, to be pretty conclusive, that man has not in- 

 habited the globe for more than about 6000 years, although the 

 evidence is equally strong, that the globe itself, is, perhaps, 

 millions of years old, and has been inhabited by a race of animals, 

 and covered with a vegetation, entirely unknown at present. During 

 the campaigns of the French army in Egypt, a Planisphere and 

 Zodiac were discovered by Mons. V. Denon in the Great Temple 

 of Dendera, or Tentyra, and copied in his " Voyage, dans la Basse 

 et la Haute Egyple, pendant les Campagnes du General Bona- 

 parte." Paris, 1802, Fol. Vol. II. Plates, 130, 131, 132. Den- 

 dera, anciently the large city of Tentyra, is a town of Upper 

 Egypt, situated at the edge of a small but fertile plain, about a mile 

 from the left bank of the Nile, and 242 miles south of Cairo. Its 

 Temple, magnificent even in ruins, is the first that the Egyptian 

 traveler discovers on ascending the Nile ; it is 265 feet m length 

 and 140 feet in breadth, and has 180 windows, through each of 

 which the sun enters in rotation, and then returns in a retrograde 

 direction. The front of the Temple is adorned with a beautiful 

 cornice and frieze, covered with hieroglyphics, over the centfe of 

 which is the winged globe; while the sides are decorated with 

 compartments of sacrifices. In the front of the building is a 

 massive portico, supported by 24 immense columns, in four rows, 

 having circular shafts covered with hieroglyphics, square capitals 

 resembling Egyptian Temples supported by four human heads 



