86 BABYLONIAN LITERATURE. 



thsean Agriculture " is founded, rendering it 

 necessary to find at some point in history, 

 the reality of that series of sects, of pro- 

 phets, and founders of religion, which the 

 book of the Parsee enumerates. To recon- 

 cile other portions, gives rise to equal 

 doubts. Kuthami, like Berosus or San- 

 choniathon, like Josephus, or Mar Abas Ca- 

 tina, or Moses Choronensis, appears to have 

 been afflicted to the greatest degree with 

 the faults of all Oriental writers from the 

 time of Alexander to about our fifth cen- 

 tury, a total want of judgment, unmeasured 

 syncretism, silly deductions (evhemerismc), 

 and exaggerated national vanity. 1 Un- 

 truths, apocryphal fabrications, all sorts 

 of confusion ; sticking at nothing, in order 

 to establish their favourite position, proof of 

 the high antiquity of their doctrines, and 

 superiority of those doctrines over those of 

 the Greeks. That position was sometimes 

 true, at least so far as the antiquity of 



1 See, for fuller details, my Memoire sur Sanchoniathon, in the 

 Memoires de 1'Acad. tome XXIII. 2nd part, p. 317 ff. 



