197 
of Niam-eul-sse, or the twenty-two histories. The entire 
collection of the official annals from 2698 b.C. to 1645 A.D. 
comprise a period of 4345 years. Here, then, we have one of 
the most ancient histories of an ancient people, carrying us 
back to a period less than three thousand years before 
Christ. 
Passing now to the Babylonian records, what evidence do 
we get of man’s great antiquity ? Certamly not very much. 
The clay tablets which have been discovered in the ruins of 
the tower of Belus are generally supposed to date from about 
3750 B.C., and at this period of human history man was in 
a highly-civilised state, being learned in the arts of war and 
manufacture and in law. 
Let us now pass on to the Hindoos, and here it will be well 
to note that Hindoo literature itself is almost without known 
dates, owing either to the peculiar organisation of the Hindoo’ 
mind or to the convulsions of Indian history: hence the 
various dates which have been assigned to the subject by 
different writers must be received with great caution. 
The Vedas or sacred writings of India are undoubtedly very 
ancient. ‘he most ancient of these documents is the Rig- 
Veda, which is probably the oldest hterary document in 
existence. It is next to impossible to fix a date to this docu- 
ment. While some writers have claimed for it many thousands 
of years before the Christian era, others have been content with 
1000 to 1200, while some have assigned it to a date as late as 
800 or even 60 B.C. ‘Thus, then, it is clear that no valid 
argument for a high antiquity for man can be drawn from the 
ancient writings of the Hindoos. 
However much the various systems of chronology vary in 
length, none of them make the period from Christ to the com- 
mencement of human history more than 4,000 or 5,000 years, 
thus giving man an existence of somewhat less than 7,000 
years. But this period is considered by many scientific men 
of the present day to be wholly insufficient, and so one pleads 
for 20,000 years as the human period, another wants 27,000, 
while a third asks for 100,000. Professor Haeckel maintains 
that man has existed on the earth for a very much longer than 
the longest of these periods, or all of them taken together, 
while the writer of an article in a London daily paper 
claims billions of years since man’s first advent on this 
earth. 
Of course, the chief evidence of man’s antiquity produced 
by its advocates is drawn from pre-historic times, and the 
period of this is held to be of immense length. 
