RELIGIONS AND CIVILIZATION. 173. 



of a fiood, indicating, but erroneously, tliat of Deucalion. On the 

 authority of Acusilaus he puts Ogyges 1020 years before the first 

 Olympiad, or equivalent to 1796 years before Christ; to which time 

 he also refers the Exodus of Israel, much too early a date for the latter 

 event, perhaps not early enough for the flood of Ogyges, but which 

 would place it during the residence of the Israelites in Egypt, 255 

 years before the Exodus. Ogyges, who afterwards founded Eleusis, is 

 said by Thallus to have been of the race of giants who warred against 

 heaven ; and, being defeated, he fled as an emigrant from Ph<xnicia to 

 the land then called Acte, but since Attica. The flood which hap- 

 pened in his day through the overflowing of a river, may, therefore, 

 have been not in Greece, but in the country from which he emigrated 

 thither. The Scholiast on Plato does not say that it was in Greece 

 but only that Ogyges was king of Attica. In the Latin of the Chronicus 

 Canon of Eusebius we accordingly find it mentioned thus : " Diluvium 

 Egypti hoc tempore fait, quod factum est sub Ogyge.'' "'^ More pro- 

 bably it was in Canaan than in Egypt, though known to the Egyp- 

 tians;^"- and it is not unlikely that the flow of the waters of the 

 Jordan, which must necessarily have preceded the bursting in and 

 final settling down of the basin of the Dead Sea to its present form, 

 meets us in this tradition, which has since become transferred to 

 Greece, partly from the emigration of Ogyges thither, and also partly 

 from its having become confounded with a later flood. Ptolemy the 

 geographer informs us that near the Climax, an ascent or hill in or 

 near the Idumean range, there was a spring having Avernian associa- 

 tions, for it was called '' the Stygian fountain." Apollodorus makes 

 Phgethon a native of Syria and son of Tithonus (who has Egyptian, and 

 Assyrian, and Persian connections). Ovid, who seems in some things 

 to have taken his materials from Acusilaus, in others doubtless from a 

 variety of other ancient writers of history genuine or traditionary, 

 makes him contemporary with Epaphus, and he glances at the existence 

 of a wide-spread inundation, or sea of collected waters, at or just fol- 

 lowing the period of the conflagration of Phsethon, and at the spot 

 where the earth sank down to a lower level. Clement of Alexandria 

 puts the conflagration in the time of Crotopus. Johannes Antiochenus 



101 " The Egyptian deluge was at this time, whicli took place under Ogyges." 



loa There is every reason to believe that the plutonic agency at work in the lower basin of the 



Jordan was of a wide- spread character, and materially altered the face of the country towards 



the shores of the Red Sea, and probably eastward towards Egypt. 



