104 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF 



Berosus, a Babylonian and a priest, who wrote scarcel}'^ one hundred 

 and twenty years after Herodotus, gives an alarming antiquity to Ba- 

 bylon ; but it is to Nebuchadnezzar, a prince of comparatively recent 

 date, that he attributes the principal monuments *. 



A s far as regards Cyrus, that remarkable prince, and whose history 

 should be so well-known, so common, Herodotus, who only lived a 

 century after him, confesses that there were three different opinions • 

 and, in fact, sixty years later, Xenophon gives us a biography of this 

 prince entirely different from that of Herodotus. 



Ctesias, nearly cotemporary with Xenophon, pretends to have drawn 

 from the archives of the Medes, a chronology which renders the ori<nn 

 of the Assyrian monarchy more remote by eight hundred years, placing 

 at the head of its kings the same Ninus, the son of Belus, whom He- 

 rodotus had made one of the Heraclidse ; and at the same time he 

 attributes to Ninus and Semiramis, conquests towards the west, of an 

 extent absolutely incompatible with the Jewish and Egyptian history 

 of this period f . 



According to Megasthenes, it was Nebuchadnezzar who made these 

 incredible conquests. He carried them through Libya to Spain \. We 

 see that, from the time of Alexander, Nebuchadnezzar had entirely 

 usurped the reputation which Semiramis had had from th€ time of 

 Artaxerxes. But, we must certainly suppose, that Semiramis and 

 Nebuchadnezzar had conquered Ethiopia and Libya, nearly in the same 

 manner as the Eg5'ptians attributed the conquest of India and Bactria 

 to Sesostris or Osymandias. 



It would avail us nothing, if we now entered into an examination 

 of the different traditions of Sardanapulus, in which a celebrated 

 learned man has imagined that he has discerned proof of the existence 

 of three princes of that name, all victims of similar misfortunes § ; and 

 in the same way, another learned man finds in the Indies, at least 

 three Vicramaditjia, equally the heroes of precisely similar adven- 

 tures. 



It was doubtlessly from the disagreement of all these narratives, 

 that Strabo was induced to say that the authority of Herodotus and 

 Ctesias was not equal to that of Hesiod or Homer j|. Ctesias has not 

 been more fortunate in copyists than Manetho ; and it is now very 



* Josephus (contra App.) lib. i, cap. xix. 

 + Diod. Sicul. lib. 2. 



+ Josephus (contra App.) lib. i, chap, vi, and Strabo, lib. z •, p. 687. 

 § See the Memoir of Freret, on the History of the Assyrians, in the Memoirs of 

 the Academy of Belles Lettres, vol. v. 

 II Strabo, lib. xi, p. 507. 



