f peoples are absurd. Thus the
Egyptians had been governed by the gods for many centuries; then they
had been governed by demi-gods; finally they had had kings for eleven
thousand three hundred and forty years; and in that space of time the
sun had changed four times from east to west.

The Phoenicians of Alexander's time claimed to have been established
in their country for thirty thousand years; and these thirty thousand
years were filled with as many prodigies as the Egyptian chronology. I
avow that physically it is very possible that Phoenicia has existed
not merely thirty thousand years, but thirty thousand milliards of
centuries, and that it experienced like the rest of the world thirty
million revolutions. But we have no knowledge of it.

One knows what a ridiculously marvellous state of affairs ruled in the
ancient history of the Greeks.

The Romans, for all that they were serious, did not any the less envelop
the history of their early centuries in fables. This nation, so recent
compared with the Asiatic peoples, was five hundred years without
historians. It is not surprising, therefore, that Romulus was the son of
Mars, that a she-wolf was his foster mother, that he marched with a
thousand men of his village of Rome against twenty-five thousand
combatants of the village of the Sabines: that later he became a god;
that Tarquin, the ancient, cut a stone with a razor, and that a vestal
drew a ship to land with her girdle, etc.

The early annals of all our modern nations are no less fabulous; the
prodigious and improbable things must sometimes be reported, but as
proofs of human credulity: they enter the history of opinions and
foolishnesses; but the field is too vast.

OF RECORDS

In order to know with a little certainty something of ancient history,
there is only one means, it is to see if any incontestable records
remain. We have only three in writing: the first is the collection of
astronomical observations made for nineteen hundred consecutive years at
Babylon, sent by Alexander to Greece. This series of observations, which
goes back to two thousand two hundred and thirty-four years before our
era, proves invincibly that the Babylonians existed as a body of people
several centuries before; for the arts are only the work of time, and
men's natural laziness leaves them for some thousands of years without
other knowledge and without other talents than those of feeding
themselves, of defending themselves