_if_ there were no doubt about
the reading of this name on the tablet, and _if_ his date and dynasty
were as plainly there recorded, and _if_ all this tallies exactly with
equally precise particulars in Manetho's list, it would indeed be a
remarkable coincidence and would imply some common source, whether
record or fact. But if having credited Manetho with the record of such a
name and date, one tortures a hieroglyph into a faintly similar name,
and concludes at once that the same name must be the same person, and
that therefore this is the oldest record in the world, the confirmation
is not so striking. That it is so in this instance we do not affirm; but
we should need the assertion of a man of more intellectual sobriety than
Mr. Laing to make it worth the trouble of investigating.

Passing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the
deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a
mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from
borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not _very_
conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on
much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately
only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus.
Berosus was a _learned priest_ of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a
history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the
annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions." [56]
Still this "learned priest," though antecedently as competent a critic
as Manetho, is so portentously mythical in his accounts, that "no
historical value can be attached to them," which must be regretted,
since he pushes history back a quarter of a million years prior to the
Deluge, and the Deluge itself to about half a million years ago. Here,
therefore, we are thrown solely upon the independent value of the
monumental evidence, and must drop the argument from coincidence. This
evidence, we are told, "is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt,
where the lists of Manetho, &c.... The date of Sargon I. [57] (3800 B.C.)
rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than three
thousand years later, and may have been mistaken." "The probability of
such a remote date is enhanced _by the certainty_ that a high
civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 B.C." If the evidence
for the antiquity of Chaldee civilization is "less conclusive"