efore, in a piecemeal condition--in the memory of the people or in
the books of the priests--before even their primitive history began;
the learned who collected it later on had only to select some of the
materials with which it furnished them, in order to form out of them a
connected narrative, in which the earliest ages were distinguished from
the most recent only in the assumption of more frequent and more direct
interpositions of the powers of heaven in the affairs of men. Every city
had naturally its own version, in which its own protecting deities, its
heroes and princes, played the most important parts. That of Babylon
threw all the rest into the shade; not that it was superior to them,
but because this city had speedily become strong enough to assert its
political supremacy over the whole region of the Euphrates. Its scribes
were accustomed to see their master treat the lords of other towns as
subjects or vassals. They fancied that this must have always been
the case, and that from its origin Babylon had been recognized as the
queen-city to which its contemporaries rendered homage. They made its
individual annals the framework for the history of the entire country,
and from the succession of its princely families on the throne, diverse
as they were in origin, they constructed a complete canon of the kings
of Chaldaea.

But the manner of grouping the names and of dividing the dynasties
varied according to the period in which the lists were drawn up, and at
the present time we are in possession of at least two systems which the
Babylonian historians attempted to construct. Berossus, who communicated
one of them to the Greeks about the beginning of the IInd century B.C.,
would not admit more than eight dynasties in the period of thirty-six
thousand years between the Deluge and the Persian invasion. The lists,
which he had copied from originals in the cuneiform character, have
suffered severely at the hands of his abbreviators, who omitted the
majority of the names which seemed to them very barbarous in form, while
those who copied these abbreviated lists have made such further havoc
with them that they are now for the most part unintelligible. Modern
criticism has frequently attempted to restore them, with varying
results; the reconstruction here given, which passes for the most
probable, is not equally certain in all its parts:--*

[Illustration: 084.jpg CHRONOLOGIC TABLE]

It was not without reason that Berossu