he greater part of the 5th century B.C.,
and who drew up a chronological list of the priestesses of Here at
Argos; of Ephorus, who lived in the 4th century B.C., and is
distinguished as the first Greek who attempted the composition of a
universal history; and of Timaeus, who in the following century wrote an
elaborate history of Sicily, in which he set the example of using the
Olympiads as the basis of chronology, the works have perished and our
meagre knowledge of their contents is derived only from fragmentary
citations in later writers. The same fate has befallen the works of
Berossus and Manetho, Eratosthenes and Apollodorus. Berossus, a priest
of Belus living at Babylon in the 3rd century B.C., added to his
historical account of Babylonia a chronological list of its kings, which
he claimed to have compiled from genuine archives preserved in the
temple. Manetho, likewise a priest, living at Sebennytus in Lower Egypt
in the 3rd century B.C., wrote in Greek a history of Egypt, with an
account of its thirty dynasties of sovereigns, which he professed to
have drawn from genuine archives in the keeping of the priests. Of these
works fragments only, more or less copious and accurate, have been
preserved. Eratosthenes, who in the latter half of the 2nd century B.C.
was keeper of the famous Alexandrian library, not only made himself a
great name by his important work on geography, but by his treatise
entitled _Chronographia_, one of the first attempts to establish an
exact scheme of general chronology, earned for himself the title of
"father of chronology." His method of procedure, however, was usually
conjectural; and guess-work, however careful, acute and plausible, is
still guess-work and not testimony. Apollodorus, an Athenian who
flourished in the middle of the 2nd century B.C., wrote a metrical
chronicle of events, ranging from the supposed period of the fall of
Troy to his own day. These writers were followed by other investigators
and systematizers in the same field, but their works are lost. Of the
principal later writers whose works are extant, and to whom we owe what
little knowledge we possess of the labours of their predecessors,
mention will be made hereafter.

The absence or incompleteness of authentic records, however, is not the
only source of obscurity and confusion in the chronology of remote ages.
There can be no exact computation of time or placing of events without
a fixed point or epoch from which the