by the Egyptian theosophy? On the one hand,
what abundance, we may say what super-abundance; on the other, what
poverty, what gaping breaches in the chain of material history! Among the
gods and genii, whose names have come down to us, how few there are whose
images we can surely point to; and, again, what a small number of figures
we have upon which we can put a name without fear of error!

To write the history of these beliefs is a difficult task, not only because
the _idols_, as they would once have been called, are few, and the
Chaldaeo-Assyrian inscriptions historical and narrative rather than
religious and dogmatic, but also because the interpretation of the texts,
especially of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of the
hieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or at least written in the
primitive ideographic characters, are attacked, the process is one of
divination rather than of translation in the strict sense of the word.

Another difficulty has to be noticed; classic literature does little or
nothing to help us in filling up these voids and dissipating the
obscurities they cause. The Greeks were guilty of many errors when they
attempted to understand and describe foreign religions, but their relations
with the Egyptians and Phoenicians were so prolonged, and, towards the end,
so intimate, that at last they did succeed in grasping some of the doctrine
taught in the sanctuaries of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Byblos and
Hierapolis. With their lively intellects they could hardly frequent the
temples, examine the sacred images, and question the priests as to the
national rites and ceremonies without discovering at least a part of the
truth. It was not so with Chaldaea. Babylon was too far off. Until the time
of Alexander's conquests the boldest travellers did no more than glance
into its streets and monumental buildings, and by that time Nineveh had
long ceased to exist. It was only under the first of the Seleucidae, when a
Macedonian kingdom was established in the centre of Mesopotamia, that the
curiosity of the Greeks led them to make inquiries similar to those they
had pursued for some three centuries in the valley of the Nile. We cannot
doubt that this desire for information arose among the followers of those
princes themselves; many of them were very intelligent men; and when
Berosus determined to write his history in Greek, he may have wished to
answer the questions asked in his hearing b