Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/102

86 Agriculture” is founded, rendering it necessary to find at some point in history, the reality of that series of sects, of prophets, and founders of religion, which the book of the Parsee enumerates. To reconcile other portions, gives rise to equal doubts. Kúthámí, like Berosus or Sanchoniathon, like Josephus, or Mar Abas Catina, or Moses Choronensis, appears to have been afflicted to the greatest degree with the faults of all Oriental writers from the time of Alexander to about our fifth century, a total want of judgment, unmeasured syncretism, silly deductions (évhémérisme), and exaggerated national vanity. Untruths, apocryphal fabrications, all sorts of confusion;—sticking at nothing, in order to establish their favourite position, proof of the high antiquity of their doctrines, and superiority of those doctrines over those of the Greeks. That position was sometimes true, at least so far as the antiquity of