Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/103

Rh the doctrines is concerned; but the arguments brought forward to prove it, were almost always detestable. An imaginary history, formed by artful contrivances, obtained credit, and after some centuries, became an authority. From this air of folly and extravagance, which pervades ancient Babylonian histories in Arabian writers of the school of Bagdad, often led away themselves by the false method of their predecessors, “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture” appears to have been written at the date of this apocryphal and trickish literature. The author is not a forger himself, but he appears to be misled by forgers. The true descendants of the Nabathæans, the Mendaïtes, continued until the Mussulman epoch, and almost up to our own times, to practise similar frauds, from which small communities free themselves with such difficulty. Many of their mythological personages have thus become Hebrew patriarchs. The Yezidis have