Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/39

Rh criticism. In the foreground appears the chief personage of Babylonian literature, a certain Yanbúshádh, founder of natural sciences and originator of a kind of Monotheism. He is separated from Kúthámí by four or five centuries. Some ages before Yanbúshádh, appears Daghrith, founder of another school, which had some disciples, even after Yanbúshádh. This Daghrith lived, according to Dr. Chwolson, two thousand years before Christ; and speaks of various persons of Babylonian tradition in a manner which shows that he then considered them as men of early antiquity. Indeed, long before Daghrith, there is another age of literature, of which the representatives are Másí the Suranian, his disciple Jernáná, and the Canaanites, Anúhá, Thámithrí, and Sardáná (towards 2500). All these sages appear at once as priests, founders of religions, moralists, naturalists, astronomers, agriculturalists (agronomes), and as universally endeavouring to introduce a worship freed from idolatrous superstitions.