Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/79

Rh his time, and vigorously to attack idolatry. I am perfectly aware that professions of a more theistic tendency were common among the Shemetic nations; but it would certainly not be at Babylon where Shemetism, so to say, was of so mingled a character, that one would most expect to find it. But whenever these professions of faith occur in remote antiquity, it is never in the polemical, reflective, and systematic forms which they assume in “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture.” Prof. Ewald is right in believing that such passages bespeak the full development of a monotheistical religion. The kind of incredulity towards the received religion which peeps out in Kúthámí and several of his countrymen, and the atheism of which some traces are perceptible in his writings, point to the works of Berosus and Sanchoniathon, and belong to the epoch of the Seleucides. It is well known that the religious creeds in Babylon were much shaken at that period, and that many persons