Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/64

 I 54 Journal of Philology. us from the first with its centralized despotisms, and correspond- ing to them with history orderly digested and authoritatively kept 5 , instead of human curiosity and interest : and in the same way, it presents us with the first essays at that science whose roots, from the consecutiveness and length of time which the observations for it require, are likely to have shot forth, unlike its developed growth, best in a soil of permanent institutions and monotonous ideas. I mean astronomy : and from this political and scientific time-keeping of the East has sprung chronology, just as it is the awakened energy of the West which has given history its life, and its variety. The first contemporary marking of time which, independent of the sacred writings, we know of, is the succession of Babylonian years, called by the Greek astronomers of Egypt years of Nabo- nassar. That this was a real contemporary reckoning is proved by the record of astronomical observations kept in it, which science proves to have been really made at the time to which they are assigned. The general character of Eastern political reckoning seems to have been sometimes in regnal years, some- times in years of the dynasty, and sometimes of a previous dynasty, the counting from which, for some reason, had sur- vived ; hence each political or dynastial change caused a new epoch, but an epoch not universally used, as often the dating from the older epoch continued concurrently with it 7. In the Nabonassarean dating, the astronomical observations were re- corded in regnal years of Babylonian kings : some have supposed that there was none but regnal reckoning, no dating, that is, from Nabonassar or any one epoch, till the Greek astronomers for convenience sake thought it best to throw the regnal reckonings all into one series. It is more probable however, 8 Such were the pa<riitcal &vaypa<pal oning, and cannot venture therefore to (Diod. 2. 7i), and the /3a<rtt/cal 6i<p9i- speak of that. pat (Id. 2. 32), from which Ctesias drew 7 It is evident, of course, that all his accounts : the chronicles on which regnal and dynastial reckoning is to a Berosus's history purported to be found- certain degree eponymous, but being ne- ed and from which Ptolemy's canon cessarily partly numeric, and the name must be drawn, the Tyrian annals re- not being associated with a definite in- ferred to by Josephus, and the Phoeni- terval of time, it is more akin to simple cian histories mentioned by Tatian, &c. epochal dating, and more likely to lead 9 I am but imperfectly acquainted to it than eponymous dating such as with what has been made out with re- that of Greece and Rome, gard to earlier Egyptian dynastial reck-