Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/510

398 a number of others; but nothing is more consonant to the history of the country than the translation I have given it, nor will the word itself bear any other.

Chronicle of Axum, the most ancient repository of the antiquities of that country, a book esteemed, I shall not say how properly, as the first in authority after the holy scriptures, says, that between the creation of the world and the birth of our Saviour there were 5500 years * ; that Abyssinia had never been inhabited till 1808 years before Christ * ; and 200 years after that, which was in the 1600, it was laid waste by a flood, the face of the country much changed and deformed, so that it was denominated at that time Ourè Midre, or, the country laid waste, or, as it is called in scripture itself, a land which the waters or floods had spoiled ‡ ; that about the 1400 year before Christ it was taken possession of by a variety of people speaking different languages, who, as they were in friendship with the Agaazi, or Shepherds, possessing the high country of Tigrè, came and sat down beside them in a peaceable manner, each occupying the lands that were before him. This settlement is what the Chronicle of Axum calls Angaba, the entry and establishment of these nations, which finished the peopling of Abyssinia.

further says, that they came from Palestine. All this seems to me to wear the face of truth. Some time after the year 1500, we know there happened a flood which

occasioned

‡ Isaiah, chap. xviii. ver. 2.
 * Eight years less than the Greeks and other followers of the Septuagint.