Under Troy there is a fourth stratum of ruins, varying from thirteen to twenty feet in depth. The most remarkable feature of these oldest ruins is the superiority of the terracotta articles. These vases are of a shining black, red, or brown color, with ornamental patterns, first cut into the pottery, and then filled with a white substance. The age of these ruins "is a matter of pure conjecture, since the vicissitudes of the city's history--frequent destruction and rebuilding--would have the same practical effect, or very nearly so, as a long interval of time. We have anywhere from two to five thousand years before Christ as the date of the foundation of the _first_ Troy."[98] _Chaldea._--Berosus, a Chaldean priest of Belus, nearly three hundred years before Christ, wrote in Greek a regular history of Chaldea, in nine books. The materials for this work were supplied by the archives then existing in the Temple of Belus at Babylon. The work was particularly devoted to a history of the kingdom prior to the beginning of the Assyrian empire. Fragments of this work have been preserved by Josephus and Eusebius. After describing the cyclical ages of ten fabulous kings, he then comes to what he considers true history, and enumerates one hundred and sixty-three kings of Chaldea, who reigned successively from the time when the list begins to the rise of the Assyrian empire, about the year 1237 B. C. Berosus begins with a dynasty of eighty-six kings, and gives their names, which are now lost. He had no chronology of their time, but subjected it to a cyclical calculation. His list, which has so far escaped the lapse of time and the change of hands, is thus preserved: First, eighty-six Chaldean kings; history and time mythical. Second, eight Median kings; during two hundred and twenty-four years. Third, eleven kings. Fourth, forty-nine Chaldean kings. Fifth, nine Arabian kings; during two hundred and forty-five years. The rulers of the Assyrian empire were next added, as a sixth dynasty. The blank spaces in the list are doubtless the result of careless copying, or caused by imperfections in the manuscripts. In order to make the old kingdom of Chaldea begin about the year 2234 B. C. the first eighty-six kings of Berosus have been struck out as fabulous, and the Median dynasty regarded as spurious, and this without any show of reason, save that it does not agree with the chronology which the mutilators of history accept.