10. However that may be, 5000 B.C. is a moderate and probable date. But ancient nations were not content with such, when they tried to locate and classify their own beginnings. These being necessarily obscure and only vaguely shadowed out in traditions which gained in fancifulness and lost in probability with every succeeding generation that received them and handed them down to the next, they loved to magnify them by enshrouding them in the mystery of innumerable ages. The more appalling the figures, the greater the glory. Thus we gather from some fragments of Berosus that, according to the national Chaldean tradition, there was an interval of over 259,000 years between the first appearance of Oannes and the first king. Then come ten successive kings, each of whom reigns a no less extravagant number of years (one 36,000, another 43,000, even 64,000; 10,800 being the most modest figure), till the aggregate of all these different periods makes up the pretty sum total of 691,200 years, supposed to have elapsed from the first appearance of Oannes to the Deluge. It is so impossible to imagine so prodigious a number of years or couple with it anything at all real, that we might just as well substitute for such a figure the simpler "very, very long ago," or still better, the approved fairy tale beginning, "There was once upon a time, ..." It conveys quite as definite a notion, and would, in such a case, be the more appropriate, that all a nation's most marvellous traditions, most fabulous legends, are naturally placed in those stupendously remote ages which no record could reach, no experience control. Although these traditions and legends generally had a certain body of actual truth and dimly remembered fact in them, which might still be apparent to the learned and the cultivated few, the ignorant masses of the people swallowed the thing whole, as real history, and found things acknowledged as impossible easy to believe, for the simple reason that "it was so very long ago!" A Chaldean of Alexander's time certainly did not expect to meet a divine Man-Fish in his walks along the sea-shore, but--there was no knowing what might or might not have happened seven hundred thousand years ago! In the legend of the six successive apparitions under the first ten long-lived kings, he would not have descried the simple sense so lucidly set forth by Mr. Maspero, one of the most distinguished of French Orientalists:--"The times preceding the Deluge represented an experimental period, during which mankind, being as yet barbarous, had need of divine assistance to overcome the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Those times were filled up with six manifestations of the deity, doubtless answering to the number of sacred books in which the priests saw the most complete expression of revealed law."[AI] This presents another and more probable explanation of the legend than the one suggested above, (end of Sec. 7);