When these first historians speak of ancient events, whether occurring in their own nation, or in neighbouring countries, they only cite oral traditions, and not public works. It was not until a long time after them, that pretended extracts were given from the Egyptian, Phenician, and Babylonian annals. _Berosus_ wrote only in the reign of Seleucus Nicanor; _Hieronymus_ in that of Antiochus Soter, and _Manetho_ under Ptolemy Philadelphia; the whole three having flourished only in the third century before the Christian era. That _Sanconiatho_ was an author real or supposed, was not known till Philo of Byblos had published a translation of his work in the reign of Adrian, in the second century before Christ; and, when he did become known, there was nothing found in his account of the early ages, as in those of all the authors of this kind, but a puerile theogony, or metaphysical doctrines, so disguised under the form of allegory as to be unintelligible. One nation alone has preserved annals written in prose before the period of Cyrus, namely, the Jewish people. The part of the Old Testament which is known by the name of the _Pentateuch_, has existed in its present form, at least since the separation of the ten tribes under Jeroboam, since it was received as authentic by the Samaritans equally as the Jews, which assures us that its actual antiquity is upwards of 2800 years. Besides this, we have no reason to doubt the book of Genesis having been composed by Moses himself, which gives it an antiquity of 500 years more, or of thirty-three centuries; and it is only necessary to read it, to perceive that it has in part been composed of fragments of previously existing works. We cannot, therefore, hesitate to admit, that this is the most ancient writing which has been transmitted to modern times in the West[115]. Now, this work, and all those which have been composed since, whatever strangers their authors might be to Moses and his people, speak of the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean as of recent origin; they represent them as still in a half savage state some ages before. And, further, they all speak of a general catastrophe, an irruption of the waters, which occasioned an almost total regeneration of the human race; and to this epoch they do not assign a very remote antiquity. Those texts of the Pentateuch, which extend this epoch the longest, do not place it farther back than twenty centuries before Moses, and hence not more than 5400 years before the present day[116].