Prior to the appearance of Oannes, Berosus relates, "that Chaldæa had been colonized by a mixed multitude of men of foreign race, who lived without order like animals," thus carrying back the existence of mankind in large numbers, to some date anterior to 259,000 years before the Deluge. There is also a legend resembling that of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages, recorded in another fragment of Berosus. These accounts are all so obviously mythical that no historical value can be attached to them, and they have only been preserved because early Christian writers saw in them some sort of distorted confirmation of the corresponding narratives in the Old Testament. For anything like historical dates therefore the Bible remained the principal authority, until the recent discoveries made from the monuments of Chaldæa and Assyria. This authority does not carry us very far back. The first event which can advance any claim to be considered as historical, is that of the migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, and the further migration of his son Abraham from Haran to Palestine. This is said to have taken place in the ninth generation after Noah, about 290 years after the Deluge, and it presupposes the existence of a dense population and a number of large cities both in Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. It mentions also an event, apparently historical, as occurring in Abraham's time, viz. a campaign by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, with four allies, one of whom is a King of Shinar, against five petty kings in Southern Syria. Chedorlaomer has been identified from inscriptions with Khuder-lagomer, one of the kings of the Elamite dynasty, who conquered Chaldæa about 2300 B.C., and were expelled before 2000 B.C. A long interval then occurs during which the scattered notices in the Bible relate mainly to the intercourse of the Hebrews with Egypt, with the races of Canaan, with the Philistines, with the Phoenicians of Tyre, and with the Syrians of Damascus. Mesopotamia first appears after the rise of the Assyrian Empire had united nearly the whole of Western Asia under the warlike kings who reigned at Nineveh, and when Palestine had become the battle-field between them and the declining power of Egypt, which under the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties had extended to the Euphrates. The capture of Jerusalem in the reign of Rehoboam by Shishak, the first king of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty, affords the first certain synchronism between sacred and profane history. The date may be fixed within a few years at 970 B.C. Assyria first appears on the scene two hundred years later in the reign of Menahem King of Israel, when Pul, better known as Tiglath-Pileser II., came against the land, and exacted a large ransom from Menahem, whom he confirmed as a tributary vassal.