[200] Layard ("Nineveh and Babylon," p. 343) says, "We can scarcely hesitate to identify this mythic form (at Kosyundik) with the Oannes or sacred man-fish, who, according to the traditions preserved by Berosus, issued from the _Erethræan_ sea, instructed the _Chaldæans_ in all wisdom, in the sciences and the fine arts, and was _afterwards_ worshipped as a god in the temples of Babylonia.... Five such monsters rose from the Persian Gulf at fabulous intervals of time (Cory's "Fragments," p. 30). It has been conjectured that this myth denotes the conquest of Chaldæa at some remote and pre-historic period by a comparatively civilised nation coming in ships to the mouth of the Euphrates.... The _Dagon_ of the Philistines and of the inhabitants of the Phoenician coast was worshipped, according to the united opinion of the Hebrew commentators on the Bible, under _the same form_." The five apparitions at long intervals may have been the confusion of the previous revelations to the patriarchs with those made to Noah--or they may be reduplications (_vide supra_, p. 157). "He is said to have transmitted to mankind the knowledge of grammar and mathematics, and of all the arts, of the polity of cities, the construction and dedication of temples, _the introduction of laws_ ([Greek: kai nomôn eisêgêseis]); to have taught them geometry, and to have shown them _by example_ the modes of _sowing the seed_ and gathering the _fruits of the earth_," [the "vir agricola" of Genesis], and along with them to have tradited all the secrets which tend to humanise life. And no one else at that time was found more super-eminent than he."--_Vide_ Rawlinson, i. 155. We have seen that he was known to "the first settlers on the Euphrates and Tigris." The Abbé de Tressan says, Berosus begins his history with these words:--"_In the first year_ appeared this extraordinary man" (Oannes). Now, with "the early settlers" on the Euphrates and Tigris the commencement of all things would have been naturally dated from the Deluge. It appears to me worth while, in conclusion, to place more succinctly before the reader the _identical_ terms in which the ancients (various authors) spoke of the first founders of states or their earliest progenitor--compelling the conclusion that allusion was made to one and the same individual and epoch. Bryant ("Myth." ii. 253) says that Noah was represented as Thoth, Hermes, Menes, Osiris, Zeuth, Atlas, Phoroneus, and Prometheus, &c. &c. "There are none wherein his history is delineated more plainly, than in those of Saturn and Janus." These I will now omit, as we have just seen them to be identical--and so too Bacchus, who equally with them plants the vine, teaches them to sow, and gives them laws.