It was not without reason that Berossus and his authorities had put the sum total of reigns at thirty-six thousand years; this number falls in with a certain astrological period, during which the gods had granted to the Chaldæans glory, prosperity, and independence, and whose termination coincided with the capture of Babylon by Cyrus.** Others before them had employed the same artifice, but they reckoned ten dynasties in the place of the eight accepted by Berossus:—
* After the example of G. B. Niebuhr, Gutschmid admitted
here, as Oppert did, 45 Assyrians; he based his view on
Herodotus, in which it is said that the Assyrians held sway
in Asia for 520 years, until its conquest by the Medes. Upon
the improbability of this opinion, see Schrader’s
demonstration.
** The existence of this astronomical or astrological scheme
on which Berossus founded his chronology, was pointed out by
Brandis, afterwards by Gutschmid; it is now generally
accepted.
Attempts have been made to bring the two lists* into harmony, with varying results; in my opinion, a waste of time and labour. For even comparatively recent periods of their history, the Chaldæans, like the Egyptians, had to depend upon a collection of certain abbreviated, incoherent, and often contradictory documents, from which they found it difficult to make a choice: they could not, therefore, always come to an agreement when they wished to determine how many dynasties had succeeded each other during these doubtful epochs, how many kings were included in each dynasty, and what length of reign was to be assigned to each king. We do not know the motives which influenced Berossus in his preference of one tradition over others; perhaps he had no choice in the matter, and that of which he constituted himself the interpréter was the only one which was then known. In any case, the tradition he followed forms a system which we cannot, modify without misinterpreting the intention of those who drew it up or who have handed it down to us. We must accept or reject it just as it is, in its entirety and without alteration: to attempt to adapt it to the testimony of the monuments would be equivalent to the creation of a new system, and not to the correction simply of the old one. The right course is to put it aside for the moment, and confine ourselves to the original lists whose fragments have come down to us: they do not furnish us, it is true, with a history of Chaldæa such as it unfolded itself from age to age, but they teach us what the later Chaldæans knew, or thought they knew, of that history. Still it is wise to treat them with some reserve, and not to forget that if they agree with each other in the main, they differ frequently in details. Thus the small dynasties, which are called the VIth and VIIth, include the same number of kings on both the tablets which establish their existence, but the number of years assigned to the names of the kings and the total years of each dynasty vary a little from one another:—
* The first document having claim to the title of Royal
Canon was found among the tablets of the British Museum, and
was published by G. Smith. The others were successively
discovered by Pinches; some erroneous readings in them have
been corrected by Fr. Delitzsch, and an exact edition has
been published by Knudtzon. Smith’s list is the fragment of
a chronicle in which the VIth, VIIth, and VIIIth dynasties
only are almost complete. One of Pinches’s lists consists
merely of a number of royal names not arranged in any
consistent order, and containing their non-Semitic as well
as their Semitic forms. The other two lists are actual
canons, giving the names of the kings and the years of their
reigns; unfortunately they are much mutilated, and the
lacunæ in them cannot yet be filled up. All of them have
been translated by Sayce.
