That they have confused the dates, and especially the order of events “intentionally,” is undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings and records were all Esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the priests of other ancient nations. Their records were meant only for the Initiates and their disciples, and it is only the latter who were furnished with the keys to the true meaning. But Professor Sayce's remarks are promising. For he explains the difficulty by saying that as:
The Nineveh library contained mostly copies of older Babylonian texts, and the copyists pitched upon such tablets only as were of special interest to the Assyrian conquerors, belonging to a comparatively late epoch, this added much to the greatest of all our difficulties—namely, our being so often left in the dark as to the age of our documentary evidence, and the precise worth of our materials for history.
Thus one has a right to infer that some still fresher discovery may lead to a new necessity for pushing the Babylonian dates so far beyond the year 4,000 b.c., as to make them pre-cosmic in the judgment of every Bible worshipper.
How much more would Palæontology have learned had not millions of works been destroyed! We talk of the Alexandrian Library, which has been thrice destroyed, namely, by Julius Cæsar 48 b.c., in a.d. 390, and lastly in the year a.d. 640 by the general of Kaliph Omar. What is this in comparison with the works and records destroyed in the primitive Atlantean Libraries, wherein records are said to have been traced on the tanned skins of gigantic antediluvian monsters? Or again in comparison with the destruction of the countless Chinese books by command of the founder of the Imperial Tsin dynasty, Tsin Shi Hwang-ti, in 213 b.c.? Surely the brick-clay tablets of the Imperial Babylonian Library, and the priceless treasures of the Chinese collections, could never have contained such information as one of the aforesaid “Atlantean” skins would have furnished to the ignorant world.
But even with the extremely meagre data at hand, Science has been able to see the necessity of throwing back nearly every Babylonian [pg 732] date, and has done so quite generously. We learn from Professor Sayce that even the archaic statues at Tel-loh, in Lower Babylonia, have suddenly been assigned a date contemporary with the fourth dynasty in Egypt.[1633] Unfortunately, dynasties and pyramids share the fate of geological periods; their dates are arbitrary, and depend on the whims of the respective men of Science. Archæologists know now, it is said, that the afore-mentioned statues are fashioned out of green diorite, that can only be got in the Peninsula of Sinai; and
They accord in the style of art, and in the standard of measurement employed, with the similar diorite statues of the pyramid builders of the third and fourth Egyptian dynasties.... Moreover, the only possible period for a Babylonian occupation of the Sinaitic quarries must be placed shortly after the close of the epoch at which the pyramids were built; and thus only can we understand how the name of Sinai could have been derived from that of Sin, the primitive Babylonian moon-god.
This is very logical, but what is the date fixed for these dynasties? Sanchuniathon's and Manetho's synchronistic tables—or whatever remained of these after holy Eusebius had the handling of them—have been rejected; and still we have to remain satisfied with the four or five thousand years b.c., so liberally allotted to Egypt. At all events one point is gained. There is, at last, a city on the face of the Earth which is allowed, at least, 6,000 years, and it is Eridu. Geology has discovered it. According to Professor Sayce again:
They are now also able to obtain time for the silting up of the head of the Persian Gulf, which demands a lapse of between 5,000 and 6,000 years since the period when Eridu, now twenty-five miles inland, was the seaport at the mouth of the Euphrates, and the seat of Babylonian commerce with Southern Arabia and India. More than all, the new chronology gives time for the long series of eclipses recorded in the great astronomical work called “The Observations of Bel”; and we are also enabled to understand the otherwise perplexing change in the position of the vernal equinox, which has occurred since our present zodiacal signs were named by the earliest Babylonian astronomers. When the Accadian calendar was arranged and the Accadian months were named, the sun at the vernal equinox was not, as now, in Pisces, or even in Aries, but in Taurus. The rate of the precession of the equinoxes being known, we learn that at the vernal equinox the sun was in Taurus from about 4,700 years b.c., and we thus obtain astronomical limits of date which cannot be impugned.[1634]
It may make our position plainer if we state at once that we use Sir C. Lyell's nomenclature for the ages and periods, and that when we [pg 733] talk of the Secondary and Tertiary age, of the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene periods—this is simply to make our facts more comprehensible. Since these ages and periods have not yet been allowed fixed and determined durations, two-and-a-half and fifteen million years being assigned at different times to one and the same age (the Tertiary); and since no two Geologists or Naturalists seem to agree on this point—Esoteric Teachings may remain quite indifferent to the appearance of man in the Secondary or the Tertiary age. If the latter age may be allowed even so much as fifteen million years' duration—well and good; for the Occult Doctrine, jealously guarding its real and correct figures so far as concerns the First, Second, and two-thirds of the Third Root-Race, gives clear information upon one point only—the age of Vaivasvata Manu's humanity.[1635]
Another definite statement is that during the so-called Eocene period the Continent to which the Fourth Race belonged, and on which it lived and perished, showed the first symptoms of sinking, and that it was in the Miocene age that it was finally destroyed—save the small island mentioned by Plato. These points have now to be checked by scientific data.