But if having credited Manetho with the record of such a
name and date, one tortures a hieroglyph into a faintly similar name,
and concludes at once that the same name must be the same person, and
that therefore this is the oldest record in the world, the confirmation
is not so striking. That it is so in this instance we do not affirm; but
we should need the assertion of a man of more intellectual sobriety than
Mr. Laing to make it worth the trouble of investigating.
Passing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the
deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a
mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from
borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not _very_
conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on
much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately
only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus.
Berosus was a _learned priest_ of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a
history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the
annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions.
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