his date, though unfortunately we do not know his work in its
entirety. This was Berossus, the Babylonian priest, who prepared a
Babyloniaca which was dedicated to Antiochus I. When we remember that
it is this same Antiochus who is the only one of the Seleucidae to
furnish us with an inscription in cuneiform and to the honor of one of
the old gods, [Footnote: Best in Weissbach, _Achaemeniden
Inschriften_, 132 ff., cf. xxx for bibliography.] it becomes clear
that this work was prepared at the time when fusion of Greek and
Babylonian seemed most possible, and with the desire to acquaint the
Macedonian conquerors with the deeds of their predecessors in the rule
of Babylonia. The book was characteristically Babylonian in that only
the last of the three books into which it was divided, that beginning
with the time of Nabonassar, can be considered historical in the
strictest sense, and even of this only the merest fragments,
abstracts, or traces, have come down to us. And the most important of
these fragments have come down through a tradition almost without
parallel. Today we must consult a modern Latin translation of an
Armenian translation of the lost Greek original of the Chronicle of
Eusebius, [Footnote: A, Schoene, "_Eusebii Chronicorum libri
duo_, 1866 ff.; cf. Rogers, _Parallels_, 347 ff.; J. Karst,
_Eusebius Werke_, V.] who borrowed in part from Alexander
Polyhistor who borrowed from Berossus direct, in part from Abydenus
who apparently borrowed from Juba who borrowed from Alexander
Polyhistor and so from Berossus. To make a worse confusion, Eusebius
has in some cases not recognized the fact that Abydenus is only a
feeble echo of Polyhistor, and has quoted the accounts of each side by
side! And this is not the worst. Although his Polyhistor account is in
general to be preferred, Eusebius seems to have used a poor manuscript
of that author. Furthermore, there is at least one case, that of the
name of one of Sennacharib's sons, which can be secured only by