LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE BABYLONIAN DATE OF ABRAHAM.
[To TER EDITOR Or THR BPIZTAT0R.1
SIR,—The difficulty about accepting the date assigned by the native Babylonian chronology to the age of Abraham, to which you draw attention in your review of my recent books in the Spectator of June 27th, is one which I fully feel myself ; indeed, my own private conviction is that the date is a good deal too early. It is given us by a native chronologist who lived in the time of Cyrus, and compiled a list of the Kings- who had reigned over Babylonia from the period when Babylon first became the capital of a united kingdom. The Kings are arranged in dynasties, and not only is the length of each King's reign stated, but also the duration of the dynasty to which he belonged. But I pointed out some years ago that the length of reign assigned to several of the Kings in the first two dynasties is suspiciously, if not impossibly, long, and that the same high number recurs with too great a frequency. Since then the American excavators in Babylonia have discovered tablets which show that in the early period of Babylonian history records were kept of the events which marked the several years of each King's reign, and it was by these events that the legal documents of the time were dated. I believe it will turn out that the compiler of the dynastic list supposed in some cases that where two or three events. characterised the same year they were to be reckoned as. representing separate years, while in other cases the co- regencies of a father and son have been neglected, as they have been in Egyptian and Jewish history.
Perhaps I ought to have stated this in the preface of my "Patriarchal Palestine." But I there wished to give simply the monumental fkicts, so far as they are known to us at. present, and I did not consider myself at liberty to go behind these facts, or attempt to explain any of them away. The Babylonian chronologist had far more materials at his. disposal than we have, and however much convinced we may be that be has misinterpreted some of them, I doubt whether a conviction without proof ought to be put forward in books- intended to give the public the ascertained results of archmology.—I am, Sir, &c., 23 Chepstow Villas, W., June 30th. A. H. SATO?...
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