Jenks's Portland Gazette

ANCIENT HISTORY.

Some very bold conjectures have been lately advanced upon the Egyptian Zodiacs being differently disposed from ours; it has been supposed that the difference must necessarily be explained by the precession of the equinoxes. The suppositions that monuments have been preserved, we may say miraculously, for 15 and even 87,000 years, has been preferred to seeking in antiquity, another reason for their peculiar situation. The celebrated Visconti, being consulted upon the first of these Zodiacs, the plans of which have been brought into France, has explained this phenomenon more naturally by a fact well known to all chronologers: that is, that the intercalary day was never introduced into the sacred year of the Egyptians; nor into their civil, until the time of Augustus. Hence it results that every fourth year would commence a day sooner, which, in 120 years, would make the difference of one sign, and in 1430 years, one complete year, while the period of the procession of the Equinox is 72,000 years.

Citizen Visconti has detailed this explanation in a tract which he will soon give to the public. He is now about examining the Zodiacs since discovered: but it is infinitely more probable that their particular situation is founded on the period of 1430 years than of 72,000, which will reduce their antiquity in the same proportion.

It is to be observed in general, that history is carried back into the regions of fiction, in proportion as the real knowledge of history is limited. The present East Indians boast an antiquity of some millions of years. In the time of Alexander they pretended to no more than 5000 or 6000 years; in the time of Diodorus Siculus, some Egyptian priests fixed at 23,000 years a certain epoch, which, in the time of Herodotus, they only carried up to 11,000; and it is very probable that, in the time of Moses, their pretensions were, in the same proportion, less.