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BE it remembered, that on the seventh day of September, A. D. 1829, and in the fifty-fourth year of the Independence of the United States of America, Munroe & Francis, of the said District, have deposited in this Office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as proprietors, in the words following, to wit:

"ANTEDILUVIAN ANTIQUITIES. Fragments of the Age of Methuselah.

יתר הרפאים

The remnant of giants.-Moses.

He rends the veil of ages long gone by,

And views their remnants with a poet's eye.-Byron.

-Open new spheres of thought

Read ancient books

-Rogers.

Eloquent ruins of nations.-Everett.

Translated by an American Traveller in the East."

In conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, entitled, "An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned:" and also to an act, entitled, "An act supplementary to an act, entitled an act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies during the times therein mentioned; and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints." JOHN W. DAVIS, Clerk of the District of Massachusetts.

1778 37

ANTEDILUVIAN ANTIQUITIES.

[THE date of the invention of letters has never been satisfactorily ascertained. It has long been believed by many of the learned that the art of writing, or rather of engraving upon stone or wood, existed before the Deluge. JOSEPHUS says expressly that registers of births and deaths were kept in the antediluvian times. We have had communicated to us transcripts of certain fragments, which we are assured remain even unto this day among the ruins of the Ark at the site of the ancient city of AròCaney, (as it is called in the Greek, the Armenian name being Nachidsheuan, or The first place of Descent,) on the mountains of Ararat, in Armenia. We cannot pledge ourselves that the transcriber possesses a correct key to the original language, but he believes that he possesses it, and certainly the translations with which he has furnished us indicate somewhat of the ease, the simplicity, the eccentricity of metaphor and similitude, and the rapidity of transition, which characterize the early oriental compo

sitions. The specimens which we are about to present to our readers exhibit, we are assured, the exact sense of the original; but it would have been extreme affectation not to have given, in some instances at least, a modern turn to the true manner of expression. Lord BOLINGBROKE has translated from Boileau the best rule upon this subject, in his Letters on History. "A good writer will rather imitate than translate, and rather emulate than imitate; he will endeavour to write as the ancient author would have written, had he wrote in the same language." The gigantick critick, JOHNSON, has remarked, that when one would tell that which the world knew not before, his language should be peculiarly simple and perspicuous: The authors of these fragments, though they wrote not for the world, wrote in anticipation of the spirit of that remark, and it has been closely kept in view throughout the translation. Our readers will exercise their own judgment as to the intrinsick evidence which the following fragments display of their own authenticity. We can do no more than pledge the sacred honour of a translator, that they are the genuine classical remains of antediluvian antiquity.]

EPISTLE I.

From the city of Enoch, in the land of Nod, on the ninth day of the tenth New Moon, in the year of the Creation of Adam and Eve, One Thousand and Four.

MAHALAH, the son of Zabach, of the generation of Enoch, the son of Cain, sendeth to the friend and brother of his heart, Zarbanad, the son of Arphazah, of the generation of Abel at the city of Evanam, in the great plain of Zebomar, Health and Peace.

It came to pass that we were first known to each other when we were lads of forty-nine years old, at the time when our great father and mother, Adam and Eve, were yet alive, and went down into the low country toward the rising of the Sun, to pay their offerings to the LORD God on the altar of Irad. My heart was drawn to thine, and thy heart was drawn to mine, by the strong branches of the tree of love, which the wind of ages can bend, but cannot break. Although I was of the generation of Cain, and thou of the generation of Abel, we became friends and brothers, Thou knowest that some of the children of Cain were the servants of God. We were hunters together in the plain of Mozam, and

the beasts of the wood fled from the flame of our spears. We kept our flocks on the hills and in the vales, and when the wild lions came to our borders, we dashed their heads upon the sharp points of the rocks. When the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve met together to pay their vows to God, we also came to the altar with our white and tender lambs, and our hearts were glad. We travelled with one another to the east of the garden of Eden, and when we saw the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life, we mourned and wept. Oh, thou friend of my life, said Mahalah unto Zarbanad, how great were the sins of the father and mother of all living! If they had obeyed the voice of the LORD God, we all should have lived happy in Eden, or all the world would have been one great Eden. The LORD God made them free to do well or to do ill, but the serpent beguiled the woman, and the woman beguiled the man, and they both sinned and death entered into the world. Dost not thou remember when we first saw Adam and Eve, at the feast given at the tent of Arzaph, bowed down with the heavy burden of eight hundred years, and covered with white hair which was blown about by the wind, as the feathers of the dove that is wounded by the arrows of Tubal, or as the down of the thistle in the time of the year when the leaves of the trees do fade? Every one of

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