ANTEDILUVIAN ANTIQUITIES.

PS

991 AI A545

DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS, TO WIT:

District Clerk's Office.

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.

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 AwòCalneov, (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