cient nations of Europe also describe their origin from the
_three_ sons of some king or patriarch. The Germans said that Mannus
(son of the god Tuisco) had _three_ sons, who were the original
ancestors of the three principal nations of Germany. The Scythians said
that Targytagus, the founder of their nation, had _three_ sons, from
whom they were descended. A tradition among the Romans was that the
Cyclop Polyphemus had by Galatea _three_ sons. Saturn had _three_ sons,
Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto; and Hesiod speaks of the _three_ sons which
sprung from the marriage of heaven and earth. (See Mallet's Northern
Antiquities, p. 509.)

[23:7] See chap. xi.

[23:8] "It is of no slight moment that the Egyptians, with whom the
Hebrews are represented as in earliest and closest intercourse, had no
traditions of a flood, while the Babylonian and Hellenic tales bear a
strong resemblance in many points to the narrative in Genesis." (Rev.
George W. Cox: Tales of Ancient Greece, p. 340. See also Owen: Man's
Earliest History, p. 28, and ch. xi. this work.)

[24:1] See Taylor's Diegesis, p. 198, and Knight's Ancient Art and
Mythology, p. 107. "Plato was told that Egypt had hymns dating back ten
thousand years before his time." (Bonwick: Egyptian Belief, p. 185.)
Plato lived 429 B. C. Herodotus relates that the priests of Egypt
informed him that from the first king to the present priest of Vulcan
who last reigned, were three hundred forty and one generations of men,
and during these generations there were the same number of chief priests
and kings. "Now (says he) three hundred generations are equal to ten
thousand years, for three generations of men are one hundred years; and
the forty-one remaining generations that were over the three hundred,
make one thousand three hundred and forty years," making _eleven
thousand three hundred and forty years_. "Conducting me into the
interior of an edifice that was spacious, and showing me wooden
colossuses to the number I have mentioned, they reckoned them up; for
every high priest places an image of himself there during his life-time;
the priests, therefore, reckoning them and showing them to me, pointed
out that each was the son of his own father; going through them all,
from the image of him who died last until they had pointed them all
out." (Herodotus, book ii. chs. 142, 143.) The discovery of mummies of
royal and priestly personages, made at Deir-el-Bahari (Aug., 1881), near
Thebes, in Eg