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OF THE SIRIADIC COLUMNS.
FROM JOSEPHUS.

“All these (the sons of Seth), being naturally of a good disposition, lived happily in the land without apostatising, and free from any evils whatsoever: and they studiously turned their attention to the knowledge of the heavenly bodies and their configurations.

And lest their science should at any time be lost among men, and what they had previously acquired should perish, (inasmuch as Adam had acquainted them that a universal aphanism, or destruction of all things, would take place alternately by the force of fire and the overwhelming powers of water), they erected two columns, the one of brick and the other of stone, and engraved upon each of them their discoveries; so that, in case the brick pillar should be dissolved by the waters, the stone one might survive to teach men the things engraved upon it, and at the same time inform them that a brick one had formerly been also erected by them.

It remains even to the present day in the land of Siriad.”158 ―Extracted from Josephus Antiquities of the Jews Book i. ch. 2.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR. “We do not here propose to renew the inquiry concerning the celebrated antediluvian columns, or stelae, on which the lore of this primaeval world, with all its wisdom, was said to be transmitted.

Plato, it is well-known, speaks of these columns in the opening of the Timaeus. We shall examine, in the 5th book, whether this be anything more than a figurative description, and how far we may be justified in assuming any connection between the Egyptian legend and the two pillars of Seth mentioned by Josephus. (Antiq. i., ch. 2).

These pillars, it is obvious, have reference to the Book of Enoch 159; perhaps also to the pillars of Akikarus, or Akicharus, the Prophet of Babylon, (or the Bosphorus), whose wisdom Democritus is said to have stolen, and on which Theophrastus composed a treatise.

In the Egyptian traditions that have come down to us, these primaeval stelae do not make their appearance until the third and fourth centuries. They are first mentioned in the so-called Fragments of Hermes, in Stobaeus; afterwards, in Zosimus of Panopolis, evidently in the colouring of Judaising-Christian writers; but, in their worst shape, in the fourth century, in the work of an impostor who assumed the name of Manetho.

That in this latter instance, at least, they were connected with the narrative of Josephus, is shown by their allusion to the ‘Syriadic Country.'”―Extracted from Bunsen’s Egypt’s Place in History, vol. 1., p. 7, 8.

E. Edmond Hodges, Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 3d ed., 1876, pp. 151-2.