of the Persian kings. After Artaxerxes Longimanus, he immediately names Darius, and, after him, none other. And, according to this account, the Sanballat of the twentieth of Artaxerxes Longimanus, and the Sanballat in the time of the last Darius, may, very consistently, be made the same man; for there will be, according to this reckoning, very few years between them. The truth of the matter, I take to have been thus: the Sanballat, who would have hindered the re-building of Jerusalem, was the same, who is said, Neh. xiii, 28, to have been father-in-law to one of the sons of Joiada, the high-priest; that Manasseh, who was the son-in-law, was the immediate son of Joiada, as the Scripture saith, and not the grandson, as Josephus saith; that this marriage was made, while Nehemiah, in the twelfth year of his government (which was the thirty-second of Artaxerxes) was gone into Persia to the king; and that, for this reason, on his return, he drove him away from officiating any longer in the temple; whereon, he, retiring to Samaria, about five or six years after, obtained leave, by Sanballat's interest, at the Persian court, to build the temple on mount Gerizim; which the Jewish chronology running into the time of Alexander, Josephus, for that reason, sets it down as done in the time of Alexander; and this, I verily believe, was the whole authority he had for it. And, that he should make such a mistake in those times, is no wonder, since there may be others observed in him, of the same times, altogether as gross, of which your lordship takes notice in your paper.

I beg your lordship's pardon, that I have transgressed so long upon your patience, with this tedious paper. I humbly offer it to your consideration: and I am, my lord, your most dutiful humble servant,

HUMPHREY PRIDEAUX.

P.S. And, I beg leave, further to observe to your lordship, that, whereas Josephus placeth the ceasing of the spirit of prophecy, in the last year of that Artaxerxes, from whom, according to your lordship's scheme, Ezra and Nehemiah had their commission; all the Jewish writers do so too, telling us, that Ezra,

Haggai, Zachary, and Malachi, all departed out of this life on that year; and that the spirit of prophecy departed with them. But they make that year to be the last of the Persian monarchy, and the very same, in which Alexander came to Jerusalem, and Sanballat obtained that grant for a temple on mount Gerizim, which Josephus tells us of. And therefore it is plain, to me, that Josephus, in bringing down this matter of Sanballat as low as the time of Alexander, followed the false chronology of his countrymen, the Jews, and not that true computation, which your lordship reckons by.

TO FRANCIS GWYNN, ESQ. AT FORD ABBEY, NEAR

CRUCKERN.

Sir, I have received the letter you honoured me with; and you should sooner have received an answer to it, had I been in a condition to give it; for I am so broken by age and infirmity, that I have few intervals of health to enable me to do any thing.

I have, indeed, often said, that there is wanting a good history of the East, from the time of Mahomet; and that there are sufficient materials to be had for it, from the writings of the Arabs, of which there is a great treasury at Oxford, especially since the addition of Dr. Pocock's MSS. But I could not say much of the Mamalucs, of whom I know no author, that has written in particular; neither did they deserve that any should.

For they were a base sort of people; a Colluvies of slaves, the scum of all the East, who, having treacherously destroyed the *Jobidæ, their masters, reigned in their stead; and, bating that they finished the expulsion of the western Christians, out of the East, (where they barbarously destroyed Tripoli, Antioch, and several other cities) they scarce did any thing worthy to be recorded in history. The beginning of their empire was, A. D. 1250, and it ended in the year 1517, which was the eighth year of the reign of our king Henry the Eighth; so that their empire, in Egypt, lasted two

'See Dr. Prideaux' Life of Mahomet, p. 164,

hundred and sixty-seven years, during which time, they had a succession of above fifty reigns, in which the major part of their kings ascended the throne by the murder or deposition of their predecessors. So base and barbarous a people scarce deserve to be spoken of, and so quick a succession could not allow time enough for any of them to do any great matters. They gloried in having been slaves, and therefore called themselves by a name, which expressed as much; for Mamaluc, in Arabic, signities a slave; and, for the further expression hereof, it was an usage among them to take the names of all the masters they served, by way of addition to that, which was properly their own.*

But what you mistook me to have said of the Mamalucs is true of the East in general; for there are many good histories of the affairs thereof, from the time of Mahomet, in the Abraham and Persian languages. And the many revolutions, that happened there, from the time aforesaid, and the many considerable events, which were produced in the effecting of them, afford sufficient materials for a very good history of those parts, which we here wholly want. For, from the time of Mahomet, there were four large empires erected in the East, in succession one of another, whose transactions deserve recording, as well as those of the Greeks or Romans.

The first of these empires was that of the Saracens, which in eighty years, extended itself as largely as that of the Romans did in eight hundred; for it took in India, Persia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, Spain, and all the coast of Africa, westward, as far as the Atlantic Ocean. It began in the year 622, and, after having lasted, under the caliphs of Bagdat three hundred and fourteen years, it expired all at once, in the year 936. For, in that year, all the governours of provinces conspiring together, each declared himself sovereign, in his respective government, and left the caliph only Bagdat, with the narrow. territories of that city, for his support; where he and his successors continued, for several ages after, as sacred persons, being, as it were, the popes of the Mahometan

sect.

* See Margat. Hist. of Tamerlane, lib. viii, in princip.

The empire of the Saracens, being weakened by this division of its dominions, and, having also suffered many convulsions from the mutual hostilities, which the successors of them that divided it made upon each other, the *Seljukian Turks, from the northern parts of Tartary, taking the advantage thereof, A. D. 1037, made a terrible invasion upon it. One part of them, under the leading of Togrul-Beg (whom the western writers call Tangrolonix) seized on all that lies between the Indus and the Euphrates; and the other part of them, passing farther, under the command of Koslumish, seized the Lesser Asia, and there founded the kingdom of Iconium, where his posterity, for sev eral descents, till Aladin, the last of them, dying without issue, Othman, from being his mercenary, became his successor; and, in the year 1300, seized his kingdom, and thereon founded the Turkish empire that is now in being; of which Knowles hath given us a very good history. Togrul-Beg, having fixed his empire in Persia and Assyria, and the neighbouring countries, he and his descendants there reigned, for several successions, till they were suppressed by Jingiz-Can, king of the ancient Moguls, who inhabited that part of Tartary, which lies next to the wall of China.

For this mighty prince, having begun his reign, A. D. 1202, formed the largest empire that ever was in the world, for it contained all China and India, and extended westward, on the side of the north, through all Tartaria, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, as far as the Baltic, the Oder, and the Adriatic; and on the side of the south, as far as the Euphrates, and the Euxine sea; which was more than double the extent of that of Alexander, or of that of the Romans. And, therefore, by reason of the largeness of it, whenever a general council was called, two years were allowed for their meeting, the remote distance of some of the provinces requiring that time for their coming together. This empire continued in the posterity of Jingiz-Can, through twelve descents, till the death of BahadurCan, the last of them; when it had the same end with * See Mr. Petis de la Croix Hist. Genghiscan, book ii, chap. 1.

that of the Saracens. For, on the death of that prince, which happened in the year 1335, the governours of provinces, by a general conspiracy, usurped in each of them the sovereignty to themselves, and thereby extinguished this empire all at once; and, we may reasonably expect, that the empire of the Othmans will, some time or other, have the same fate. It hath been several times attempted by some of the bashaws; but it hath hitherto failed of success, for want of the general concurrence of the rest. One Mr. Petis de la Croix* hath published, in French, the history of Jingiz-Can, with an account of his empire, and the succession of the kings of his race, that governed it after him; in the compiling of which work, he tells us, he employed ten years; so that, it may be hoped, he hath gathered together all the materials that are proper for the same; but whether he has done so, I cannot say, having never seen the book.

Thirty-three years after the extinction of this empire of the Moguls, there was raised out of its ruins, another empire of the Moguls, who, to distinguish them from the other, are called the latter Moguls. The founder of this empire was the famous Tamerlane, by the western writers, who, beginning his reign in the year 1368, continued in it thirty-six years, that is, till the year 1404, when he died; during which time he over-run all the eastern part of the world with prodigious success of victory; whereby he subjugated to him all Tartaria, China, India, Persia, and all else, westward, as far as the Archipelago. At his death, he divided his empire among his sons; the posterity of him that had India for his part of the legacy, still reign there, unless the many revolutions and convulsions of government, which have happened there since the death of Aurang Zeb, have by this time extinguished it. Of this race of the Mogul kings in India, one Seignior Monuchi, a Venetian, who had been physician in the court of Aurang Zeb, for near forty years, hath written a very good history: it is published in French and English; which is very well worth the perusal. He was lately alive at St. Thomas, a town of the Portu*See Collier. Append. Genghiskan.