Cory's Ancient Fragments (1832)

Isaac Preston Cory · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 456 pages

*A complete scanned book of 456 pages, and by far the largest file in this section at nearly seventeen megabytes. It is the second edition of Isaac Preston Cory's Ancient Fragments*, published in London by William Pickering in 1832, from the copy held by the University of California. Because it is a photographic scan rather than typed text, it is slow to open and cannot be searched from within — worth knowing before downloading it.

The full title says what it is: Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldaean, Egyptian, Tyrian, Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and other Writers; with an Introductory Dissertation, and an Inquiry into the Philosophy and Trinity of the Ancients, by Isaac Preston Cory, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge. What Cory assembled is the surviving wreckage of lost historians — authors whose own books have perished and who are known only through quotation in later writers. The contents page lists them by nation. From the Phoenician, Sanchoniatho. From the Chaldaean, Berossus, Abydenus, Megasthenes, Nicolaus Damascenus, Hestiaeus, Alexander Polyhistor, Eupolemus, Thallus, Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus, Castor, Vellieus Paterculus, Aemilius Sura, Pliny and Cicero, together with the dynasties of the kings of Chaldaea, Assyria, Media, Persia, Thebes and Egypt. From the Egyptian, the material drawn from the obelisks, and from Manetho, Chaeremon, Diodorus Siculus, Lysimachus, Polemo, Ptolemaeus Mendesius and Artapanus. From the Tyrian, Dius and Menander; from the Carthaginian, Hanno and Hiempsal; from the Indian, Megasthenes and Clitarchus; and from the Atlantic and Panchaean, Marcellus and Euemerus. Cory's own preface explains the principle of selection — that the volume gathers fragments translated from foreign languages into Greek, or borrowed or transcribed by Greeks from foreign authors, or written in Greek by foreigners who had access to the archives of their own countries — and admits the arrangement is not perfect: it is a manual to the chronologist and mythological antiquarian rather than a chronological history, and he has added supplementary fragments and extracts that appear detached from more ancient sources, though they are now to be found only in Greek or Latin writers. This is the source book behind many of the cosmogonical quotations that appear across the rest of the site.

Read the full text (PDF, 16.8 MB, 456 pages)