Berosus tells us, speaking of the ancient days of Chaldea, “In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythraean Sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with feet also below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail.  His voice too and language was articulate and human, and a representation of him is preserved even unto this day.  This being was accustomed to pass the day among men, but took no food at that season, and he gave them an insight into letters and arts of all kinds.  He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge.  He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and humanize their laws.  From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions.  And when the sun set, this being, Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep, for he was amphibious.  After this there appeared other animals like Oannes.”

This is clearly the tradition preserved by a barbarous people of the great ships of a civilized nation, who colonized their coast and introduced the arts and sciences among them.  And here we see the same tendency to represent the ship as a living thing, which converted the war-vessels of the Atlanteans (the Kyklopes) into men with one blazing eye in the middle of the forehead.

Uranos was deposed from the throne, and succeeded by his son Chronos.  He was called “the ripener, the harvest-god,” and was probably identified with the beginning of the Agricultural Period.  He married his sister Rhea, who bore him Pluto, Poseidon, Zeus, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera.  He anticipated that his sons would dethrone him, as he had dethroned his father, Uranos, and he swallowed his first five children, and would have swallowed the sixth child, Zeus, but that his wife Rhea deceived him with a stone image of the child; and Zeus was conveyed to the island of Crete, and there concealed in a cave and raised to manhood.  Subsequently Chronos “yielded back to the light the children he had swallowed.”  This myth probably means that Chronos had his children raised in some secret place, where they could not be used by his enemies as the instruments of a rebellion against his throne; and the stone image of Zeus, palmed off upon him by Rhea, was probably some other child substituted for his own.  His precautions seem to have been wise; for as soon as the children returned to the light they commenced a rebellion, and drove the old gentleman from his throne.  A rebellion of the Titans followed.  The struggle was a tremendous one, and seems to have been decided at last by the use of gunpowder, as I shall show farther on.