Noah's Ark, or a History of Empires and Kingdoms from the Creation of the World to Our Own Times

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Original title: Arca Noae, sive Historia imperiorum et regnorum a condito orbe ad nostra tempora A Latin universal history and chronological compendium of polities, printed by the Hackian office at Leiden and Rotterdam and dedicated to William III of Orange. Rather than narrating battles and sieges, it enters every empire, kingdom, principality and commonwealth under a common grid of headings — origins, successions, growths, declines, conjunctions, divisions and ends — tracing a continuous series from the world's foundation to the author's own decade. It anchors its chronology in the Hebrew text of Scripture and Ussher's computation, shortening or dismissing Egyptian, Assyrian and Chinese antiquities that conflict with it, and assimilates foreign peoples to the postdiluvian lines of Ham, Shem and Japheth by etymological, comparative and diffusionist argument: Greek myth is read as corrupted Hebrew history, Chinese pre-Flood emperors are matched with the patriarchs (Fohi with Adam, Xinnungus with Cain), Alexander is said to have reached Sichuan, and American peoples and empires are explained through Scythian manners and a Chinese fleet reaching Mexico and Peru. Turkish, Tartar, Arabic, Ethiopian, Indian, Chinese and American books draw on Orientalist sources supplied at Leiden, and the volume includes a 1647 letter from the Hoorn shipwright Pieter Reyniers on whether a hull of Mosaic proportions would sail, closing by presenting Dutch commerce and navigation as a new ark gathering the divided world, followed by an alphabetical index of memorable things and words. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

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