From Zonaras we find that the concurrent testimony of the ancient authors he had consulted was to this effect; for, speaking of arithmetic and astronomy, he says: "It is said that these came from the Chaldees to the Egyptians, and thence to the Greeks." If the Egyptians and Greeks derived their arithmetic and astronomy from Chaldea, seeing these in Chaldea were sacred sciences, and monopolised by the priests, that is sufficient evidence that they must have derived their religion from the same quarter. Both Bunsen and Layard in their researches have come to substantially the same result. The statement of Bunsen is to the effect that the religious system of Egypt was derived from Asia, and "the primitive empire in Babel." Layard, again, though taking a somewhat more favourable view of the system of the Chaldean Magi, than, I am persuaded, the facts of history warrant, nevertheless thus speaks of that system: "Of the great antiquity of this primitive worship there is abundant evidence, and that it originated among the inhabitants of the Assyrian plains, we have the united testimony of sacred and profane history. It obtained the epithet of perfect, and was believed to be the most ancient of religious systems, having preceded that of the Egyptians." "The identity," he adds, "of many of the Assyrian doctrines with those of Egypt is alluded to by Porphyry and Clemens"; and, in connection with the same subject, he quotes the following from Birch on Babylonian cylinders and monuments: "The zodiacal signs...show unequivocally that the Greeks derived their notions and arrangements of the zodiac [and consequently their Mythology, that was intertwined with it] from the Chaldees. The identity of Nimrod with the constellation Orion is not to be rejected." Ouvaroff, also, in his learned work on the Eleusinian mysteries, has come to the same conclusion. After referring to the fact that the Egyptian priests claimed the honour of having transmitted to the Greeks the first elements of Polytheism, he thus concludes: "These positive facts would sufficiently prove, even without the conformity of ideas, that the Mysteries transplanted into Greece, and there united with a certain number of local notions, never lost the character of their origin derived from the cradle of the moral and religious ideas of the universe. All these separate facts--all these scattered testimonies, recur to that fruitful principle which places in the East the centre of science and civilisation." If thus we have evidence that Egypt and Greece derived their religion from Babylon, we have equal evidence that the religious system of the Phoenicians came from the same source. Macrobius shows that the distinguishing feature of the Phoenician idolatry must have been imported from Assyria, which, in classic writers, included Babylonia.