Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 21

We will take up the question of how the philosophers' doctrines were observed by the Hebrews a little later, but first, as is fitting, we must speak of the times of Moses. Through those times it will be shown beyond doubt that the philosophy of the Hebrews is the most ancient of all wisdom. Tatian has already treated these matters precisely in his *Against the Greeks*, and Cassian has done so in the first of his *Exegetical Works*; nevertheless the present memoir requires that we too run through what has been said on the subject. Apion the grammarian, surnamed Plistonicus, in the fourth book of his *Egyptian History*—though he writes with marked hostility toward the Hebrews, being himself an Egyptian by birth and the author of a treatise against the Jews—mentions Amosis, king of the Egyptians, and the events of his reign, and cites Ptolemy of Mendes as his witness. Ptolemy's words are these: "Amosis, having become king in the time of the Argive Inachus, dug up Avaris," as Ptolemy of Mendes recorded in his *Chronicles*. This Ptolemy was a priest who set forth the deeds of the Egyptian kings in three complete books, and he states that under Amosis, king of Egypt, the Jews made their exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. From this it follows that Moses flourished in the time of Inachus. The most ancient of the Greek traditions are the Argolic, which begin with Inachus, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus teaches in his *Chronicles*. Of these, the Attic line that springs from Cecrops—who was two-natured and autochthonous, to use Tatian's exact words—is forty generations younger; the Arcadian line from Pelasgus is nine generations younger, and Pelasgus himself is also said to be autochthonous. The Phthiotic line from Deucalion is two generations younger than the Arcadian. Reckoning from Inachus down to the Trojan War, twenty or a few more generations are counted, amounting, so to speak, to four hundred years. But if the Assyrian records are far older than the Greek, as Ctesias asserts, then the exodus of Moses from Egypt under the Egyptian Amosis and the Argive Inachus falls in the 402nd year of the Assyrian empire and the 32nd year of the eighth dynasty of Belochus. In Greece, during the time of Phoroneus, who succeeded Inachus, there occurred the flood of Ogygus, the kingdom in Sicyon—first under Aegialeus, then Eurypus, then Telchin—and the kingdom of Crete in Crete.