Tres Orationes

παραδόσιμῳ traditional, the most ancient of poets were able to be instructed about the Creation of things, and others were able to achieve the same by reading the monuments handed down to posterity on that subject. They relate that the descendants of Seth, when they had understood from their grandfather (as is in Josephus, Book 1 of τῆς ἀρχαιολογίας Antiquities, ch. 2, and in the first book of the annals of Zonaras) that the fabric of this world would someday pass away by either flood or conflagration, and having remembered that they had often predicted this, feared that their inventions and the doctrine of natural and celestial things would slip away from the knowledge of men and perish before they were fully understood. Because they were excellent in their talents and in their skill in natural things, the stars, and all of mathematics, they erected two columns, one of marble and the other of fired brick or tile, and inscribed their inventions upon both, so that if the brick one happened to be destroyed by the flood, the stone one would provide men with the opportunity for learning and exhibit what was inscribed upon it to posterity. We accept that the Chaldeans and Egyptians subsequently imitated this custom, but less faithfully, using hieroglyphic letters, of which their occult philosophy consisted. Whatever those Egyptian letters were, whether σημεῖα signs/symbols—not letters, but figures of living things sculpted to signify words, which they venerated as divine, or characters and marks of letters incised into solid matter with a chisel or stylus—we do not dwell on this at present, leaving aside the mysteries of the ἱερογλύφων hieroglyphs and those things that the ancients have commented upon in Horus