title: Ancient Syria: A Three Thousand Year History
author:  Trevor Bryce 
description: <br />"Bryce has outdone himself; a marvellous achievement. Reads as smoothly as a novel, but packed as full of facts as an encyclopedia. Bryce weaves together the threads of disparate cultures and centuries of civilization, creating the very fabric of history itself..." --Eric H. Cline, author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction <br />
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
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  Four Beasts In One
  
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  # Four Beasts In One: The Homo-Cameleopard
  
  
  ### Edgar Poe
  
  
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  Chacun a ses vertus.
  
  
  —Crebillon's Xerxes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES is very generally looked upon as the Gog of the prophet
  Ezekiel. This honor is, however, more properly attributable to Cambyses, the
  son of Cyrus. And, indeed, the character of the Syrian monarch does by no
  means stand in need of any adventitious embellishment. His accession to the
  throne, or rather his usurpation of the sovereignty, a hundred and seventy-one
  years before the coming of Christ; his attempt to plunder the temple of Diana
  at Ephesus; his implacable hostility to the Jews; his pollution of the Holy of
  Holies; and his miserable death at Taba, after a tumultuous reign of eleven
  years, are circumstances of a prominent kind, and therefore more generally
  noticed by the his