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Eerste druk: Oktober 2003
Om die boek te soek op die internet, kyk The Annals of the World.
The Epistle to the reader
You hold in your hands the first major English revision that has been done of Rev. Archbishop Ussher’s Annals of the World since it was published in 1658-two years after his death. In January of 1997, Answers in Genesis obtained photocopies of the 1650-1654 Latin copy and the 1658 English copy for us to examine. Ussher is ridiculed by sciolists. (OED-Sci olist: superficial pretender to knowledge. The first” is long and we suggested it might be good to republish this old classic since very few people have actually seen what he wrote.
We set to work. My wife, Marion, typed in the whole English document-it was impossible to scan-and I started to edit it. An early review prompted the classic comment, I cannot understand this old English! The horrible thought crossed my mind that the whole document would have to be extensively revised. That was done. We updated the English and checked and updated over ten thousand footnotes against the Loeb Classi- cal Library. We carefully checked the text against the most ancient sources and Ussher’s Latin copy to verify the accuracy of what was being said. My wife read it aloud three times while we both amended the English. Over four years later, we finished the task and turned the work over to the publisher for the final proof-reading.
The format used for the footnoting is explained in the bibliography at the end of this work. In most history books, it is very difficult to tell where the material came from. Separating the editorials from the facts would challenge even Solomon. This is not true of Ussher’s work. It contains more than twelve thousand footnotes from secular sources and over two thousand quotes from the Bible or the Apocrypha. There is very little editorialising and most editorial comments come from the original writers themselves. We were able to verify about 85 percent of the footnotes pertaining to secular history. The documents for the remaining footnotes are so rare, we did not pursue them.