There are details in The Story of the Ancient World that are not found in Scripture. Where did they come from?
Although this question is answered in the Publisher’s Preface, I thought a more thorough answer would also be helpful. Besides the Scripture, which gave us the foundational framework for ancient world history, we gleaned details from a few other significant sources.
Of course, the first was H.A. Guerber’s The Story of the Chosen People. However, we did not use that text in its entirety, since she compromised with evolutionary history especially in the beginning of her work. We used The Defender’s Study Bible by the late Dr. Henry M. Morris for answers where evolutionary history clashed with the history recorded in Genesis.
We used Josephus: The Complete Works translated by William Whitson. Many details of early history were preserved in Antiquities of the Jews which were not included in Scripture, but implied. For example, Antiquities records the number of Adam and Eve’s children as 33 sons and 23 daughters, which you find repeated in chapter VI of Ancient World, The Great Boat. Now this number is not given in Scripture, but a number like this is implied. How? By the great length of years Adam and Eve lived and the great number of descendants they had to have had, in order to increase the population as rapidly as the first 11 chapters of Genesis implies.
We used The Annuls of the World by James Ussher, recently translated into English for the first time by Larry and Marion Pierce. This vast scholarly work was not only very helpful with dating biblical events, but also integrating biblical history with “secular” ancient history.
We used A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology by Jacob Bryant. This six volume work is the life work of the greatest classical scholar in Britain in his day. He analyzed all the literature of the ancient world’s mythology in its original Greek and Latin, and brought out the thread of common history which was embedded in all of it. Of course, that common history agreed in whole part with the history recorded in Genesis, since that is the true history of the ancient earth.
And we used The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World by George Rawlinson, professor of ancient history at Oxford University. George Rawlinson’s brother is Sir Henry Rawlinson, the discoverer and the translator of the Behistun Inscription, which unlocked the history of ancient Assyria to the world.
Also of incomparable value was The Chronology of the Old Testament by Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones. Here is an exacting and careful biblical scholar who harmonized every statement in Scripture as it touched on dates and chronology. He confirmed that Ussher’s work was exceedingly accurate, which must explain why Ussher’s dates appeared in the margins of English Bibles for hundreds of years before the rise of evolutionary history.
All of these works are given special notice in the Publisher’s Preface, and of course are included in the Bibliography, along with the many many other books and articles which we used as source material for preparing The Story of the Ancient World.
Now why don’t we see anything about these books today, since as we can see the scholars who prepared them were deeply qualified? To a man, they affirm the young earth history recorded in Genesis, which has been out of vogue, even with Christian churchmen, since the turn of the century. That is why we sought them out in preparing our volume. 🙂