Some of the Babylonians claimed that they had astronomical inscriptions on clay tablets for 730,000 years; others, like Berosus, claimed 490,000 years for the inscriptions. The Egyptians claimed that they had understood astronomy for more than 100,000 years.
The early Christian Church Fathers constantly argued with the pagans about the age of the earth, or about the age of civilization. They were unanimous that God had created the earth less than 6,000 years before they wrote. For example, one of the most influential, Augustine (AD354–430), in his most famous work, City of God, has a whole chapter, Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past, where he says:
‘Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. … They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.’
Theophilus (AD115–181), Bishop of Antioch, wrote an apologetic work to the pagan magistrate Autolycus about the problem of the pagan long ages, mentioning Plato’s 200 million year period between the Flood and his time, and Apollonius the Egyptian’s claim of at least 155,625 years since creation.
The ancient pagans may have calculated their vast ages through astrology because they regarded it as true science. Julius Africanus (AD200–245) wrote:
‘The Egyptians, indeed, with their boastful notions of their own antiquity, have put forth a sort of account of it by the hand of their astrologers in cycles and myriads of years … ’ [myriad = 10,000]." CMI
Then I beheld all the work of God,
that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun:Ecclesisates 8:17
