I was surprized to read the motivation of Josephus to write his work “Against Apion”. The claim and justification of “oldest civilisation” is something I also encountered in Vietnam with the
The purpose paragraph in Wikipedia reads:
In the centuries of imperial conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean, first by Alexander and his successors (see Hellenistic period) and then by the Romans, a phenomenon arose among the literate elites of the various civilizations that were incorporated into the newly formed imperial states. This took the form of historians from different cultures (typically Egyptian, Jewish, or Greek) writing histories in the form of polemics, with each author claiming his own civilization as the world’s oldest, a designation that—to the authors and audience of these works—would serve as proof of cultural supremacy.
Against Apion was Josephus’s contribution to the polemical discourse, and also a work of Jewish apologetics, an earlier example of which are the works of Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE.) Against Apion is a wide-ranging defense of Judaism against charges laid against Judaism in Josephus’s time.
Josephus stressed Judaism’s antiquity as a classical religion and philosophy, and opposed it to what he perceived as the more recent—and so less venerable—traditions of the Greeks. Against Apion cites Josephus’ earlier work Antiquities of the Jews, so can be dated after 94 CE.
Manetho was already included in my timeline project, but I have since discovered more sources for his writings.