The reports long antedated our own achievement of space travel; some of them ran back into the seventeenth century?

But this is a mere reinforcement of a native quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of the curious preference just mentioned.

For example, ceremonial animal slaughter and alcohol consumption long antedated the Burmans' arrival, and continued in remote parts of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia until recent times.

War long antedates the rise of the modern state.

His passivity in office long antedated Iran.

These and other serious deficiencies long antedated Mr. Quinones's three years at the helm.

An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11.

The work was the "Faust Cantata" (later expanded into an opera), a setting of a graphically gory text that long antedated Goethe's, dripping with irony and sarcasm.

The concept of insanity as an excuse from criminal responsibility long antedates the invention of words like "psychotic."

Mind you, slavery as a social institution is ancient, and long antedated the era I'm discussing, which was only a few centuries pre-Diaspora.