Introduction

I begin with two commonplace, but nonetheless important, observations. First, that with the conquests of Alexander the Great went also a rapid and massive diffusion of Hellenic culture to non-Greek lands. And secondly, that the writing of history was deeply implicated in Alexander’s empire building: historians accompanied him on his march; a number of his lieutenants later in life turned to the writing of history; and, perhaps most importantly, earlier historical writing, in particular Herodotus, directly affected Alexander’s own understanding of the world and his plans to conquer it (Hogemann 1985: ch. 5; Bowersock 1994: 348-349). It should come as no surprise, with the rapid spread of Greek paideia to non-Greeks and the importance placed on historiography in the early Hellenistic period, that within a generation of Alexander’s death, histories of Egypt and Babylon should appear, written in the Greek language by non-Greeks.

But though tempting to regard these histories as a logical, indeed almost natural, outcome of the Greco-Macedonian conquest of Egypt and the Near East, troubling questions remain. What was the purpose of these histories? For whom were they written? What sources and models were used in their creation? And what world view can be extracted from them?

This chapter considers only two historians, one Babylonian, Berossus, and one Egyptian, Manetho, both writing in the earliest years of the Hellenistic age. They were not the first non-Greeks to write history in the Greek language - that honor goes to Xanthus the Lydian (mid to late 5th c. bce). They were, however, the first to write narrative histories of their own lands that were clearly based on preexisting traditional written sources. There would eventually be similar histories for just about every region of importance for the whole of the oikoumenl.