Berossus, a priest of Bel, wrote a history of his native Babylon in three books, referred to as the Babyloniaca or Chaldaica. Ancient testimony states (FGrHist 680 T 2) that he wrote the work for the second Seleucid king of Babylon, Antiochus I Soter (co-ruler with his father Seleucus 294 or 293-281; sole ruler 281-261). The Baby-loniaca survives only in a modest number of fragments, or properly speaking, only through the quotation and paraphrasing of later authors, chiefly Josephus and Christian scholars, and all are probably due ultimately to the work of the first-century bce polymath Alexander Polyhistor. The first book dealt with the story of Creation; the second with the earliest kings down to the Flood and the Flood itself; the third with events from the Flood down at least into the fourth century bce and the reign of Artaxerxes II, and, very likely, the conquest of Alexander.
With some notable exceptions, a reader familiar with the great texts of Greek historiography (Herodotus or Thucydides) would no doubt have found Berossus’ narrative odd, if not utterly outre. We learn toward the start of the Babyloniaca that a priestly fish-man named Oannes (Green 1984) came out of the ‘‘Red Sea’’ and gave humankind the gifts of civilization: cities, writing, laws, agriculture (F 1). Everything of importance in human civilization was transacted in this initial teaching of Oannes: ‘‘nothing more has been discovered after that time’’ (F 1.4), Berossus adds, though other creatures like Oannes later emerged. While it is true that Herodotus can produce his own marvels ( thomata), he nowhere has talking fish-men, and, generally speaking, has difficulty accepting the outright miraculous.
Book 2 was constructed around a king list containing ten rulers ofBabylon, from the first (Aloros) down to and including the king during the Flood (Xisuthros). The period covered lasted for ‘‘120 sars’’ or 432,000 years! It is here, during the massive reigns of several of these rulers, that Berossus also noted the appearance of other fish-men sages like Oannes. Xisuthros is the hero of the Flood story: he is ordered by ‘‘Kronos’’ to bury ‘‘the beginnings, middles and ends of all writings in the city of Sippar’’ (F 4.14), construct a boat loaded with birds and animals, and board the vessel with his family in anticipation of a massive flood, which comes on the fifteenth day of Daisios. When land reappears, Xisuthros performs a sacrifice and is taken to heaven; his voice commands the survivors to dig up the writings at Sippar and deliver them to Babylon.
Berossus treated the Neo-Assyrians in detail in Book 3: an important section deals with Sennacherib’s invasion of Cilicia and his refoundation of Tarsus as a ‘‘new Babylon’’ (FGrHist 685 F 5). Berossus’ interest in this otherwise poorly attested campaign is probably due to the fact that Greek and Babylonian meet, with the latter victorious (Burstein 1978: 24 n. 80; Dalley 1999). The longest surviving narrative from Book 3 concerns the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, from its beginnings to the capture of Babylon by Cyrus the Great (626-539). Particularly important is the characterization of Nebuchadrezzar II (reigned 603-562) as a world conqueror; the description of his building program in Babylon (including the famous Hanging Gardens); and finally, the surprisingly positive handling of the last Neo-Babylonian ruler, Nabonidus, and Cyrus’ generous treatment of him (FF 8-10).
Where did Berossus’ material come from? Later readers of the Babyloniaca are uniform: Berossus ‘‘followed’’ or ‘‘preserved’’ the very oldest ‘‘records’’ (anagra-phai, T 3). Oannes’ creation account is clearly related to the Enuma Elish. The Flood story also is very old and widely known in the ancient Near East. Of particular importance is Berossus’ choice of hero: Xisuthros is a Greek rendering of Ziusudra, the Sumerian name for the Flood hero (Civil 1969: 143). More common was the Babylon name familiar from the Gilgamesh epic (Utanapishtim). Written sources such as the Flood story not only provided Berossus with the content of his history, they also shaped its structure. A cuneiform text from Uruk dating to the First Millennium contains a king list of antediluvian rulers that in an almost spectacular fashion parallels the account of Berossus from Book 1. What is more, in addition to listing the same kings of Babylon before the Flood, it also pairs several of them with an accompanying apkallu (advisor), just as Berossus does. Paired with the first king Aialu (Berossus: Aloros) is the apkallu U’An (Berossus: Oannes), the celebrated heroic sage figure found in many other Akkadian texts, often named U’An-adapa (van Dijk 1962; Burstein 1978: 8-9 and n. 18). Hence we can be sure that Berossus’ king list and his listing of wise men who advise the Babylonian kings have a documentary basis which he used to construct his narrative.
Just as important as this documentary link, though, is Berossus’ claim that ‘‘the beginnings, middles, and ends of all knowledge’’ were buried by Xisuthros at Sippar. This statement locates the Babyloniaca within a distinct tradition in the Near East. First, the phrase itself - ‘‘beginnings, middles and ends’’ - can be paralleled exactly in cuneiform texts (Lambert and Millard 1969: 137). Secondly, Mesopotamian texts commonly refer to external, physical artifacts that confirm the authenticity and antiquity of the texts themselves. Thus a late redaction of the Gilgamesh epic contains a reference to a box buried under a city-wall that turns out to be the actual repository for this particular text of the legend (Michalowski 1999: 80-81, 87). Similarly, Berossus, writing of events before the Flood, had to create a link in his own work to the very antediluvian documents he mentions. His Babyloniaca, then, becomes a direct descendant of the actual records deposited by Xisuthros before the Flood at Sippar, for the implication is that everything that Berossus has reported up to the Flood derives from these very tablets. In a world where priestly and scribal descent was routinely traced back to the earliest times, so too Berossus’ historiography had to be connected in a physical sense to the earliest sources of human knowledge (cf. Lambert 1957). While Berossus was writing in Greek - something no Near Eastern intellectual had yet done - he conformed to conventions that were in some cases more than two thousand years old. Moreover, bi - and multilingualism were already standard in his world: Sumerian is routinely employed in Akkadian texts, and Aramaic had been in use at least since the period of Persian domination (cf. von Soden 1960).
But not everything in the Babyloniaca had native antecedents, real or fabricated. The beginning contained an ethnographic section on Babylon’s site, plants, and animals, for which there are no Babylonian parallels. A Greek perspective can also be found embedded within standard Near Eastern narrative blocks. Notable in this regard is Berossus’ dating of the Flood to 15 Daisios, a Macedonian month-name from the Seleucid calendar. Also important here is that the Flood was given a specific date at all, for the legendary event is not dated in cuneiform sources (Lambert and Millard 1969: 136-137; though cf. Gen. 7: 11). Also revealing are remarks that immediately follow the description of Bel’s slaying of Thalatth and the creation of earth and heaven out of her remains (F 1.7): ‘‘he says this [story] has been told allegorically ( allegorikos) as an accounting of the natural world (pephusiologesthai).’ If Berossus himself used the words ‘‘allegorically’’ and ‘‘natural account,’’ we would have to assume a major adaptation on his part of Babylonian legendary texts to current Greek literary and philosophical systems of exegesis.
Two more ‘‘Greek’’ features of Berossus’ narrative deserve mention: distinct polemic and persuasive elements, features which seem to expect a response on the part of specifically a Greek reader. First, the polemic. Josephus informs us that Berossus ‘‘found fault with Greek historians'' for attributing the foundation of Babylon to the legendary queen Semiramis (F 8.142). Ctesias had earlier claimed that Semiramis founded the city shortly after she took over the throne from her deceased husband, Ninus (F 7 Lenfant); this became the standard view for subsequent Greek and Roman historians. The response that this section of the Babyloniaca would seem to require is a retraction of some sort, or an admission of error.
Of greater scope and consequence are those places where Berossus is thought to have tried to influence his Greco-Macedonian readers, specifically the new masters of his land, Seleucus and his son Antiochus I. While Berossus nowhere directly addresses them, his account of the Neo-Babylonians has suggested to some that he was attempting to provide a model of a highly successful father and son duo for the new kings of Babylon (see esp. Kuhrt 1987: 55-56), one which would simultaneously help to legitimate the Seleucids and make clear to them the importance of the native legacy and those priests, like Berossus himself, charged with its preservation.
We have both explicit and implicit evidence, then, that Berossus had a Greek audience in mind for his Babyloniaca: polemic and persuasion on the one hand (explicit), and the influence of contemporary Greek historiographic and even philosophical principles on the other (implicit). But it would be a mistake to stop our investigation of the Babyloniaca here, and to observe that despite its overtures to a Greek audience, the Greeks themselves simply did not read the book (Momigliano 1975b: 7-8; 1975c). The foregoing analysis privileges disproportionately the Greek features of his work. The primary register of the Babyloniaca is a Babylonian one that happens to be in the Greek language. This suggests that there were other audiences for the work. Take the Flood account: as noted above, the cataclysm itself is dated by a Macedonian month-name from the Seleucid calendar. What is the effect of this? At one level the dating brings this central Near Eastern myth within the Greco-Macedonian world; in a sense it ‘‘Hellenizes’’ the moment. And yet, Berossus chose the Sumerian hero for the story, Ziusdra, and placed the events squarely within the region of Babylon and the neighboring city of Sippar. With the choice of Ziusdra it seems Berossus is deliberately archaizing, perhaps to build support for where he innovates, namely, in his locale for the Flood story. Babylon is clearly the region envisaged by Berossus as the setting for all early history, going back even to Oannes. In other words, Berossus has both ‘‘Hellenized’’ and ‘‘Babylonianized’’ the Flood narrative. This second reorientation of the story could only be fully understood by a regional audience, other residents of the Mesopotamian world who would understand Berossus’ choice of hero and setting, and fully appreciate the claims implicit in these choices.
World History
