tuplin_berossus

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Offprint from

The World of BerossosProceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on

The Ancient Near East between Classicaland Ancient Oriental Traditions,

Hatfield College, Durham 7th9th July 2010

Edited byJohannes Haubold, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi,

Robert Rollinger, John Steele

2013

Harrassowitz Verlag . Wiesbaden


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Berossos and Greek Historiography

Christopher Tuplin (University of Liverpool)

Introduction

Felix Jacoby detected ve types of historiography: genealogy / mythology; ethnography;

chronology; Zeitgeschichte and Universalgeschichte; and local history. The rst two are

rst exemplied by Hecataeus (but DionysiusPersica was the rst full-blown ethnography);

the third arrives with Hellanicus;1 the fourth, pregured in Herodotus VIIIX, is represented

by Thucydides; and the fth was a spin-off from Herodotus. (Dionysius of Halicarnassusoffered an exact reverse scheme in Thucydides 5, with local history as the starting point,

but the developmental issue is not for present purposes that important.) All of these strands,

except perhapsZeitgeschichte (dened as mostly concerned with the authors own time), are

represented in some measure in Berossos work, and he is duly cited by the likes ofJosephus

or Athenaeus alongside a variety of historians (Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Acusilaus, Ephorus,

Herodotus, Ctesias and Megasthenes). So, broadly speaking, Berossos text cannot be faulted

as a potential example of Greek historiography; its title Babyloniaca is of unimpeachably

appropriate sort,2 and, if we conceive it (perhaps not too over-simplistically) as essentially a

work about a single city, it couldeven be said to be of specially Hellenic character. Of course,

the content also ts perfectly well two major categories of Babylonian literature (mythical

epic and king-lists / chronicles), though the combination of both in a single literary text may

be odder in the Babylonian than the Greek context: I am not sure whether Grayson 1975,

18 = Glassner 2004, 3, which inserts a Flood narrative into a king list i.e. something that

one could describe as analogous toBabyloniaca II makes the entirety of Berossos project

seem normal.

By the time Berossos wrote there was a lot of Greek historiography: over 130 authors had

written history of one sort of another in Greek by the start of the third century BC, 3 well

over half (78) of whom were in the local history category to which Berossos belongs. 4 So in

1 Priestesses of Hera in Argos. Hellanicus also does local history and several items whose titles are -ika

forms derived from topo- or ethnonyms (ten are attested).

2 Schnabel 1923, 16 (endorsed by de Breucker) opted for this title on the ground that it is the one given byPolyhistor the only source author whom we can believe had actually had a copy of Berossos book in

his hands. The prevalence ofChaldaica or cognate forms in the tradition presumably reects the fact that

Polyhistor himself used that title. Unless otherwise indicated references to Berossos use the numera-

tion in Jacoby.

3 The precise gure in my current list is 134, of whom 78 belong in Jacobys categories IIIAC (22 of

them writing on non-Greek subjects). The formation of the list involves many imponderable questions,

but the order of magnitude must be roughly right.

4 These are among the authors collected in FGrHistIIIA 262296 (Autoren ber verschiedene Stdte /

Lnder),FGrHistIIIB 297607 (Autoren ber einzelne Stdte (Lnder)) and IIIC 608856 (Autoren

ber einzelne Lnder) between them much the largest single category in Jacobys vision of things.


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178 Christopher Tuplin

principle he had numerous models to follow or to fail to live up to. In practice, of course,

things are not quite like that.

It would be astonishing if he actually encountered more than the tiniest proportion of

these theoretical riches. Most readers of Greek without access to the library of Alexandria(an institution unparalleled in Seleucid Babylonia) would have been in a similar position. And

so are we, for fragmentary survival means that most of these 130+ authors are literary and

scientic personalities whom we can scarcely grasp at all. The project of locating Berossos

in Greek historiography is one in which the realistic comparanda are few in number.

There is also an issue about his desire to encounter lots of potential precedents. Berossos

learned Greek, but what does that imply about engagement with Hellenicpaideia? We have

no way of knowing what his actual spoken or written Greek was like which rules out one

way of deciding whether he was a truepepaideumenos. Some historians start from the so-

called Graeco-Babyloniaca and the assumption that the King communicated with every-

one who mattered in Greek and deduce widespread knowledge of Greek among Babylonian

temple-personnel or scholars.

5

That might be fair, but does it implypaideia? The half-centurysince the conquest was time for some to have discovered that the Greek language had more

to offer than administrative functionality, but it begs the question to take Berossos work

as proof that such a process had gone very far.6 John Dillery has claimed that Manetho and

Berossos used Greek because it was a prestige language (2007, 229), and that the activity was

an aspect of competition with other members of the native (colonial) elite. Perhaps so.7 But

does the prestige derive from entry to a new literary / cultural world or just from proximity to

the levers of power? Can we be sure Berossos engagement with Greek literature was much

more than a supercial by-product of conversations with Greeks who were properly educated?

Are the putative signs of Stoic philosophy and Empedocles robust enough (and technically

substantial enough) to demonstrate that it was?8

Precedents

Three types of Greek historiographical precedent present themselves

5 See e.g. Clancier 2007, 25.

6 Some now tell us a theatre was built in Babylon at a quite early date, perhaps affording one context for

discovery of Greek literature. But the fact that a Hellenic element had already entered Babylonian seal-

design in the fth century (and received no further stimulus from the Greco-Macedonian conquest) is

a doubtful pointer towards exposure to or absorption ofpaideia. Postulates about Babylonian inuence

on classical Greek thought might entail contexts-of-contact that could work both ways. Even before 331

a Chaldaean allegedly visited the dying Plato (Philip of OpusFGrHist1011 F 1 = P.Herc. 1021, col.

III.35V.19) and, although exactly what transpired depends on interpretation of the fragmentary papyrus

text, on one reading it included the Chaldaean reciting two Greek verses (of his own composition or from

a tragic text) which criticized barbarians for being naturally unrhythmical. Irrespective of its historicalveracity, the story mighthave generic validity as a comment on reciprocal cultural inuence. But those

who do not think so can scarcely be accused of excessive scepticism. (It does not help that the exist-

ence of another story about Plato and aPersian visitor raises the possibility that there is a confusion of

Chaldaeans and magi going on here.)

7 I would say they did it in Greekprimarily because it was the rulers language; but that it would also be

read by other natives was to be expected, if appropriate literacy in Greek had some coverage in the na-

tive elite, so there would be no harm in giving a particular spin that might irk or entice groups among

them but doing so might be almost instinctive if we assume some level of campanilismo to be natural

to the Mesopotamian (and the Egyptian) environment.

8 See Johannes Haubolds chapter in this volume.


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179Berossos and Greek Historiography

authors writing about (some of) the same historical material: Herodotus, Ctesias, Dinon,

Heraclides and other more faintly attested writers ofAssyriaca (e.g. Hellanicus) or

Persica.9

authors writing about different historical material but in some sense doing the samething, that is people doing the history / customs of a Greek community (in principle lots

of authors) or the history / customs of non-Greek environments: Xanthus, Megasthenes,

Hecataeus, the writers ofPersica, and various other (mostly not very familiar) authors.10

non-Greek authors writing in Greek: Xanthus but not Manetho whom I take to be later

in date.11

Inspecting things at this level draws attention to some ways in which the substance of

Berossos work has not got much to do with Greek predecessors:

Assyriaca

Herodotus (1.184) writes as though he had the wherewithal for a full account of Assyrianhistory, including the reigns and deeds of many kings. So there was in theory a Greek dis-

course available about pre-Persian eastern history other than the Ctesian one, a discourse

which would at best have had the same disconcerting relation to reality as displayed in

Herodotus history ofEgypt or in what he says ofSemiramis and (especially) Nitocris12

and which would probably have been quite dissimilar to what we nd in Ctesias. But we do

not know that anyone had written such a discourse (Hellanicus is the only candidate of any

literary substance, though there are no Assyrian fragments13) or, if someone had, whether

it is likely Berossos would have had access. Perhaps, if he hadknown of such a work, he

would have made special efforts to get hold of it. But to say even that may be to make unwar-

ranted assumptions. As for the Ctesian discourse, it is has almost nothing really to do with

Babylonia, and in particular pretty much writes out of history the Babylonia encountered in

Babyloniaca III.14

9 This is assuming that Berossos diddo Persian-period history in sufcient detail to makePersica writers

(and some bits of Alexander-historians) real precursors. Otherwise only those who also wrote about pre-

Persian, perhaps even pre-Median, contexts are relevant and questions would then arise, e.g. whether

a single reference to Semiramis guarantees that Dinon was one of them.

10 Lyceas of Naucratis (613), Dalion (666), Tauron (710), Androsthenes (711), Demodamas (428 T 13,

F 2), Patrocles (712), Aristippus (759), Theocritus of Chios (760), Menecrates of Xanthus (769), Andron

(802), Mnesimachus (841), Timonax (842). The work of Aristotle and Theophrastus on Etruscans will

also belong here.

11 I assume this on the undoubtedly contentious ground that the one ancient source to address the question

explicitly (Syncellus 18.224 = 609 T 11b; cf. 16.35 = 609 T 11c) says so (the status of his statement is

disputed: see Murray 1972, 210 n. 2; but Murray eventually accepts that Manetho is later), but sustainedalso by other indications in the same direction (see Ian Moyers chapter in this volume). In an ideal

world knowledge of Manetho might allow inferences about Berossos on the basis of assumptions about

how Manetho reacted to him. In practice, we know far too little about both for this to be likely to be a

persuasive approach.

12 Nitocris is variously held to be (mis)informed by Ada-Guppi (Nabonidus mother),Nebuchadnezzar II

or Naqia (wife ofSennacherib).

13 Hellanicus was an author Ctesias thought worth attacking: 688 F 16(62) = 4 F 184 (in a Persian context).

14 It is worth noting that, whereas Megasthenes did India (see below), no Hellenistic Greek author appar-

ently ever did Babylonia / Assyria. (The scant information about Athenaeus, Athenocles and Simacus

[FGrHist681683] does not controvert that statement.) Perhaps it would have been different if the


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Priestly history

As an author-priest Berossos resembles some Atthidographers Cleidemus the exegete,

Philochorus the mantis and hieroskopos (though his work would not yet be available),Phanodemus the hieropoios and lead-man in redevelopment of the Oropian Amphiareum. But

this rather serves to point a contrast: Dillery has recently spoken of the cult-centered char-

acter ofAtthidography (2005, 509) and contextualised it in what he calls sacred history

an historiographical enterprise initiated by a priest, in part derived from priestly records,

establishing a past seen through the lens of a religious site and its dedications (2005, 519).

But this really does not sound much like Berossos, whose text seems extremely secular and

focused on kingship, not temple-cult.15

Xanthus

Dionysius evocation of pre-Thucydidean local historians (Thucydides 5) does in rather

general terms seem appropriate to Berossos, and Xanthus (whom Dionysius mentions) inparticular resembles Berossos in that he wrote an account of his homeland two to three

generations after it had lost an empire. But he was not writing in the language of the new

overlords, and the long history of Greco-Lydian cultural (and political) intersection makes

the situation rather different.

Megasthenes

IfMegasthenes wrote as early as Bosworth 1996 thinks (and even if he did not), his work

could have been known to Berossos. Might we wish to say that the spectacle of a Seleucid

Greek dealing systematically with a barbarian environment tempted a barbarian to deal

with a barbarian environment?16 And there is a more specic connection. Megasthenes

(715 F 11 = Abydenus 685 F 6) spoke of Nebuchadnezzar, saying that he was stronger than

Heracles, campaigned successfully against Africa and Spain and deported people thence to

the right-hand side of Pontus. That such ideas got into a work on India says something about

the visibility of Nebuchadnezzar in early Seleucid Babylonia17 and might have provided

Herodotean Assyrioi Logoi had existed: i.e. perhaps the problem is that by contrast with Egypt or

India there was an insufcient free-standing tradition ofAssyriaca (Hellanicus alleged work being

an uncertain quantity and Ctesias treatment being not free-standing) to call for Greek revisitation in

the new political circumstances.

15 The stress on Nebuchadnezzars secular building is one neat illustration of this. See the chapters of

Haubold and Moyer in this volume for the views (respectively) thatBabyloniaca is a sort ofFrstenspiegel

and that its metatextual organization revolves around commemorative acts of creating, preserving, re-

covering and even destroying texts that constitute a central legitimating function of kingship.

16 The putatively systematic nature of the treatment and its relationship to a well-dened polity argu-ably distinguish Megasthenes Indica from the works of Demodamas or Patrocles. But, if all were

contributing to the agenda of delineating the Seleucid realm by inspecting its outer boundaries (cf. Paul

Kosmins chapter in this volume), they might all help to inspire a delineation of the realms inner core.

17 The possibility that there was early Seleucid building at many sites in Babylon and elsewhere normally

associated with Nebuchadnezzar would entail considerable early Seleucid exposure to inscriptional evi-

dence for that kings architectural activities which would be one contribution to his high prole. But

politico-military discourse (less readily traceable now) was probably more important. It is, of course,

hard to be sure how large Nebuchadnezzar actually bulked in Megasthenes text; but Beaulieu 2006 and

Kosmin (in this volume) are inclined to take it seriously, and it is natural to identify a political angle

reinforcement of the point that Seleucus should look west, not to the conquest of India. (On Bosworth


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added stimulus for composition of a real history of Babylonia. But, at rst glance any-

way, Megasthenes treatment ofIndia was not much like Berossos ofBabylonia. Berossos

produced a species of diachronic history, whereas in Megasthenes there seems to be little

history between (on the one hand) Dionysus or the indigenous Heracles and (on the otherhand) the time of Alexander except for (a) the failure of Semiramis and others to invade

it and (b) the claim (unadorned by any narrative elaboration?) that there was a dynastic link

between Dionysus appointee as rst Indian king and Chandragupta.18 In this respect (con-

tinuous narrated history) Herodotus and Hecataeus on Egypt are arguably a more pertinent

(but also a more distant) precedent. It must be conceded that much of Berossos history also

seems to be narrative-free but also asserted that in his work something like a real historical

record starts over 450 years in the past, whereas in Megasthenes we must essentially wait for

the authors own lifetime: that is a real difference.

Alexander historians

A signicant number of historical works about Alexander appeared in the decades after hisdeath, many of them early enough to have been accessible to Berossos. Collectively they are

a special example of contemporaryZeitgeschichte. Individually they take a variety of forms

(and not all of them were systematic narratives). The fact that Alexander liberated Babylon,

spent an unusual amount of time there subsequently, had dealings with Chaldaean scholars

and expired in the city might have made part of the Alexander historians record a matter of

interest to Berossos. But, in the absence of any trace of whatever Berossan treatment of the

Macedonian arrival in Mesopotamia there may have been, the question is beyond rational

comment. (The problem is further encapsulated by the Hanging Gardens something that

may have been in Clitarchus, but which in any case remains quite unconnected with the ac-

tual story of Alexander.) The fact that these works were characteristically written by people

who were directly associated with the Alexander expedition and who in some cases later had

links with one of the diadochi (Marsyas and Nearchus with Antigonus) or (in Ptolemys case)

turned into a diadochus himself means that this is a historiography that is not necessarily

divorced from political setting. But to take the most extreme case even if Berossos knew

that the King ofEgypt had produced his own spin on the story of the conqueror, I cannot say

that it seems very obvious that that fact had or was likely to have had much bearing upon his

own historiographic venture.

Transmission and agenda

The project of locating Berossos in relation to Greek history-writing is, of course, made

difcult by the paucity and character of the remains. The uncontentious testimonia and

fragments19 amount to the equivalent of 1516 pages of OCT Greek (about 15% the length

ofHerodotus II), and what we have is known through epitomes or citations of Polyhistorsepitome of the original. Moreover Eusebius epitome of Polyhistor is only known through an

dating of the text, the stress is rather on the unprecedented nature of Alexanders achievement as an

outside conqueror: cf. Bosworth 2003.)

18 715 F 12 (Arr.Ind. 8.13), F 14 (Ar r.Ind. 9.9).

19 That is, excluding the astronomical material some of which may, however, be a genuine part of the

account of creation inBabyloniaca I, and proved to be such in part precisely by itsfailure to cohere with

Babylonianscientifcastronomy: see the chapters of Martin Lang and John Steele in this volume. Among

items assigned topseudo-Berossos by Jacoby F 16a and F 22 have a reasonable claim to authenticity.


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Armenian translation and Syncellus extracts. The transmission process leaves us vulner-

able to misunderstandings of genuine text, intrusion of non-genuine text not just (perhaps)

some of the astronomica but (with varying degrees of certainty) things such as Sennacheribs

invasion ofEgypt (F 7c), the Tower of Babel (F 4) or a reference to Zoroaster (F 5b) andextremely skewed selection of material: a large proportion is preserved because of a Judaeo-

Christian historical or chronographic agenda. In these circumstances the niceties of linguis -

tic or literary analysis are scarcely available: discussing the fragments ofManetho, John

Dillery felt able to say the Egyptian author used and in a proper Greek manner (1999,

99). I should hesitate to speak thus of Berossos.

Various Greek agendas have been postulated for Berossos project. Do they imply a spe-

cic engagement with Greek historiography?

The assumption that the work was intended to inform or inuence Greek rulers is conso-

nantwith the authors assimilation of himself to thepersona of a Greek historian, but it hardly

requires it. This is no less true (though perhaps no more true either) if we stress Antiochus Is

special interest in Babylonian tradition or even (perhaps wildly) conjecture on the basis ofT 4 (from Moses of Chorene) that Antiochus asked Berossos to produce the text.

Claims that (a) construction of Nabopolassar as a successful rebellious subordinate

is intended to provide a parallel for Seleucus and, more generally, that the rise of post-

Assyrian Babylon is a precedent for the rise of post-Achaemenid Babylon, withNabopolassar

and Nebuchadnezzar foreshadowing Seleucus and Antiochus20 or (b) Sennacherib and

Nebuchadnezzar are good and bad role models for Seleucid kings (Burstein 1978) or (c) al-

leged Babylonian possession of Egypt is a model forSeleucid claims (Beaulieu 2006) or

(d) Nebuchadnezzars Iranian (garden-loving) wife is a precedent for Seleucus-Apame (Van

der Spek 2008) do not in themselves require Greek historiographical thinking unless we

suppose that historical analogy and a kings sense of his relationship to his predecessors are

purely Hellenic phenomena. That would be dangerous. One may hesitate to draw a direct

analogy between the presupposition underlying theAstronomical Diaries (that marrying as-

tronomical and historical data is a worthwhile process in the interests of allowing evidence-

based consideration of the future) and Thucydidean claims about the value of historiography,

if only because the interplay of celestial phenomena and human activity rather contrasts with

the primacy in Thucydides ofto anthrpinon. But one could imagine a more deistic version

of the Thucydidean principle; and it would seem bizarre to claim that a Babylonian was like-

ly to need more than the slightest (and essentially political rather than literary) prompt to see

that his country had history that was relevant to current circumstances.21 Less grandly, one

20 Beaulieu 2006; Kuhrt 1987. There is reason to thinkNabopolassar came from a pro-Assyrian back-

ground (Jursa 2007; Jursa 2010, 99); and it is a point upon which Berossos and Ctesias effectively agree

though the latter calls him Belesys and gives him a relation to the Medes that is foreign to Berossospicture of things.

21 This is, of course, a different scale of prediction on the basis of the past than any discussion of future

ood or conagration that Berossos may have offered. But the authenticity of F 21 (in its current form)

is suspect; and if it is at least partly authentic and evidence of Berossos exposure to Stoic ideas about

ekpursis then we are in the realm ofphilosophy rather than historiography. At the same time, if the

principle that the association of cer tain events and ast ronomical situations has predictive potential is

valid at all, the possibility that it might (on Babylonian principles) apply to, for example, the Flood can

hardly be precluded, whatever general views may be taken about Babylonian attitudes to cyclical his-

tory (cf. Lambert 1976, 1723, as against Drews 1975, 505). Any difculty in predicting a new Flood

would be practical, viz. absence of appropriate records of the astronomical conditions at the time of


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may also observe that the same trick of drawing parallels between the early Neo-Babylonian

and early Seleucid eras has been detected in the so-called Dynastic Prophecy a purely

Babylonian product.22

The suggestion that the construction of ancient history seen in Berossos and in the UrukKing-List23 (in both of which early kings have their associated wise men) is intended to

validate a special relationship between the likes of Berossos and Seleucid kings24 would

have Berossos devising a role for the historian-scholar that has few prior analogues in

Greek historiography at least outside the Macedonian monarchic environment. (I have

in mind Antipater of Magnesia, author of a historical work potentially helpful to Philip II

[FGrHist 69], or more famously Callisthenes, Alexanders ill-fated court historian.) Even

so, this is a long way from the Babylonian situation, which (if it is to be taken seriously) is

surely much more of a Babylonian than a Greek phenomenon something spun out of the

necessary tendency of Greek rulers (if they cared at all) to engage with local experts on

issues of native custom, divine goodwill and forecasts of the future. If there is the slightest

possibility that Berossos was constructing himself as a sort of culture-hero, he was cer-tainly not being constrained by a Greek historiographic model; and even if we take a less

extreme line and see him as assimilating himself to the sort of logioi to whom Herodotus

refers any consciousness of such a model has resulted in a degree of detachment from it. 25

Authority and choice of material

It seems likely that the texts opening contained three important statements: that Berossos

was a contemporary of Alexander (T 2, F 1b[1]), that he was a priest of Bel (T 2), and

that his sources were or included extremely antique documents (T 3, F 1[1]).26 About the

priesthood of Bel little more need be said: it clearly seeks to establish status and access

to sources. Contemporary with Alexander is trickier. It is not clear whether he means he

was born around the same time as Alexander (356) or in the reign of Alexander (331323).27

The former would confer on Berossos (writing in the 280s) the authority of personal age

perhaps with the additional twist that, being older than the Greek dispensation (old enough

to remember the world before 331), he has some special entitlement to explain Babylonia

to the Greeks. The latter would make him a man whose lifespan equated with the new dis-

the rst one and provision of a calendar date for the latter may not prove that Berossos was implicitly

claiming that such records didexist after all.

22 E.g. Beaulieu 2006, 1434. See below, p. 193.

23 Van Dijk 1962, 4361 = Van Dijk & Mayer 1980, 89 = ANET3 566.

24 Cf. Joanns 2000 and Kosmins chapter in this volume. The related notion that Berossos wrote in the role

of a priest educating a royal successor is articulated in Mastrocinque 2005. Some have seen Onesicritus

work on Alexander as being about the princes education, but that is far too uncertain to legitimate

speculation about an inuence upon Berossos project.25 Culture hero orlogios: see the chapters elsewhere in this volume by (respectively) Lang and Kosmin.

On logioi see Luraghi 2009.

26 It is less clear whether he said that he was a Chaldaean (T 3, T 5). There is some danger that the record

(here and indeed more generally in the presence ofKhaldaios in the fragments)is contaminated by de-

scription of his work as Chaldaica (cf. n. 2) and / or Berossos association with astronomical or magical

lore. This uncertainty is sad, given the prominence of Chaldaeans in the Alexander historians treat -

ment of the conquerors engagement with Babylon.

27phsi genesthai auton kata Alexandron tou Philippou tn hlikian. The use ofhlikian here has no pre-

cise parallel in Syncellus. References to the hlikia Kekropos (pp. 74, 75) or the despotik hlikia (p. 387:

apparently the Roman imperial period) are the closest and may slightly favour the second interpretation.


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pensation; perhaps that too could be claimed as some sort of ground for authority. Either

way he is not making a quasi-Thucydidean point, since he was not writing contemporary

history and assertions about date-of-birth are not otherwise (I think) a normal program-

matic issue in Greek history-writing. As for sources: the insistence that the whole span ofBabylonian history is preserved by anagraphai (underlined by the preservation ofKulturgut

buried at Sippar during the Flood) is striking. I shall say more about one aspect of this ow

of documentation later; here I just note it has a parallel in Ctesias decidedly novel claim to

have spent time working on the basilikai diphtherai (688 F 5) and to be able to report what

is said about Memnon in the basilikai anagraphai (688 F 1b = Diodorus 2.22.5). There is, of

course, a notable difference Ctesias putative documents were royal documents, presum-

ably taken from a palace archive, whereas no such thing is asserted (or likely to be implied)

in the Berossan case28 and (after all) the Babylonians actually didhave (copies of) very old

records, so Berossos did not need Ctesias to make him think of such things. But the analogy

is a real one and likely to be of some signicance. Self-presentation and claim to authorial

individuality and authority is normally seen as alien to Babylonian literature (a world wherepreserved names are those of scribes, not authors). Does this mean that Berossos behaviour

is modelled on the programmatic utterances of Greek historians? Perhaps. But, since he was

in any case doing an entirely novel thing, he might in any case have felt a need to state his

claim to do so. He cannot be proved to have said anything very complicated (even to have

said why he was doing it); did he need Greek models to do so?29

As preserved, Babyloniaca consists of a diachronic history of Babylon, organised by

dynasties and kings, preceded by some observations about geography. Where in this might

we look to uncover the effect of Greek historiography?

The geographical opening is appropriate to a Hellenic ethnographic discourse, as is speci-

cation of the crops grown and the fertility or lack of it of particular parts of the country

not that Babylonians needed Greeks to tell them that Babylonia was fertile or that this was a

distinguishing feature of the region or (what is presumably implicit) that it was tied up with

the two great rivers and the hydraulic system enabling their exploitation. But the prominence

of the geography draws ones attention to the apparentabsence of other expected features

of synchronic description of foreign places: there are no advertised thaumata (the wondrous

primeval monsters are rather different, I think) and no description of the customs of the

Babylonians. There is also (by notable contrast with earlier Greek treatments ofAssyriaca)

no description of the city of Babylon. Now perhaps these absences are illusory. Perhaps the

account ofOannes invention of civilisation embraced much talk of how things are still

done in Babylon: after all, it is asserted that nothing has been invented since Oannes time.

Perhaps description of Nebuchadnezzars building activities broadened into a description

of the whole city as its great imperial ruler had made it. That would be a sensible enough

disposition of material. Oswyn Murray (1972, 210) suggested that, as a Babylonian, Berossoscould not distance himself enough to see his society as an outsider or (therefore) describe

28 The Moses attestation (T 4) also does not specically associate royal records with Berossos. And as a

matter of fact Berossos is plainly empowered in documentary terms by the temple rather than the palace.

29 The ction of Berossos retiring to Cos to engage in iatromathematics (T 5) arguably presupposes a

parallel in someones mind not (or not just) with Eudoxus (cf. Kuhr t 1987, 41) but with Ctesias, a doctor-

historian from the other great medical centre, Cnidus. (Note also T 6, giving Berossos a Hippocrates-like

status.) But that conjecture neither authorizes precise inferences about the actual relationship between

the two authors nor is invalidated by disagreements between them (cf. below pp. 180181).


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its habits; that may be extreme but, if he was not in fact consciously trying to follow a

Greek ethnographic template, he might end up not separating out the relevant material into

a self-contained section in quite the Greek manner. On the other hand, Athenaeus unique

report that the Sacaea appeared inBabyloniaca I (680 F 2) conrms that fragmentation hasconcealed material about nomoi that was originallythere and that Book I is where such ma-

terial might be; and one might in the end feel that a combination of literal geography with

everything that couldhave come out via the account of Oannes meant the Book I functioned

as an introductory account of land and customs before continuous diachronic history started

in II.30 So perhaps, after all, the effect was not so very different from Herodotus II. But the

question is open; and I cannot wholly suppress the feeling that there is a signicant differ-

ence between setting out to describe more (or less) systematically some customary features

of a contemporary society and presenting a discourse about the origin of civilisation albeit

a civilisation that still exists.31

Babyloniaca starts with mythological material but eventually deals with the deeds of

what are undoubtedly real historical gures. Under the inuence of the Thucydides-Polybiusmodel of history-writing, we may be uncomfortable about this combination of the fabulously

unreal and the real in a single through-composed diachronic narrative. On the other hand:

There are caesurae at the Flood and, especially, at the reign ofNabonassar (F 16);

Berossos implicitly distinguishes the variousspatia historica, so the most mythological

is well-distanced from the rest.

Berossos does not directly narrate the creation of the world he says Oannes narrated it:

cosmogony is thus only indirectly in the historical narrative.

Greek histories certainly did mythology. Herodotus may spend relatively little time re-

tailing myths, Thucydides might affect to reject to muthdes altogether (while, of course,

treating Minos and the Trojan War as part of a historically analysable narrative), and

Ephorus might start his universal history with the Return of the Heraclidae (at the his-torical end ofmythology) and rationalize things from earlier horizons (70 FF 3134),

but the wider historiographical discourse had room formythology. Some of the earliest

historiographical prose writing (Hecataeus, Pherecydes, Acusilaus32) deals precisely

with mythology, mythological genealogy and even cosmogony and theogony, and with

Damastes and Hellanicus at least we encounter authors who do both this sort of thing and

what we would see as more straightforward history, if not necessarily in the same works.

The rst authors to articulate a history of the western Greeks (Antiochus, Philistus) be-

gan with the story of Daedalus ight to the refuge of King Cocalus court, while even

the rebarbatively cynical Theopompus not only described a fantasy-continent beyond

the Ocean (evidently for purposes of moral admonition) but also put that description

into the mouth of the satyr Silenus, a mythological gure allegedly captured by King

30 Sarachero (F 13) might very well belong there too. But the Anahita statue of F 11 explicitly belongs in

Babyloniaca III.

31 Briants hypothetical suggestion (1991, 4) that the Sacaea was connected with annual re-afrmation of

the kings right to rule alerts one to the possibility that material on customs in Babyloniaca I shared

a slant towards the issue of kingship that some feel characterised the work as a whole (cf. n. 15). But

cf. n. 41 below.

32 Acusilaus claimed to know genealogies thanks to a bronze tablet left by his father (2 T 1).


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Midas (115 FF 7475).33 And more generally, and pertinently to Berossos (at least generi-

cally), authors of local history characteristically gave a mythographic slant to community

origins. It is true that Hecataeus already said the Greeks tell silly stories (1 F 1) and

engaged in rationalisation (so Cerberus becomes a deadly dangerous snake: 1 F 27); butwe should be wary of assuming a generally sceptical / critical at titude about mythological

stories that rmly marks Greeks off from the mind-set of someone like Berossos

Of course, there are myths and myths. Dillery 2007, 222 comments that Oannes the

talking sh-man is not the sort of wonder Herodotus would be comfortable with. That

is true he is much less happy than Ctesias with mixed-species oddities and neither of

them wants them anywhere but at the remoter edges of the oecumen34 but perhaps not

quite the point. Oannes is myth, not an aspect of contemporary bio-diversity. How far can

the feeling that he is a bit outr really stand up to the fact that the various autochthonous

gures at the origins of Athens included the half-man, half-snake Cecrops 35 or that even

Hecataeus allowed Phrixus ram to talk. And, as for the Flood, Greeks had a ood story

too: that it might be a relic of eastern cultural inuence is neither here nor there

So, in the end one may have to concede thatBabyloniaca did not so far as the presence of

myth goes represent a discourse radically unlike anything possible in Greek historiogra-

phy. We may remember that Zoilus of Amphipolis and Anaximenes of Lampsacus (nestling

at nos. 71 and 72 in Jacobys Universal- und Zeitgeschichte) had written historical works

which, though they ended respectively with the deaths of Philip and Alexander, began with

the Birth of the Gods. And yet: Johannes Haubolds chapter elsewhere in this volume leaves

a clear feeling that, if there is a Greek context forBabyloniaca I, it may be as much a philo-

sophical as a historiographical one.36

Berossos certainly engaged directly at least once with the Greek historical tradition. F 8a

reports that he criticisedHellnikoi sungrapheis for attributing the building of Babylon to

Semiramis. Burstein (1978, 34) additionally claimed that the statement about 45 kings in 526

years towards the end of Book II is the remnant of a statement about the date of the real

Semiramis relative to Antiochus I, and thus part of another prong of an attack on the Ctesian

picture.37 At the same time, since Abydenus says that the Chaldaeans paid little heed to

Ninus and Semiramis, it looks as though Berossos chief strategy was to sideline Semiramis

rather than substitute a vivid alternative account of Sammuramat (if it is she). Might one say

that this shows that, while aware of (some aspects of) Greek tradition, his project is not (in

his mind) formed by that tradition? It is simply his business to tell the truth, as he sees it

(which still does not have to be the truth as we see it). It is also, incidentally, more generally

nothis business to follow the Greek vision and ll the Orient with over-powerful women.

33 Admittedly this waspart of what seems to have been a sustained but perhaps clearly delimited part ofPhilippica VIII on thaumasia (a word used as an alternative or sub-title by some who cite the book).

34 See Lenfant 1999.

35 Others were Ogygus (the rst man), Actaeus (from whose name comes the term Attica), Erichthonius

(the child of Athenas thigh and Hephaestus sperm): Harding 2007, 184. Theban Cadmus had snake-

associations too, and there were people (Spartoi) literally born from the earth.

36 Is there a relationship between such philosophical colour and Megasthenes observation that Brahmans

and Jews anticipated Greeks in ta peri phuses philosophoumena?Was Berossos suggesting that the

Babylonian account of origins anticipated Greek ones?

37 The suggestion is mentioned without assessment by De Breucker 2010 (on F 5a), but effectively rejected

in Verbrugghe / Wickersham 1996, 27.


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Semiramis is not the only context in which that strategy might be evident. In the case of

Sardanapalus we can see Berossos effectively denying two Greek versions: Sardanapalus

did not self-immolate in Nineveh (that was Saracus = Sin-sharra-ishkun: F 7d) and he

did not build Tarsus and Anchiale and erect a funerary monument at the latter (that wasSennacherib except that his was not a funerary monument, and he did it after defeat-

ing some Greeks: F 7c).38 The assumption (cf. Abydenus F 5[8]) has to be that in Berossos

the only Sardanapalus was indeed Assurbanipal,39 but, as things stand, we learn absolute-

ly nothing about him not even from Abydenus. This is odd: ifSardanapalus succeeded

Samoges = Shamash-shuma-ukin (F 7c), then, without prejudice to the identity or non-iden-

tity of Kandalanu and Assurbanipal, there was a long period (21 years) to be accounted for

that should have generatedsomethingin Berossos text. Could it be (again) that part of the

strategy of seeing off the Ctesian Sardanapalus was actually to assign his real counterpart

next to no history at all?

Other visible deviations from Greek tradition are more straightforward Berossos had

an alternative version of Cyrus capture of Babylon to that in Herodotus or Xenophon (andperhaps pre-emptively ruled out the Greek version in his description of Nebuchadnezzars

building activity40) and an alternative version of Cyrus death in battle to that in Herodotus

and Ctesias, at least to the extent of naming its agents as Dahae, not as Massagetae or

Derbices or Indians. Others again are simply speculative: is the material about Pythagoras in

F 7 and Abydenus 685 F 5 the remnant of some unusual attempt to associate the philosophers

engagement with Chaldaeans with the reign of Sennacherib? Was what he said about the

Sacaea plainly different from what Ctesias said (whatever that was)?41 And then there is the

Hanging Garden:42 one view would make this the appropriation and corrective supplement

of a Greek story a contribution to the greater glory of Nebuchadnezzar and the elimination

of any claim by Iranians before Cyrus to universal domination in Asia.43 But, in any event,

whatever we make of the Hanging Garden, Berossos general celebration of Nebuchadnezzar

38 Amyntas (122 F 2) gave Sardanapalus a funeral mound and an inscribed monument (but with a different

inscription) at Nineveh. There are probably more complications in the traditions about Assyrias nal

ruler than we can now disentangle. On Sennacheribs Cilician activities see also Giovanni Lanfranchis

chapter in this volume: the defeat of Greeks is, it seems, a (creative) confusion with events under Sargon

and, at rst sight paradoxically, part of a historiographical strategy intended to appeal to Antiochus.

39 This assumes that one rejects as erroneous Syncellus assertion that Nabopolassar was called

Sardanapallus in theBabyloniaca (F 7d).

40 See F 8(139): Nebuchadnezzar arranged things so that besiegers could not make any headway by turning

the river aside. In other words, what Herodotus and Xenophon said happened could not have happened.

41 688 F 4. If Ctesias espoused the sort of Persian aitia encountered in Strabo 11.8.5, he was certainly

in a different place from Berossos; and the way Athenaeus 639C cites Berossos and Ctesias does not

guarantee that the latter shared the formers view of the festival. On the other hand Ctesias did mentionit inPersica II (the Assyrian, not Persian, part of his history) and Strabos explanations of its origins

might both derive from Anatolian Iranian sources. For a recent view of the Sacaea see Huber 2005: there

was a Babylonian festival (its name involving the word sakku = obtuse, half-witted, obscure [CAD]:

cf. Langdon 1924), associated with Ishtar-temples (thus Strabo) but also celebrated domestically (thus

Berossos), and belonging at the time of year indicated by Berossos. But, despite the reference to cloth-

ing like the kings in Berossos and the claims of Dio Chrysostom 4.37, it had no direct link with the

Ersatzknigritual. Huber offers no conjectures about Ctesias treatment of the matter or, therefore, about

whether Berossos was correcting his account.

42 On which see Robert Rollingers chapter in this volume and the further literature cited there.

43 Van der Spek 2008, 30213, esp. 31113. Rollinger (this volume) takes a similar view.


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is, for any reader familiar with the Ctesian tradition, a de facto corrective to that authors

complete suppression of the Neo-Babylonian empire.44

All of this taking of positions against other Greek views certainly ts the prole of the

Greek historian. But is Berossos doing it because he is a species of Greek historian? Howmuch Greek historiography did he have to know at rst hand in order to do what he did?

And is every disagreement a conscious one? His motive for deviation is certainly substan -

tive and Babylonian, not adventitious and merely literary, and I think it is at least tricky to

tell apart the inheritor of Greekhistorifrom the Babylonian who wants to get things (as he

sees them) right.

Hellenic colour

Let us look next at some features of the text (or what passes for the text) as text. Is there

Hellenic colour? Did any of it actually read like a Greek historiographical discourse?

One thing is clear: Berossos is not engaged in excavating a defunct tradition of liter-

ary or chronicling activity; the Babylonian texts his work relates to were still being copiedand recopied; and Esagila has even been seen as a state-favoured scholarly centre in late

Achaemenid and early Seleucid times (Beaulieu 2006).45 The state of mind in which he

approaches his task can essentially be that of a translator or interpreter (albeit a selective

one). That it was more than that is something we need toprove. The default is Babylonian

colour, as is immediately obvious, whether in the presence of sh-men as inventors of human

culture or the prodigious lengths of documented history46 or in the way thatBabyloniaca II

recalls the Babylonian Royal Chronicle47 (the one that mixes kings and ood narrative) or

the Urukking-list (which shares Berossos characteristic pairing of kings and wise-mon-

sters48) or in tell-tale traces like Sennacheribs building Tarsus as an image of Babylon (F 7c)

or the ideologically signicant contrast between the wall-building of Nebuchadnezzar and

Nabonidus and the wall-destruction of Cyrus.49 More substantively partisan points of a

purely Mesopotamian signicance (and a substantial degree of opacity from the modern

historians point of view) may well be embedded in the choices Berossos made in the ante-

and post-diluvian king lists ofBabyloniaca II.

But there is some Hellenic veneer at a verbal level examples include post-diluvian

Median and Arabian dynasties (F 5a), the rebellious satrap of F 8 (i.e. the Egyptian king

Necho, ideologically re-interpreted as a mere Babylonian governor),50 Sennacherib invading

44 See Lanfranchis chapter in this volume and also Lanfranchi 2011.

45 Beaulieu ascribes fourth century Esagila a library like Assurbanipals. It must be allowed that those ele-

ments of Beaulieus argument that relate to technical astronomy belong in that bit of the scholarly world

that seems unlikely to have anything to do with Berossos.

46 432,000 years of kings; a text base covering 2,150,000 years or 150,000: either way not really consist-ent; but we are not dealing with real arithmetic.

47 Grayson 1975, 18 = Glassner 2004, 3.

48 Though not the provision of numbers of regnal years.

49 Destroying the citys walls is a thing that the king must positively undertake notto do (Akitu festival).

Since what Cyrus destroyed (F 9[152]) was probably ta ts ex poles teikh(not as Josephus MSS have

it ta ex ts poles teikh), the target was precisely that creation of an extra new Babylon for which the

great Nebuchadnezzar was responsible (F 8[139]). Hdt.3.159, by contrast, said Cyrus did not destroy any

Babylonian walls. See further Rollingers chapter in this volume.

50 Hellenic in the sense that it is a familiar anachronism suitable to Greek discourse about an oriental em-

pire, just as Median and Arabian would be more familiar than Gutian or Amorite. IfKhaldaios was


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Babylon and carrying off the kings friends (instead of invading Akkad and carrying off

the great men of the King),51 Macedonian calendar dates, both the enigmatic 15 Daisios

as the date of the Flood (F 4b)52 and 16 Loos as the date of the Sacaea (F 2)53 and perhaps

in other more substantive ways: one may not wish to think that the statement that nothingpros tn hmersin was been discovered after the time ofOannes buys into a familiar Greek

perspective in which barbarian wisdom lies in the (distant) past, but might it cast Oannes

as aprtos heurets or Platonic dmiourgos?54 Do we get anEnuma Elish washed in Greek

philosophy? Still, as I have already remarked, philosophy of this sort is not historiography

(and we are also some way from what people mean when they speak ofHecataeus philoso-

phizing the Hellenic reception of Egypt55) and, more mundanely, precise calendar dates

are nota standard feature of the discourse of Greek historiography. I would also note that,

whereas Herodotus Ninus is the great-great-grandson of Heracles (1.7)56 and Ctesias and

Manetho both engineer links with Greek myth (the Trojan War; Danaus), 57 there is none of

this in Berossos: there is no attempt to subordinate Greek gods or heroes (and so recorded

Greek history) to Babylon by genealogical game-playing or other means. One may alsocontrast the intercutting of Egyptian and Greek myth in Hecataeus (producing weird phe-

used in Berossos text (cf. n. 26), that would probably represent another piece of Hellenic colour (Van

der Spek 2008, 289) a more remarkable one inasmuch as it affects Berossos own identity.

51 F 7c. Friends in the translation of the original Armenian in Jacoby, Burstein 1978 and Verbrugghe /

Wickersham 1996 has become companions in the new translation in De Breucker 2010; for Berossos

use of friends see also Dillerys chapter in this volume.

52 On this date see Langs chapter in this volume.

53 Van der Spek 2008 suggests that apotumpanizein in F 9(148) corresponds to the Akkadian concept of

the rack of interrogation (to his citations from four second centuryAstronomical Diaries add BCHP 15

rev.3 [222 BC], 17.11,24 [162 / 1 BC]) andparatattein in F 8a(136) and F 9a(151) corresponds to Akkadian

karu, but of these only the former might count as the substitution of a familiar Greek concept in place

of an unfamiliar foreign one and, even so, the case would be odd: although there is dispute about theprecise sense ofapotumpanizein, it is clear that it is a means of killing someone, whereas application of

a rack of interrogation precedes the execution of sentence.

54 For the Platonic parallel see Langs chapter in this volume. There is also the potential analogy of

Dionysus in Megasthenes Indica (cf. Kosmin, in this volume). Of course, Dionysus is a god, and a

Greek one at that, who improved an unsatisfactory nomadic non-Greek environment, so we have here

a version of that Greek mythological colonisation of the non-Greek world that is lacking in Berossos

(see below) a version originally driven in the early 320s at the point of a sword (Bosworth 2003). It

remains, of course, possible that Berossos Oannes is a reaction to Megasthenes model; but the lack of

proper parallel in surviving cuneiform literature for the role he ascribes to Oannes cannot condently

be adduced in favour of the determinative inuence ofMegasthenes because it is increasingly clear that

our knowledge of the cuneiform literature available to Berossos is decidedly limited: see e.g. Stephanie

Dalleys chapter in this volume.

55 Hecataeus marriage of the travellers innocent eye with local tradition and with Greek philosophy isa renewal of Herodotus for a more sophisticated age (Murray 1972, 207). Diogenes Laertius cited

Hecataeus work asperi ts tn Aiguptin philosophias (264 F 1). See in general Murray 1970. It is not

clear whether Berossos engaged in the sort of quasi-philosophical utopian idealisation of alien environ-

ments that is perhaps to be seen in what Megasthenes says about slavery in India. (Murray 1972, 209

held that material of this sort in Megasthenes was a deliberate response to Hecataeus idealisation

of Egypt.)

56 And also the father of the founder of the Heraclid dynasty of Lydian king all this on the reasonable

assumption that theNinus of Hdt.1.7 is the sameNinus as the founder of a great city on the Tigris (2.150).

57 Post-Semiramis Assyrians in the Trojan War: Ctesias 688 F 1 = Diod.2.22.25. Pharaoh Armais =

Danaus: Manetho 609 F 3b (p. 41), 9a: cf. Dillery 1999, 95.


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nomena such as Macedon, the son of Osiris) or the important presence of Dionysus and an

indigenous Heracles in Megasthenes Ur-history of India. Greeks liked to colonize the

world mythologically; Berossos does not follow suit. Greeks may count as enemies of bad

universal domination,58

but they are newcomers to the eastern environment.

Narrative

The essential feature of Greek historiography is historical narrative. Let us at last come to

this crucial matter.

First, this being Berossos, there is the narrative that is not there. Some absence is acci -

dental, and this includes not just the general fragmentation ofBabyloniaca but specically

tantalizing things like a direct citation of narrative about Sennacherib and Egypt that has

dropped out of the MSS of Josephus AJ10.20 (F 7a) or passages such as F 7c (Polyhistor

again recounts several works and deeds ofSennacherib. He also mentions his son in ac-

cordance with the Scriptures of the Hebrews and enumerates everything in detail) or F 8a

(Berossos providedpolla pros toutois on the reign of Nebuchadnezzar).

59

More interestingis deliberate absence. InBabyloniaca II, we are told, virtually no detailed information was

supplied about the long list of post-diluvian kings and we nd ourselves wondering how

the pages got lled. The idea of an oriental history of huge temporal extent lled with nu-

merous kings about whom there is no specic record is not unique: this was apparently true

of much of Ctesias Assyrian and Megasthenes Indian history; and it may later have been

the case in some parts ofManetho just as (mutatis mutandis) it had earlier been the case in

Herodotus II. But the Berossan situation is different in that it comes with a surviving and

somewhat remarkable explanation.

Nabonassar, we learn in F 16a, destroyed earlier records in order to ensure special status

for himself. There is no sign that this was standard Babylonian spin on the fact that chron-

icles and astronomical diaries started in the time ofNabonassar (a phenomenon signicantly

nuanced but not eliminated by Waerzeggers 2012, 298); and the statement might seem both

to cohere with Greek stereotypes about overweening monarchs and to draw a distinction in

the Babylonian historical record vaguely reminiscent of that drawn by Herodotus between

Saite and pre-Saite Egyptian history (2.99,147). The claim allows Berossos to account for

the lack ofpraxeis of pre-Nabonassar kings without compromising the essential claim to

a hugely long documented history. But would it normally have occurred to a Babylonian

to think an explanation was needed? So the next question is: is it something about what

Greeks specically required by way of historical evidence that prompts the explanation?

Familiarity with Greek historiography would have left an ambivalent impression about docu-

ments: Berossos might have had some sympathy forJosephus later observation that Greek

historians were concerned with literary style at the expense of documents. On the other hand

Herodotus intermittently claims to cite documents and Ctesias exceptionally professed to beunloading the contents of royal records on to his Greek readers.60 But Greek historiography

certainly likespraxeis (whether of kings or others), and the actual state of pre-Nabonassar

58 See Lanfranchi (this volume).

59 Josephus makes no such remark in the case of the material in F 9.

60 Note that Ctesias F 5 (Diodorus) uses polupragmonsai and ta kath hekasta of the engagement with

basilikai diphtherai that asserts a claim to systematic effort. The Herodotean situation is pretty much

in line with what Lane Fox 2010 art iculates about Thucydides. There is no working of archives going on.

It appears possible that (leaving Ctesias aside) Hieronymus of Cardia was the earliest Greek historian


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Babylonian history would be an embarrassment. What then emerges as remarkable is that

Berossos did notsolve the problem it seems with inventively imaginative story-telling

or the weaving of even a few popular fables into the king-list record. Here there seems a

contrast with Manetho: didKnigsnovelle lay to his hand more readily than equivalents didto Berossos? Is that really likely?61

What about the historical narrative inBabyloniaca III that is there? What survives is the

equivalent of fewer than four pages of Herodotus, none of it in Berossos own voice. That

is not much of a basis for judgement. As it stands it is disproportionately dominated by

Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar. There must be a suspicion that a bible-dened agenda

rather than the reality of Berossos text produced this result. But, if this is not (or not wholly)

so, do we really want to say that the disproportion is the result of Berossos applying criti-

cal judgement to an undifferentiated documentary record and that, intellectually speaking,

there is something distinctively Greek about this? Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar would

stick out for a Babylonian for purely Babylonian reasons. And the virtually total failure of

anything to survive of the history of Achaemenid rulers after Cyrus might also, at least inpart, reect purely Babylonian priorities and prejudices though it must be conceded (in-

deed, asserted) that, even if the reigns of kings from Cambyses to Darius III only gured for

their impact in Babylonia,62 there were at least three moments when that local impact was

prima facie so large that it oughtto have generated interesting narrative: Darius accession

year (when there were two Babylonian attempts to resist the new regime), the early years

ofXerxes reign (when, it becomes increasingly clear, there is a signicant caesura in the

experience of Babylon under Persian rule) and of course 331 BC.

One distinctive feature of Greek historical judgement is normally said to be a concern for

causes. There is nothing in Berossos as provocative as Manethos statement in 609 F 8 that he

has no explanation for an attack on Egypt from the east that he then proceeds to narrate.63 But

causal statements are quite rare Nebuchadnezzar campaigns because his father is too old,

an explanation missing in the parallel chronicle text (F 8a); Evil-Marduk was killed because

he behaved anoms kai aselgs, Labashi-Marduk was killed because he was kakoths,

Nebuchadnezzar fortied the city to stop attacks via the river, and Cyrus destroyed walls that

made the place hard to capture (F 9a) and there is not even the slightest surviving causal

commentary on striking events such as Sennacheribs murder or Nabopolassars rebellion.

Perhaps it was different in the original,64 but as the evidence stands Berossos was not in this

respect at the supposed Greek end of the spectrum of historical narrative.

More generally and again as the evidence stands Berossan historical narrative was

fairly bald. Exceptions are modest: Sennacherib went boldly against the Babylonians,

to undertake such activity (cf. Hornblower 1981, 1317), but his work which stretched at least until

272 BC was not complete when Berossos producedBabyloniaca.61 Bichler 2004 already remarked on the few traces of real stories, of all that rich tradition of novels and

even romances.

62 Thus we hear about Artaxerxes II and Anahita (F 11) because one of the statues was in Babylon. We are

entitled to suppose that chronicle texts continued to be written, though direct evidence is exiguous and

the parsimonious efforts of surviving Persian-era astronomical diaries at recording historical (politico-

military) information only help us a little to imagine the contents of such chronicles.

63 See Dillery 1999, 989, 1045; Dillery 2007, 227. The missing explanation was doubtless that the

Egyptian king had done something that merited punishment.

64 Note Lanfranchis conjecture (this volume) that Berossos pictured the failure of Assyrian and Persian

domination as due to moral decadence. On other Greek views of these matters see Tuplin (forthcoming).


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hastened against the Greeks, ordered that his own courage and heroic deeds be in-

scribed (F 7c). Saracus, dismayedat the enemys approach, burned himself to death (F 7d).

Nebuchadnezzar was an energetic man and the more fortunate than any previous king,

and his building activity is variously ambitious, worthy and pious (F 8a). Cyrus treatedNabonidus humanely (F 9a). Sometimes one can make a direct comparison with chron-

icle texts. Sennacheribs boldness is absent in the relevant chronicle 65 though for the

rest there is little to choose stylistically between he took Bel-ibni and his great ones into

exile in Assyria as against he took Belibos prisoner together with his friends and had

them taken to Assyria or between Sennacherib made his son Assur-nadin-umi sit on the

throne of Babylon and he ruled over the Babylonians and he put his son Asordanios as

king over them. The chronicle version of Nebuchadnezzars Levantine campaign has more

geographical specicity and colour than Berossos, and the same is true of Cyrus invasion

of Babylonia.66 Contrariwise the account of Nabopolassars death and Nebuchadnezzars

subsequent actions is fuller, if still fairly colourless, in Berossos. Consideration of chroni-

cle texts that do not overlap with surviving bits of Berossos gives the same mixed result.Sometimes there are just occasional words that lift the record from the purely objective.

Sometimes there is more and more than the Berossan epitome generally offers. But, of

course, it is avowedly an epitome, whereas chronicle entries are presumably in the state in

which their immediate scribe thought they were intended to be: this may not be a wholly

straightforward matter (and some detailed chronicle texts have been thought to be prepara-

tory for other less detailed ones), but by any reckoning the comparison is not of entirely com-

mensurate entities and (tiresome though it is to keep saying it) what we are reading when we

read Berossos is not really Berossos. Trying to decide whether a text once had the allure of

Greek historiography rather than Mesopotamian chronicle is intrinsically problematic when

epitomisation naturally turns historiography into chronicle. But, then, we should not only

be talking about chronicles.

Some material plainly recalls building inscriptions.

Berossan narratives are unlike most chronicles in that they are not of a rigorously an-

nalistic, Year XXX : such and such happened, type. The manner is more like parts of

Grayson 1975, 20A = Glassner 2004, 39 (a late Babylonian report of the reigns of Sargon

ofAkkad and successors) or Grayson 1975, 22 = Glassner 2004, 45 (a late Babylonian

copy of a chronicle of the Cassite kings), in that they present a continuous narrative of

each king rather than a year-by-year one. (The second of these has long bits of direct

speech and is much more elaborate in literary terms than any surviving Berossos.)

Taking the rst two points together one might feel that the Nebuchadnezzar narrative

(F 9a = Josephus In Apionem 1.135f) really recalls the sort of royal text that combines

campaign narrative with the description of a building project. Context- and consequence-setting statements like Cyrus had previously come out from

Persia with a large army and, after he had conquered all of the rest of Asia, he made for

65 Grayson 1975, 1a = Glassner 2004, 16.

66 Grayson 1975, 5 = Glassner 2004, 24 and Grayson 1975, 7 = Glassner 2004, 26. Van der Spek 2008

compares Nabonidus ight with a few companions (F 9a[151]) with the return of Nebuchadnezzar to

Babylon (F 8a[137]) and with passages in the Alexander-Darius Chronicle and an Astronomical Diary

(relating to Antiochus). The same trope applies to the ight of some of Darius opponents in the Behistun

narrative.


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Babylonia (F 9[150]) or Cyrus gave him [Nabonidus] Carmania as his residence and

expelled him from Babylonia; Nabonidus spent the rest of his life in that country and died

there (F 9[153]) are not characteristic of chronicles. The description of Nebuchadnezzar

as an energetic man and more fortunate than any previous king evidently derives from asummarizing judgement, before or after the narrative of the reign, and is not in chronicle

manner

What is said ofNabonidus reign and defeat is not factually consonant with theNabonidus

Chronicle to any great degree and actually recalls theDynastic Prophecy.67 The statement

that Labashi-Marduk was executed because he was kakoths is not so different in intent

(if blander in expression) from the statement that the child was untutored in proper be-

haviour and placed himself on the throne against the will of the gods but that is from

Nabonidus Babylon Stele.68

The Aramaic story-telling forms of the names of Shamash-shuma-ukin and Assurbanipal

are a signicant hint of non-Chronicle background;69 and if we accept that the

Sennacherib-Tarsus narrative is an articial historical confection

70

we have another rea-son to say that Berossan narrative may not be simply dictated by the chronicle model or

the contents of the chronicle series.

The question remains: how far does any of this make Berossos text signicantly Greek?

Is Berossos actually engaged in an exercise in source combination that is, after all, con -

ceptually distant from just transferring Babylonian documents into Greek and presupposes

an idea of what constitutes the historical record that could only come from reading Greek

historians?71 I have to say that I am not convinced. Even if ones initial sense on opening

Babyloniaca III of being in the world of GraysonsAssyrian and Babylonian Chronicles is

too simple, the next or additional ports-of-call can still be non-Greek texts. And even if the

idea of constructing an account of Babylon was prompted by the existence of an alien audi-

ence and by the questions future members of that audience put to learned Babylonians what

happened here before we Greeks came? have you heard ofSemiramis? of Sardanapalus?

the fact that his response in Babyloniaca III was so much dictated by the categories (and

mind-set) of Babylonian literature makes it seem most likely that the same was essentially

true throughout.72

67 A document (for which see Van der Spek 2003, 31124) whose coverage corresponds to the post-Assyrian

phase of Babylonian history. Since one difference between Berossos and theNabonidus Chronicle is the

role played in the formers version by Borsippa, it is tempting in the light of Waerzeggers 2012 to wonder

whether he was drawing on a lost chronicle from the Borsippa tradition.68 IV 3742. In Schaudigs translation (2001, 524) the child [wollte] keine Fhrung annehmen, which (as

Schaudig himself notes: 524 n. 813) is perhaps even closer to Berossos kakoths.

69 I have in mind the story of the two brothers as told in P.Amherst 63 (in Aramaic written in Egyptian

Demotic characters): cf. Steiner / Nims 1985, Steiner 1997.

70 Perhaps facilitated by the possibility that Sennacherib fought on Sargons behalf as crown prince: see

Lanfranchi (this volume).

71 Kuhrt 1987, 46 remarked that the apparent coincidence of the literary style of Berossos and the chron-

icles should not be over-estimated (contra Drews 1975), but did not elaborate.

72 Any lack of correspondence in detail betweenBabyloniaca III (especially on post-diluvian kings) and

cuneiform sources that happen to be available to us is not Hellenic in nature.


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Conclusion

That Berossos wrote in Greek guarantees a Greek context for his project. He must minimally

have been aware that Greek readers consumed texts other than purely functional administra-tive or political ones in effect, that there was such a thing as Greek literature. But how far

did his knowledge of such literature and susceptibility to its inuence go? One thing that

requires stress is that there really is noproofthat Berossos was aware ofHerodotus.73 That

being so, we should hesitate to canvass as a signicant model any author remote from him in

time or subject-matter and much inferior to Herodotus in status. The fact that Megasthenes

Indica was produced within the ambit of the Seleucid court makes it quite likely that he was

aware of it. But it also means that any such awareness does not necessarily indicate a wider

engagement with Greek history-writing and that any inuence theIndica exerted may have

to be seen as a function of Seleucid politics rather than of the impact of a Hellenic literary

genre of more than two centuries standing. Megasthenes (like Patrocles and Demodamas)

was doing what he did asserting an intellectual possession of India in case or because noactual politico-military possession would ever be asserted as a (quite important) servant

of the state, not (just) as a scholar or an artist: he doubtless had the literary education that

ensured that acting in the rst capacity did not preclude acting in the second as well, but

it is precisely that assumption that we cannot casually make in the case of the Babylonian

priest. Berossos was also evidently aware of some aspects of the Ctesian tradition about

the history of Asia; and ifhisattribution to Nebuchadnezzar of a wife called Amytis is a

knowing re-assignment of the marital arrangements of the Ctesian Cyrus, his awareness of

Ctesias stretched to apparent points of detail though, lacking a text of Ctesias, we cannot

be sure that Astyages daughterAmytis was not familiar even to those with only a relatively

supercial knowledge of it. But neither the grand narrative of Asian empires inPersica nor

the entirely ahistorical account of the diversity of distant India inIndica provides a satis-

factory structural or conceptual precedent for Berossos work, which focused on a single

polity and one that was very close to home. In that regard, Xanthus Lydiaca remains the

closest single analogy but one that we can hardly dare to assert Berossos had ever encoun-

tered. This does leave us with Megasthenes as the next best candidate. The ways in which

Megasthenes India differs from that of the Alexander historians the exploitation of the

Dionysiac and Heraclean associations perceived by Alexander to create an ancient historical

context for contemporary India; the greater concentration upon a single kingdom, and one

not represented in earlier texts did produce a three-book logos with some similarities to

the one that would subsequently appear from the pen of Berossos. How far the stimulus went

beyond the basic project of presenting the core (rather than the periphery) of the Seleucid

Empire and a general idea that such a presentation would embrace history, geography and

customs, we cannot tell: the state of preservation of both authors, and especially Berossos,precludes the necessary analysis of intertextual relations. One thing we can tell, however, is

that the close parallel between Ctesias affectation of keen engagement with royal documents

and Berossos excavation of a Babylonian past from the most ancient anagraphai raises a

historiographical theme that appears not to have a signicant prole in Megasthenes. I have

already remarked that Berossos did not need Ctesias or any Greek to tell him that Babylonia

had ancient documents, but we might nonetheless describe the Berossan project as in part a

73 The contrast with Manetho (609 FF 1,13) is to be noted. (Manetho also cited Homer: 609 F 3b [p. 43]).


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response to the provocative Ctesian claim that archival study validated an Asian history in

which Babylon was variously the artefact and mere pawn of foreigners. If so, it is a pleasing

irony that one crucial impact by a Greek historian upon Berossos lay in a feature that was

quite untypical of Greek historiography.74

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