Berossus

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Berossus was a Babylonian priest of Bel-Marduk who, early in the third century BCE, wrote in Greek a three-book history of his homeland, the Babyloniaca — an attempt to set the long record of Mesopotamian kingship, learning, and myth before the Greek-speaking rulers who had recently inherited the East. The work does not survive. What remains is a chain of quotations and summaries copied by later writers, so that everything known of it passes through other hands. His own name, behind the Greek, was an Akkadian one — most plausibly Bēl-rēʾû-šunu, “Bel is their shepherd” — the name of a man who served the god whose theology his book would carry into a foreign tongue.

The setting is the world Alexander’s generals divided. Babylon had fallen under the Seleucids, a Greek dynasty governing an ancient land it did not understand, and Berossus addressed his history, by the usual account, to Antiochus I Soter, who held the eastern half of the empire and ruled Babylonia from Seleucia on the Tigris. The dedication is more than a courtesy. It frames the whole undertaking: a temple priest of the old capital, writing for the new Macedonian king in the king’s own language, offering up the deep past of the conquered as a gift the conqueror could read. The priest’s claim was authority of a particular kind — that he drew on temple archives reaching back across vast stretches of time, the cuneiform record of a civilization far older than Greece. By his own statement, preserved through the citation chain, those Babylonian writings comprised a period of more than fifteen myriads of years and contained histories of the heaven and the sea, of the birth of mankind, and of the kings and their deeds. He was remembered afterward less as a historian than as a sage of the stars: antiquity credited him with carrying Chaldean astronomy and its art of prediction westward, and a tradition, hard to verify, has him settling on the Aegean island of Cos and opening there a school of the celestial sciences. (The tradition is genuinely old but genuinely contested; some of what later Greeks filed under his name belongs rather to a pseudo-Berossus, and Verbrugghe and Wickersham judge the evidence for a Berossan astrological school on Cos weak, resting on late anecdote.)

The three books

The Babyloniaca moved, like a temple wall read from its base, from the first things to the present day. The first book set out the geography of Babylonia and then turned to origins — the cosmogony and the fish-sage who taught the first people. The second carried the dynasties of kings: ten rulers before the flood, the deluge itself, then the long succession of historical reigns down toward the era of recorded chronology. The third brought the account forward through the later kings — Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar and the splendor of his building at Babylon, the fall of the city to Cyrus — into the world Berossus’s readers inhabited. It was, in its shape, an argument: that the Greeks who now ruled the land stood at the end of an immeasurably longer story, and that the story could be read by a man who held its keys.

The cosmogony

The surviving fragments preserve, above all, the beginning. Before the world there was only water, and over the watery dark presided a being the Chaldean tongue called Thalatth — rendered into Greek as Thalassa, the sea, the same name that in cuneiform is Tiamat, the salt-water deep. The fragment also gives her as Omoroca. In her belly teemed monstrous mingled creatures, fish and man and beast confused together. Then Bel rose and cut the woman in two: of one half of her he made the earth, and of the other the heavens, and he destroyed the creatures within her, since they could not bear the light. The hosted fragment from Alexander Polyhistor states it plainly — Bel “divided the darkness, and separated the Heavens from the Earth, and reduced universe to order.” This is, recognizably, a Greek retelling of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enūma eliš, in which Marduk splits the body of Tiamat to fashion sky and ground; the dossier tradition treats the Babyloniaca as the single most direct ancient witness to that cosmogony in a Western language. Berossus, or the tradition he transmitted, read it as allegory: the universe, all moisture, brought forth life when a god cut off his own head and the other gods kneaded his blood into the earth, so that humanity is rational and shares, by that mixture, in the divine. Then Bel set the stars in their places, and the sun and moon and the five planets — the cosmos becoming, at the last, a thing to be read overhead.

Oannes

Into this newly ordered world the fragments bring a figure stranger than any god. In the first year, the citation runs, there rose from the Erythraean Sea — the waters bordering Babylonia — a being whose whole body was that of a fish, but who bore beneath the fish’s head a second, human head, and human feet below the tail, and who spoke in human speech. This was Oannes. He passed the day among the people of Chaldea, who until then had lived without order, “like the beasts of the field,” and he gave them everything that makes a civilization: letters and the sciences and arts of every kind, the founding of cities and temples, the framing of laws, the principles of geometry, the sowing of seed and the gathering of fruit. The held fragment puts the measure of his gift starkly — “From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions.” Then, when the sun had set, Oannes “retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep; for he was amphibious.” He returned, in short, to the water he came from, every night, forever. After him came others of his kind, the fragments report, rising in later reigns with the same blended shape; the Mesopotamian record knows them as the apkallū, the seven sages of the world before the flood, the bringers of wisdom from the abyss. Oannes is their first and greatest, the teacher who held nothing back and asked for nothing, and who belonged, finally, not to the city he civilized but to the sea.

The kings before the flood and the deluge

The second book gave the line of kings who ruled before the waters came: ten of them, beginning with Aloros of Babylon and ending with Xisuthros, their reigns counted not in years but in sari — a saros being, the fragments explain, three thousand six hundred years, with the lesser neros of six hundred and the sossos of sixty. The ten together reigned a hundred and twenty sari: four hundred and thirty-two thousand years before the flood. The number is not a slip or a boast but a structure — the same vast antediluvian arithmetic that the Sumerian King List keeps in its own units, time before the deluge reckoned on a scale that puts all human chronology in proportion to it. Then the flood. Cronus — the Greek name the fragment gives the warning god — appeared to Xisuthros in a vision and told him that on the fifteenth day of the month Daesius mankind would be destroyed by water; he must bury the writings, the record of all things from the beginning, in the city of the Sun at Sippar, and build a vessel, and take aboard his kindred and the animals, and trust himself to the deep. Xisuthros obeyed, rode out the flood, and sent forth birds to test whether the land had dried; on the third sending they returned with mud on their feet, and the vessel came to rest in the mountains of Armenia, where — the fragment adds, with a documentary touch — its timbers were said still to lie, and the people scraped them for amulets. Xisuthros is Ziusudra, the flood-survivor of the Sumerian account and the Ūta-napišti of Gilgamesh; the recovered writings, the dove and the raven, the resting on the mountain — these are the materials that nineteenth-century readers would set, electrically, beside the flood of Genesis. They are not the priest’s inventions. They are Mesopotamian materials, drawn from the temple’s own religion, set down in Greek for readers who had no other way in.

The fragments and their editions

Nothing of the Babyloniaca comes down whole; it survives only as it was quarried by others. The pagan polymath Alexander Polyhistor, in the first century BCE, made the abridgment that carries most of the narrative — the cosmogony, Oannes, the king-list, the flood. From Polyhistor the material passed in two directions. The Jewish historian Josephus drew on it (giving the impression of direct access he probably did not have) to argue the antiquity of his own people’s records. And Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early fourth century, excerpted Polyhistor’s epitome — along with a parallel adaptation by a writer named Abydenus, and a notice from Apollodorus — for the first book of his Chronicle. Eusebius’s Greek is itself largely lost; the Chronicle is recovered through a sixth-century or later Armenian translation and, more reliably, through the early-ninth-century chronography of the Byzantine monk George Syncellus, who copied the excerpts into his own work. So the chain runs: a Babylonian priest, abridged by a Greek, excerpted by a bishop, surviving in Armenian and in a Byzantine monk — and only there, at the end of so many hands, does Oannes still rise from the sea. The scattered citations were first gathered for the English reader in Isaac Preston Cory’s Ancient Fragments (1832), which set Berossus beside the other lost chroniclers of the early East and which the Library hosts; the cosmogony and the Oannes passage quoted above are taken from that text — see the fragments from Alexander Polyhistor. Modern scholarship has reassembled the witnesses with far greater rigor. The critical foundation is Felix Jacoby’s collection of the Greek historical fragments; the standard English edition with commentary is Stanley M. Burstein’s The Babyloniaca of Berossus (1978), and the standard accessible translation is Gerald Verbrugghe and John Wickersham’s Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated (1996), which pairs Berossus with his Egyptian counterpart Manetho as the two native priests who wrote their nations’ deep pasts for Hellenistic Greek readers. The fullest recent philological treatment is Geert De Breucker’s De Babyloniaca van Berossos van Babylon (2010), a fragment-by-fragment commentary. The fragments are read now not as a transparent window onto Babylonia but as a Hellenistic act of translation — a temple scholar choosing what of an immense archive to render, and how, for a king who would never read the cuneiform behind it.

Conduit and reputation

Berossus matters, then, as a conduit. His history is one of the few channels by which the Greek and later Latin world received Babylonian myth and chronology in something like native form, and it shaped how the ancients imagined the depth of Eastern time. The technical inheritance is real but narrower than the legend: the genuinely Babylonian elements of Greek astrology — the zodiac of twelve equal signs, the arithmetic schemes for planetary motion — did pass westward, though the full apparatus of Hellenistic astrology, the houses and the lots and the natal chart itself, was a Hellenistic creation rather than a Chaldean inheritance, and how much of that transmission ran through Berossus personally remains uncertain. Pliny the Elder records that the Athenians, struck by his predictions, set up a statue of him with a gilded tongue in the gymnasium; Vitruvius credits him with a school of the heavens on Cos and the invention of a semicircular sundial. These notices made him, for posterity, less the chronicler than the first Chaldean to speak Greek prophecy aloud. Later esotericism took him up on those terms — as a witness to a primeval wisdom older than Athens, the same impulse that built the legend of Hermes Trismegistus, an Eastern priest holding knowledge from before the Greeks, and the same impulse that, in Arabic, would furnish the antediluvian Chaldean sages of the pseudo-Babylonian Nabataean Hermetica with their borrowed authority. The fragments themselves are sober enough; the reputation grew around them.

What the fragments hold, when the reputation is stripped away, is stranger than any forgery his name was later attached to. A goddess who is the sea, cut in two to roof and floor the world. Ten kings whose reigns are counted in units of thirty-six hundred years, the whole span before the flood adding to a number the mind cannot hold. And a fish that walked out of the deep to teach the alphabet, and went back into it at dusk, and rose again the next morning, and did this for as long as the first people needed teaching — then left them the cities and the law and the seed, and was gone under the water for good.

→ In the library: Cory — Ancient Fragments (1832)

→ Related: Mesopotamia · Nabu · Dagon · Hermes Trismegistus · Babylon · Babylonia · Marduk · Bel · Oannes · Gilgamesh · Mesopotamian Religion Sumerian Akkadian · Hellenistic Astrology · Astrology · Pseudo Babylonian Nabataean Hermetica