The World of Berossos

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Herausgegeben von Reinhold Bichler, Bruno Jacobs, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Robert Rollinger, Kai Ruffing und Josef Wiesehofer

The World of Berossos Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on »The Ancient N ear East between Classical and Ancient Oriental Traditions«, Hatfield College, D urham 7th- 9 th July 2010

Band 5

Edited by Johannes Haubold, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Robert Rollinger, John Steele

2013

2013

Harrassowitz Verlag • Wiesbaden

Harrassowitz Verlag • Wiesbaden

Publication of rhis book was supported by a grant of Bundesministerium fur Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur in Wien; Amt der Vorarlberger Landesregierung, Abteilung lib, Wissenschaft und Weiterbildung; Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung, Abteilung Kultur. Cover illustration: “Beautiful Reconstruction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon”. Specially painted for “Wonders of the Past”. J. A. Hammerton (ed.)> Wonders of the Past - The Marvellous Works of M an in Ancient Times described by the Leading Authorities of To-day, Vol. I (London 1923 : The Fleetway House) 3 4 8 .

Table of Contents 1. Overview Johannes Haubold (Durham University) The World of Berossos: Introduction......................................................................................

3

Geert De Breucker (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Berossos: His Life and His W ork............................................................................................

15

2. Reading the Babyloniaca Johannes Haubold (Durham University) ‘The Wisdom of the Chaldaeans’: Reading Berossos, Babyloniaca Book 1 ..................

31

M artin Lang (Leopold-Franzens Universitat Innsbruck) Book Two: Mesopotamian Early History and the Flood Story..........................................

47

Giovanni B. Lanfranchi (University of Padova) Babyloniaca, Book 3: Assyrians, Babylonians and P e rsia n s............................................

61

John Dillery (University of Virginia) Berossos’ Narrative of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II from Josephus..........................................................................................

75

B ib li o gr af is c h e I n f o r m a t i o n d e r D e u t s c h e n N a t i o n a l b i b l i o t h e k

3. Society, Religion and Culture

D ie D e u t s c h e N a t i o n a l b i b l i o t h e k v e r z e i c h n e t die se P u b l i k a t i o n in d e r D e u t s c h e n N a ti o n a l b i b l i o g r a f i e ; d e t a il li e r t e b ib li og ra fi sc he D a t e n s in d im I n t e r n e t iib er h t t p : / / d n b . d n b . d e a b r u f b a r .

Tom Boiy (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Babylon during Berossos’ L ifetim e........................................................................................

99

B i b l io g ra p h i c i n f o r m a t i o n p u b l i s h e d by th e D e u t s c h e N a t i o n a l b i b l i o t h e k T h e D e u t s c h e N a t i o n a l b i b l i o t h e k lists th i s p u b l i c a t i o n in t h e D e u t s c h e

John M. Steele (Brown University) The ‘Astronomical Fragments’ of Berossos in C o ntex t......................................................

107

Bruno Jacobs (Universitat Basel) Berossos and Persian R elig io n ................................................................................................

123

Robert Rollinger (University of H elsinki/Leopold-Franzens Universitat Innsbruck) Berossos and the Monuments: City Walls, Sanctuaries, Palaces and the Hanging G arden................................................

137

N a t i o n a l b i b l i o g r a f i e ; d e t a il e d b ib l io g r a p h i c d a t a are ava ilable in t h e in t e r n e t at h t t p : / / d n b . d n b . d e .

F o r fu rth e r in fo rm a tio n a b o u t o u r p u b lish in g p ro g ra m c o n su lt o u r w ebsite h ttp ://w w w .h a rra sso w itz -v e rla g .d e © O tto H a rra ss o w itz G m b H & C o. K G, W iesbaden 2 0 1 3 T h is w o rk , in clu d in g all of its p a rts, is p ro te c te d by co p y rig h t. A n y use bey o n d th e lim its o f c o p y rig h t law w ith o u t the p erm issio n of the p u b lish er is fo rb id d en and subject to pen alty . T h is applies p artic u la rly to re p ro d u c tio n s, tran sla tio n s, m icro film s and storage and processin g in electro n ic system s. P rin ted on p e rm a n e n t/d u ra b le paper. P rin tin g and b in d in g : H u b e rt & C o., G o ttin g e n P rin ted in G erm an y ISSN 2 1 9 0 - 3 6 3 8 ISB N 9 7 8 - 3 - 4 4 7 - 0 6 7 2 8

4. Literary Contexts Stephanie Dailey (Oxford University) First Millennium BC Variation in Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, the Flood Story and the Epic o f Creation: What was Available to B ero sso s?............................................

165

Christopher Tuplin (University of Liverpool) Berossos and Greek H istoriography......................................................................................

177

VI

Table o f Contents

Paul Kosmin (Harvard University) Seleucid Ethnography and Indigenous Kingship: The Babylonian Education o f Antiochus 1 ............................................................................ Ian Moyer (University o f Michigan) Berossos and M an eth o ..............................................................................................................

199

Acknowledgements 213

5. Transmission, Reception, Reconstruction Francesca Schironi (University o f Michigan) The Early Reception o f B erossos............................................................................................

235

Irene Madreiter (Leopold-Franzens Universitat Innsbruck) From Berossos to Eusebius A Christian Apologist’s Shaping o f ‘Pagan’ L iteratu re......................................................

255

The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy, Durham University, and the Durham Centre for the Study of the Ancient M editerranean and the Near East (CAMNE). Without their support, this volume, and the conference which inspired it, would not have been possible. Thanks are also due to the participants in the conference on ‘The world of Berossos’ (Durham 7th—9th July 2010), and especially to Amelie Kuhrt, for her challenging and encouraging response to the papers. Finally, the editors would like to thank Astrid Haubold, who prepared the typescript for publication with great efficiency and unfail­ ing good cheer. JHH, G-BL, RR, JMS

Walter Stephens (Johns Hopkins University) From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus: The Forgeries o f A nnius o f Viterbo and Their F ortune......................................................

277

Kai Ruffing (Universitat Marburg) Berossos in M odern S cholarship............................................................................................

291

Birgit G ufler/Irene M adreiter (University of Innsbruck) Berossos - A B ibliography......................................................................................................

309

1. Overview

The World of Berossos: Introduction Johannes Haubold (Durham University)

This volume is devoted to a man whose work is largely lost, whose life is shrouded in mys­ tery, and whose real name we do not know.1What we do know is that ‘Berossos’ of Babylon was a contemporary of Alexander the Great and the first two Seleucid kings, Seleucus I and Antiochus I, and that he wrote a work about Babylonian history and culture, the Babyloniaca. He describes him self as a Babylonian and a priest of Bel-Marduk, the national god o f Babylon, though in practice this may mean no more than that he was in some way attached to the main temple of Babylon, the Esagila.2 According to Vitruvius, Berossos later moved to the Greek island of Cos to open a school of astronomy.3 Pliny mentions a statue which the Athenians set up to celebrate his powers of prophecy;4 and Pausanias makes him the father of the Sibyl.5 With Pausanias we are plainly in the realm of mythmaking. W hether Vitruvius or Pliny are any more trustworthy has been debated.6 W hatever we make of their testimonies, it is not implausible that Berossos had connections with the astronomers of the Esagila while in Babylon, and he must certainly have had some connection with, or at least an interest in, the Seleucid court, because he dedicated his Babyloniaca to Antiochus I.7 We know from a cuneiform chronicle that Babylonian religious experts acted as advisors to Antiochus I.8 Berossos may well have been one o f them, or in any case have worked in a similar milieu. The Babyloniaca We can reconstruct that the Babyloniaca was a history of Babylon in three books, written in Greek and for a Greek audience, but from a M esopotamian perspective.9 A fter an opening section on the geography and culture of Babylonia, book 1 describes how the world came to be. Book 2 takes the story from the first king Aloros down to N abonassar/N abu-nasir in 1 ‘Berossos’ is a Greek rendering of an Akkadian name. Our best guess at the moment is that his fellow Babylonians would have known him as Bel-re'usunu (‘Bel is their shepherd’), but this is not certain; see further De Breucker’s contribution to this volume. 2 Beaulieu 2006b. 3 BNJ 680 T 5. 4 BNJ 680 T 6 . 5 BNJ 680 T 7. 6 E.g. Kuhrt 1987, De Breucker 2003 and his commentary in B rill’s New Jacoby. 1 BNJ 680 T 2. 8 Chronicle concerning Antiochus and the Sin temple: preliminary edition and translation by R. J. van der Spek, published at www.livius.org/cg-cm/chronicles/bchp-antiochus_sin/antiochus_sin 01.html; for a printed edition with commentary see Del Monte 1997, 194-7. A similar encounter is reported by Diodorus Siculus, 17.112: when Alexander returned to Babylon from India, an astronomer of the Esagila temple called Belephantes (Akkadian Bel-apla-iddiri?), advised Alexander not to enter the city. 9 Berossos’ work was also known in antiquity under the alternative title Chaldaica, ‘Chaldaean Matters’, perhaps as the result of confusion with Alexander Polyhistor’s Chaldaica: see De Breucker’s introduc­ tion to Berossos at BNJ 680.

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Johannes Haubold

The World o f Berossos: Introduction

the 8th century BC. Book 3 outlines the more recent history of Babylon, from the Assyrian king Tiglat-Pileser, or Pulu, down to Alexander. In putting together his account, Berossos drew heavily on Mesopotamian (i.e. A kkadian and Sumerian) sources. These profoundly shape his narrative, m aking for a varied reading experience: much of the colourful account of book 1 is based on the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Enuma elis), while the rather arid lists that made up most of book 2 reflect the style of Akkadian and Sumerian king lists. Book 3, finally, owes much in tone and content to the inscriptions of important Babylonian kings, especially Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Unfortunately, the Babyloniaca as a whole is lost, and all we have are fragments that are sometimes corrupt, often difficult to interpret, and almost always at several removes from the original text. Fragment 1 is fairly typical in this regard: today we read it in two versions, one Greek, the other Armenian. The Greek text is an excerpt made by the Byzantine monk Syncellus (died after AD 810) from Eusebius of Caesarea’s now lost Chronicle of AD 306-11. Eusebius in turn used a paraphrase which Alexander Polyhistor (ca. 110-40BC) had made of Berossos’ original text. The Arm enian is a translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle with some errors and explanatory glosses.10 As this brief overview shows, Fragment 1 merely provides us with a paraphrase at three removes from the original text. This picture is fairly typical of our extant sources for Berossos. Indeed, we cannot even be certain that we have any verba­ tim quotations from the Babyloniaca at all." The other problem illustrated by Fragment 1 is that Berossos is transm itted in several languages. Chance would have it that the Armenian translation o f Eusebius is our single most important witness to the Babyloniaca but frag­ ments also survive in Greek, Syriac, classical Latin, and, in one case, a corrupt form of medieval Latin translationese.12 In this already very complicated picture o f transmission, a group o f fragments dealing with astronomical matters (in the broadest sense) pose a special set o f problems. Scholars have long questioned the authenticity o f these fragments {BNJ F 15-22), on the ground that they seem rather general and do not reflect cutting-edge Babylonian astronomy of the third century. However, in the case of Berossos what might be meant by ‘authenticity’ needs to be questioned in the first place. Berossos him self insists that he faithfully transm its the ancient archives of Babylon. Overall, he is beguilingly true to his promise, but in some cases at least authenticity seems to have been more a m atter o f authenticating gestures calculated to im ­ press Berossos’ Greek readers. The astronomical fragments may well fall in this category: Greeks and Romans knew that astronomy as a science had originated in Mesopotamia and associated it with ‘Chaldaean’ experts. It is therefore possible that Berossos pitched the astronomical fragments to Greek readers who knew and cared little about real Babylonian astronomy. Alternatively, general astronomical knowledge might have been attributed to him at a later time because he was a Chaldaean, and was therefore expected to have dealt with the subject. Difficulties o f this kind turn on the question o f agency: Berossos’ agency as a translator of culture, and his audiences’ agency in receiving his work. That Berossos was at times ca­ pable of manipulating his audience’s expectations is suggested by the much-discussed story

of the Hanging Garden in book 3 of the Babyloniaca. If we believe Josephus, who is our main source for this part of the work, Berossos told the story of how Nebuchadnezzar built a miraculous structure, half park, half palace, called the ‘Hanging Garden’, for his homesick Iranian wife Amyitis. Notoriously, the Hanging Garden, while a popular topic in Hellenistic and later Greek literature, is neither mentioned in the cuneiform sources nor has it been se­ curely identified in the archaeological record. Some scholars have therefore expressed doubt about the authenticity of the story in Berossos,13 but as in the case of the astronomical frag­ ments, authenticity here may reside not so much in abstract notions of what is legitimately Mesopotamian, but rather in Berossos’ ability to project a plausible image of Babylon to his Greek readers. Babylon was full of famous landmarks, and it must have been awash with stories about them. Nebuchadnezzar him self conceived of his palace as a ‘marvel for all people’,14 and it is unsurprising that it became the locus of much speculation and romance. The present collection as a whole suggests that the issue of authenticity in the Babyloniaca is far less straightforward than has often been assumed, and that the question of what is auth­ entically Babylonian in Berossos is intimately bound with his attempt to engage a politically dominant Greek readership. In the context of early Hellenistic Babylon, that was not such an unusual project as it might seem today: the Greek language was fast becoming a lingua fran­ ca after the conquests of Alexander, and a diverse range of culturally composite works soon began to appear throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Cultural hybridity could take many different forms, from the high-brow (auto-)ethnography of Manetho to the Creole of the Septuagint, which was certainly not intended for educated Greeks, and seems to have been ignored outside the Jewish community until well into the Christian era.15 The Babyloniaca belongs near the more elevated end of the spectrum in term s of literary and political ambi­ tion. It still looked fairly unusual in purely Greek term s, but there were precedents for what Berossos was doing, both in the elusive work of Xanthus of Lydia and - perhaps more im­ portantly - in the figure of the local informants evoked in the work of earlier historians such as Herodotus and M egasthenes.16 There is also a Mesopotamian context to be considered here. Babylon was a cultural melt­ ing pot, and Berossos will not have been alone in knowing four languages (Aramaic, Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian), and possibly more. Moreover, Babylon was - and saw itself as the ancient centre of kingship par excellence, and in Hellenistic times had become a truly cosmopolitan city. Alexander had intended to make it the capital of his world empire, and treated it accordingly during his lifetime.17 Babylonian astronomers had allegedly predicted Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela, and the city had extended a public welcome to him just as it had welcomed Cyrus after the battle of Opis.18 It is sometimes said that Babylon’s his­ tory as a self-governing city ended in 539BC, with the conquest of Cyrus. In fact, already

10 The translation was made in the 12th century CE; see Madreiter, this volume, pp. 255-276. 11 For a possible candidate see BNJ 680 F 3a. 12 BNJ 680 F 17. The fragment appears to confirm that Berossos discussed astronomy in book one of the Babyloniaca (Berosus ait in Procreatione) and is thus of great importance to our understanding of the work. Unfortunately, the text is so difficult as to render any firm conclusions hazardous.

5

13 For doubts about the authenticity of the Hanging Garden see Dailey 1994; for a different view see Bichler/Rollinger 2005, Rollinger in this volume. 14 Nebuchadnezzar 15 col. IX.29-32 (Langdon). 15 For the reception of the Septuagint see Cook 2009. 16 On Greek historical writing about the Near East see Drews 1973, Sterling 1992, Bichler 2007, Dillery 2007, Rollinger 2008, all with further literature. It cannot be shown that Berossos knew Herodotus, and in fact he may not have done; see Tuplin’s contribution to this volume, pp. 177-198. The idea of the local informant will surely have been familiar to him. 17 For Babylon as the capital of Alexander’s empire, see Strabo 15.3.9-10; for Alexander’s relationship with Babylon more generally, see Kuhrt 1990. 18 For references and discussion see Boiy’s contribution to this volume.

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Johannes Haubold

The World o f Berossos: Introduction

in the 2nd-m illennium, the Amorite dynasty, with Hammurabi as its most famous exponent, originated outside M esopotamia. The pattern of external rulers continues with the Kassite kings of the Middle Babylonian period, and the Assyrian kings who ruled Babylon in the early first millennium. Even the Chaldaeans who followed after the Assyrians were not ‘na­ tive’ to Babylon in the same way that Alexander was native to Macedonia, though they did successfully present themselves as the city’s legitimate rulers, and were widely perceived as liberators from Assyrian oppression.19 All this suggests that the art o f cultural and political accommodation was highly de­ veloped in Hellenistic Babylon. Berossos was only the latest in a long line o f intellectuals whose task it was to ‘preserve kingship’ by steering the city through a succession o f more or less self-consciously foreign dynasties.20 Others had done it before him: the famous Cyrus Cylinder and the less well-known but equally fascinating Persian Verse Account il­ lustrate well the effort that went into negotiating an accommodation with Persia after the debacle o f 539BC.21 From a Babylonian perspective, then, producing a sustainable script for a Babylonian-Greek empire was much less unusual a task than one might think. Like the Cyrus Cylinder and the Persian Verse Account, Berossos offers models of successful king­ ship and explains what happens when a king misbehaves. And like those texts, he anchors Babylonian kingship in the cosmic order. Above all, and again echoing earlier cuneiform texts, Berossos emphasises the importance of Babylon, its buildings and its wise men, the Chaldaeans. At one point in book 3, he reports how, upon the death o f the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar, the ‘best of the Chaldaeans’ preserved the throne for his son and successor Nebuchadnezzar II.22 We know that Berossos was fam iliar with the work of Ctesias, and he is likely to have been aware of the role that Babylonian characters played in the overthrow o f successive empires in the P ersicaP He thus seems to present a revisionist portrayal o f the ‘best of the Chaldaeans’ ((3s?iTioto