Berossus: The Babylonian Who Explained His World to the Greeks
A Babylonian priest who wrote his people's history in Greek, including ten kings who ruled 432,000 years before the Flood.
Berossus was a priest of Bel (Marduk) at Babylon who wrote a Greek history of Babylonia around 290 to 278 BCE. It is lost, but quotations preserve his accounts of Oannes and the Flood.
Berossus was a priest of Bel (Marduk) at Babylon who, around 290 to 278 BCE, wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek for the Seleucid king Antiochus I. The work, the Babyloniaca, filled three books and drew on cuneiform sources. It is lost; what survives are quotations in later writers, especially Alexander Polyhistor, Josephus, Eusebius, and George Syncellus.
The fragments tell of Oannes, the fish-bodied teacher who came from the sea; of ten kings who ruled before the Flood for a total of 120 sars, 432,000 years; and of Xisuthrus, the flood hero, who was told by the god to bury writings about 'the beginning, procedure, and conclusion of all things' in the city of Sippar, and after the Flood was taken to live with the gods.
Much of this matches cuneiform tradition. The flood hero Xisuthrus is Ziusudra of the Sumerian flood story, and the list of antediluvian kings parallels the Sumerian King List. Later Roman writers also remembered Berossus as an astrologer; Pliny says the Athenians honored him with a statue with a gilded tongue.
Because he wrote as an insider, Berossus is a rare bridge between cuneiform learning and the Greek world, and ancient-astronaut writers quote him often. His numbers, especially the 432,000 years of the kings before the Flood, have fed comparisons with Indian cosmology and much modern speculation. His real importance is simpler: he is the voice of a Babylonian scholar explaining his own tradition to outsiders, at the moment the cuneiform world was fading.
Berossus says the flood hero was ordered to bury written records of all things at Sippar before the waters came, and to dig them up afterward.
Historians value Berossus as a guide to Babylonian scholarship, but his text survives only secondhand and was shaped by later copyists with their own agendas.
