Ancient text
Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldaean, Egyptian, Tyrian, Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and Other Writers
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Scraps of lost ancient histories, saved only because later writers quoted them. This collection includes Berossus on Babylon and Manetho on Egypt, in 1832 English.
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Why we can share it: Internet Archive metadata: possible-copyright-status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT, copyright-region US. Published 1832; Cory died 1842.
Read the story behind it
PersonBerossusBefore the Flood, ten kings ruled for 432,000 years, according to a Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek around 290 BCE. His flood hero was also ordered to bury written records of all things at Sippar and dig them up afterward; the book itself is lost. So how do we know any of this?PersonManethoEvery Egyptology textbook divides the pharaohs into thirty dynasties, and that scheme comes from a book nobody has read in full for well over a thousand years. Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in Greek around 280 BCE, began with ages of gods and demigods. How do scholars rebuild a lost book from scraps?BeingOannesAccording to the priest Berossus, a creature with a fish's body and a second, human head under the fish's head rose from the sea in the first year of the world. It taught writing and law by day, ate nothing among people, and slept in the sea each night; Berossus survives only secondhand. What else was quoted?
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