Babyloniaca (Berossus)

The Babyloniaca is a text written in the Greek language by the Babylonian priest and historian Berossus in the 3rd century BC. Although the work is now lost, it survives in substantial fragments from subsequent authors, especially in the works of the fourth-century AD Christian author and bishop Eusebius,^[1] and was known to a limited extent in learned circles as late as late antiquity.^[2] Substantial sections, including one on the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, are also preserved in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, especially in his Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion. Until the rediscovery of cuneiform texts in the 19th century (which, for a while, drew attention away from the study of the works of Berossus), the fragments of the works of Berossus were the only genuine surviving material known from Mesopotamian civilization.^[3] During the 1970s, a German archaeological expedition discovered cuneiform texts with a kings list in Uruk similar to what is recorded in the second book of the Babyloniaca, which reinstated some confidence in the ability of the Babyloniaca to attest to genuine material from earlier periods, which, in turn, revived the scholarship addressing this work.^[4]

The Babyloniaca is structured into three books. The first recounts Babylonian geography and a variant of the cosmogony of the Enūma Eliš, as well as the transition of the existence of man prior to the divine law and after it had been revealed. The second and third books largely concern kingly genealogies and an account of the flood. An English edition of the text was first published by Burstein in 1978.^[5] A detailed study on the sources Berossus consulted for the third and final book of the Babyloniaca has also been produced^[6] as well as his conception of the creation story.^[7]