Berossus - Babylonian Astronomer and Priest

Berossus (pronounced approximately buh-ROSS-us) is the name of a Babylonian scholar, priest, astronomer/astrologer, and teacher who lived in the city of Babylon in what is today Iraq in the late fourth and early third centuries BCE. At the time, Babylon was ruled by the Seleucid empire (312-63 BCE) established under Seleucus, one of the surviving generals of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE). Berossus is primarily known for writing the Babyloniaca, a comprehensive history of Babylonian society sometimes referred to as the Chaldaica, because Chaldea was the Greek name for Babylon.

Berossus's name provides a snippet of what we know of his personal background: the first syllable refers to the god Bel or Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon and chief of the Babylonian gods in the first millennium BCE. That syllable indicates he was a member of Babylon's temple elite. Berossus's native tongue was likely Aramaic, but he was clearly adept at reading and writing cuneiform and papyrus texts in Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Greek languages, and he was widely knowledgeable in chronicles, prophecies, royal inscriptions, and astronomical diaries pertaining to Mesopotamian and Greek cultures.

What We Know of His Life

Berossus was likely born about 320 BCE. Some scholars argue that in 258 he was the high priest of the chief Babylonian god Marduk. At any rate, there was a person by the name of Bel-re-usunu ("The Lord is Their Shepherd") who was based at the main temple of Esagila in Babylon. There he taught and tutored, and acted as advisor to the kings, practicing astrological divination. Some records suggest that after 280 BCE, Berossus moved to the Greek island of Cos. Cos was a center for medical studies, and there Berossus opened a school and taught divination, Babylonian history and astronomy.


Berossus's work was much appreciated by later writers, if they were quite skeptical of his chronology. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (ca. 23-79 CE) said Berossus's astrological predictions were so remarkable that Athenians erected a statue of him with a tongue made of gold. The first century CE Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius claimed Berossus was an inventor of the sundial, but as the esteemed historian of Mesopotamian astronomy John Steele puts it, Vitruvius was a bit of a name-dropper.

Berossus died, probably on Cos, probably after 270 BCE.

The Babyloniaca

The Babyloniaca was a three-volume work on the culture and history of Babylonia, written about 300 BCE in Greek and dedicated to the Seleucid king Antiochus, probably Antiochus I (r. 294-261 BCE). In other words, the work was written to explain the Babylonian culture to its Greco-Macedonian rulers, and to correct some of their misinterpretations. It contained cross references between Greek and Babylonian legends, and also detailed discussions of the Babylonian creation myth and others of importance to the locals. It is the only surviving work of its kind from Hellenistic Babylonia, and critical to scholars of both Greek and Babylonian cultures as an indication of intellectual cross-pollination.

The Babyloniaca did not survive history: the book is only known from 23 mentions in texts written by later Greek and Latin authors. Most of those probably relied on an epitome of Berossus's work written by the Greek slave and scholar (and Roman tutor) Alexander Polyhistor (100-36 BCE). Epitome in this sense means approximately "abstract or summary." Quotations from and references to the Babyloniaca are found in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus (CE 37-ca.100), the historian of early Christianity Eusebius (ca. CE 260-340), and the Byzantine monk Syncellus (d. after 810 CE), among others.

For a taste of the Babyloniaca, see the English translation of Eusebius's Chronicle, particularly the section called The Chaldeans.

Project Takeaways

Within the context of Staring Into Space, Berossus is a piece of the puzzle in which modern-day scholars attempt to connect what Hellenistic Greece learned from ancient Mesopotamia and when. Ancient data about Mesopotamian celestial occurrences were created by Babylonian astronomers and astrologers hundreds of years before the Greeks were interested in such things. That data was definitely collected and communicated to their later Greek counterparts, but we don't exactly know how that happened. Given his role as intermediary between Babylon and its Greek rulers, Berossus may well have been one of those vectors of communication.

Sources

• Ashton, John. Curious Creatures in Zoology; with 130 Illus. Throughout the Text. John C. Nimmo, 1890
• Beaulieu, Paul-Alain. "Berossus and the Creation Story." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, vol. 8, no. 1-2, 2021, pp. 147-70, doi:https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1515/janeh-2020-0012.
• De Breucker, Geert. "Berossos and the Mesopotamian Temple as Centre of Knowledge during the Hellenistic Period." Learned Antiquity: Scholarship and Society in the near East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West, edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald et al., Peeters, 2003, pp. 13-24“. https://books.google.com/books?id=5UL8_CdkX_8C.
• Drews, Robert. "The Babylonian Chronicles and Berossus." Iraq, vol. 37, no. 1, 1975, pp. 39-55, JSTOR, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4200002.
• Koldeway, Robert and Agnes Sophia Griffith Johns. The Excavations at Babylon. Macmillan and Co., 1914.
• Layard, Austen Henry. A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. John Murray, 1853.
• Park, David. The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance. United States: Princeton University Press, 2021.
• Ridpath, John Clark. 1894. Universal History, Volume V. Cincinnati, the Jones Brothers Publishing Company.
• Steele, John M. "The 'Astronomical Fragments" of Berossos in Context." The World of Berossos, Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on the Ancient near East between Classical and Ancient Oriental Traditions, edited by Johannes Haubold et al., Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013, pp. 117-19.
• Stevens, Kathryn. Between Greece and Babylonia : Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Cambridge classical studies. WorldCat, https://www-cambridge-org.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/core/books/between-greece-and-babylonia/i.
• Van der Spek, R.J. "Berossus as a Babylonian Chronicler and Greek Historian." Studies in Ancient near Eastern World View and Society, edited by Marten Stol et al., CDL Press, 2008, pp. 277-318.
• Verbrugghe, Gerald P. "Berossus." edited by Thomas Hockey et al., New York, NY: Springer New York, 2014, pp. 206-06. https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_143.

Figure Links

• Ridpath's View of Babylon
• Mesopotamian god Ninurta with thunderbolts battles the gryphon-like Anzu; also sometimes associated with battle of Marduk vs Tiamat
• Artist's conception of the Marduk temple of Esagila at Babylon drawn for Robert Koldeway, printed in Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung. 421, Herausgegeben im Ministerium der öffentlichen Arbeiten, Berlin in 1919.
• Oannes (aka U'an in Sumerian or Adapa in Akkadian) in Ashton 1890
• The 2nd-3rd century Asklepieon on the Island of Cos, Greece by Nikater

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