Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East - Группа авторов - Страница 44

Johannes H. Haubold

Berossos of Babylon has long been a familiar figure to students of the Hellenistic Near East. In antiquity, he was invoked to defend Jewish and Christian traditions of historiography against the pagan Greek mainstream. The Renaissance saw his work enlisted in the culture wars that heralded new approaches to the ancient past. In the early nineteenth century, he was suspected of being a fraud. After the decipherment of cuneiform, he was rehabilitated as a genuine Babylonian voice in a world dominated by Greek culture and the Greek language – though quite what he was trying to achieve remained largely unclear. That question has been addressed in recent years, with the publication of important new work (including a new edition with commentary by Geert de Breucker (BNJ 680); a PhD by the same author, De Breucker 2012; an edited volume on The World of Berossos by Haubold et al. 2013; and a monograph on Berossos and Manetho by Dillery 2014). Berossos, it is now becoming clear, combined Greek and Mesopotamian cultural traditions in sophisticated and often unpredictable ways. In this chapter, I ask what his main work, the Babyloniaca, set out to achieve, and how it addressed the concerns of a Seleucid audience.