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We do not know much about Berossos’s life. His name looks like a Greek transcription of Akkadian Bēl-rē’ûšu (pronounced Bērōš), or perhaps Bēl-rē’ûšunu.¹ Most likely he was a contemporary of Alexander the Great and the first two Seleucid kings.² He will have spent much of his adult life in Babylon, where he was attached to the main temple complex of the city, the Esagila. Vitruvius suggests that he later moved to the Greek island of Cos (then under Ptolemaic rule) to found a school of astronomy (BNJ 680 T 5). This has often been doubted, but Vitruvius’s claim is not intrinsically implausible: Theocritus mentions an “Assyrian” expert in his second Idyll (Id. 2.162), and we know of at least one Babylonian intellectual, Sudines, who relocated to Pergamon not long after (Rochberg 2010: 8–9). Pliny reports that the Athenians erected a statue in Berossos’s honor (BNJ 680 T 6), while Pausanias makes him the father of the Chaldaean Sibyl (BNJ 680 T 7).This last piece of information takes us into the realm of myth and suggests just how little was known about Berossos already in antiquity.

Berossos’s main work, the Babyloniaca, was a history of the world from a Babylonian perspective. The work itself is lost, but enough fragments survive to give us a good sense of what it was like. Book 1 described the creation of the world, and of man. Book 2 traced a succession of rulers from the first king Alorus down to the historical Nabonassaros/Nabû-naṣir of Babylon in the eighth century BCE. Book 3 focused on the more recent history of Babylon: the Assyrian occupation from Tiglath-Pileser III to Sarakos/Sīn-šarra-iškun; the Neo-Babylonian Empire; and the Persians under Cyrus the Great and his successors. The work seems to have concluded with the conquests of Alexander (Abydenos BNJ 685 F 7; cf. F 1. For the transmission and early reception of the Babyloniaca see De Breucker 2013: 20–23; Madreiter 2013; Schironi 2013). We do not know when and why precisely Berossos composed the Babyloniaca. What we do know is that he dedicated it to a Seleucid king named Antiochus, probably Antiochus I (ruled 281–261 BCE).³ The work is written in Greek and shows clear signs of addressing a Greek readership, despite Berossos’s claim that he drew on native Babylonian sources (BNJ 680 F 1b (1)). Thus, Book 1 opens with an ethnography of Babylon which would not be out of place in Greek historical and ethnographic literature of the time (BNJ 680 F 1b (2)). Also in Book 1, and indeed throughout the work, Berossos translates native Babylonian gods and historical characters into their Greek equivalents.⁴ In a famous passage in Book 3, he adopts the voice of a Greek historiographer when he criticizes the Greek writers for “lying” about the deeds of the Assyrian queen Semiramis (BNJ 680 F 8a). Given these decidedly Greek gestures, it is not surprising that Berossos was at one point suspected of being a Greek impostor (Ruffing 2013: 292), who had invented his Babylonian sources just like the fraudster Annius of Viterbo would later fake fragments of Berossos’s own work (Stephens 2013).

These doubts were dispelled with the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform documents in the nineteenth century: Berossos, it now became clear, did draw on genuine cuneiform sources. Indeed, Book 1 closely paraphrases the Babylonian Epic of Creation or Enūma eliš, while Book 2 relies extensively on Mesopotamian king lists and the Mesopotamian flood story. In Book 3, Berossos uses Babylonian chronicles and the royal inscriptions of major Babylonian kings, especially Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Once this much was understood, the terms of the debate shifted, and scholars started asking just where on the scale between “genuinely” Babylonian culture and Greek literature Berossos positioned himself (Ruffing 2013: 301–304).