An Historical Screw Up

Map of Mesopotamia

In the early part of the third century B.C.E., two priests of local long established civilizations attempted to introduce to the Greeks the culture and history of their respective civilizations. They were the Egyptian Priest Manetho and the Babylonian Priest Berossus. Both wrote short books giving an outline of the histories of their respective cultures going back to mythological times. In the case of Manetho, who I have discussed in an earlier posting,1 despite the apparent lack of interest by most Greco-Romans in his book enough survived, mainly because Christian writers preserved large sections of Manetho’s chronology. This gave to modern Egyptologists the familiar outline Egyptian history has a series of dynasties and it turned out to be reasonably accurate.2 Despite the fact that Manetho’s account used Ancient Egyptian records his short book was generally ignored by the Greco-Romans and in fact what was preserved by the later Christian writers, i.e., Manetho’s dynastic list was from summaries. It appears that the actual book had swiftly become a rarity and disappeared fairly rapidly. It appears for their history of Ancient Egypt the Greeks and the Romans preferred the mess of Herodotus or the fantasies preserved by Diodorus. So what the pagan writers preserved were cute stories and interesting anecdotes; only later Christian writers with a different mindset preserved much of the dynastic list provided by Manetho.3

With Berossus it is much, much worst. What we have is summaries of summaries of summaries etc., and the information is even more garbled than that of Manetho.