An
Historical Screw Up
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| 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.
