Название: A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East
Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: История
isbn: 9781119037422
isbn:
6 6 Periplus Maris Erythraei 20: 7.14–15 (he himself sailed), 29:9.27 (mentions “the trees we have in Egypt”); Casson 1989: 6–8. Potts 1990: 316 notes that the author was not so familiar with the Arabian Gulf and the Characene coast. See also Parker 2001.
7 7 Pliny HN 6.138–139: originally a foundation of Alexander, the city was refounded by a Seleucid king Antiochos, and renamed Antiocheia, and then taken over by Spaosines, founder of the Characene kingdom (later known as Mesene) in the late second century BCE, hence the city’s later name: Charax Spasinou, “Charax of Spasinos.” See also Potts 1990: 145–146; Fraser 1996: 168–169.
8 8 Pliny names “Dionysius of Charax,” but based on Isidorus’s text, it is probable that they are the same man.
9 9 For the title Stations: FGrH 781 F2 §19; for Guidebook: Athen. 3.46 = FGrH 781 F1.
10 10 The stemma for the MSS tradition shows the two Parisian codices were copied from an unknown earlier volume compiled by Marcianus of Heraclea.
11 11 The map is available to view in full colour and with optional overlays at the Cambridge University Press website: http://www.cambridge.org/us/talbert/index.html.
12 12 Kubitschek RE X (1919) s.v. “Karten,” col. 2015–16, reconstructs the 24 regions in a table: region 17, Syria; 18, Asia citerior; 19, Asia superior; 20, Caspian and Armenia; 21, India; 22, Media, Parthia, Persia; 23, Mesopotamia; 24, Ethiopia and Arabia.
13 13 Nicolet 1991: 30–33; Velleius Paterculus 1.6.6: a later interpolation, quote of Aemilius Sura’s de annis populi Romani on Rome as fifth world power after 146 BCE. Strabo refers to Parthia as submissive to Roman power, 6.4.2, Parthia as rival to Rome based on its size and numerous subjects, 11.9.2, and Rome as having surpassed all previous rulers of the oikoumenē, 17.3.24.
14 14 Strabo 2.5.6 and 10; Dilke 1985: 36–37; Nicolet 1991: 35; Romm 1992: 131, 180; Clarke 1999: 212. Crates sojourned at Rome in the 150s BCE, teaching and writing, and Cicero used his ideas of the globe for his Dream of Scipio, de Rep. 6.19–20.
15 15 Hdt. 5.49: an early example: Aristagoras’s world map, probably based on Anaximander’s but presenting a succession of Asian peoples (Ionians, Lydians, Phrygians, and so forth) with their most valuable resources and tribute paid to the Persian king; see also Harrison 2007: 44–45, 53.
16 16 In the twelfth century, Eustathius’s commentary on Dionysius’s Periegetae orbis descriptionem (written during the reign of Hadrian) reports that the handing over occurred only after the women had borne two or three children for their first husband, see Müller, GGM II, 346, §730.
CHAPTER 4 Berossos between Greek and Babylonian Culture
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.
A Babylonian Writes Greek
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 СКАЧАТЬ