Offprint from

The World of Berossos

Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on
»The Ancient Near East between Classical
and Ancient Oriental Traditions«,
Hatfield College, Durham 7th–9th July 2010

Edited by
Johannes Haubold, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi,
Robert Rollinger, John Steele

2013
Harrassowitz Verlag . Wiesbaden
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus:
The Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and Their Fortune
Walter Stephens (Johns Hopkins University)

The reception history of Berossos’ Babyloniaca is, to paraphrase the old saw, just one
damned contradiction after another. Evidence suggests that it was little appreciated in an-
tiquity, that scant efforts were made to preserve the text, and that it was overshadowed by
other accounts of Chaldaean history, especially Ctesias of Cnidus’ Persica, written a century
earlier. Surviving ancient works that quoted or paraphrased Berossos appear to have done so
at second or third hand. Moreover, ancient writers created the impression of two Berossoi, or
rather of a split authorial personality, half astronomer and half chronicler, although it seems
unlikely that he wrote a separate astronomical treatise. Neither his chronicle nor his astron-
omy was well preserved, and Berossos the historian was particularly ill-served until Joseph
Scaliger tracked down the manuscript of Syncellus at the end of the sixteenth century.1
It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that a Latin forgery of Berossos’ chronicle, pub-
lished almost a century before Scaliger attempted to reconcile ancient chronologies, had a
long and successful publication history and an enormous fortuna, lasting from 1498 to the
mid-eighteenth century. Between those dates, many more scholars were familiar with the
forgery than with Syncellus’ excerpts. Stranger yet, there were legions of readers with no
Latin or Greek who praised Berossos as one of the most ancient and illustrious historians of
all antiquity, on the sole evidence of paraphrases and vernacular translations of the forgery.2
The crowning irony was that classical scholars recognized the forgery as such almost im-
mediately, yet many of them who must have known better continued to invoke it as Gospel
truth about ancient history, and to defend it as somehow authentic, long after the forger’s
ineptitude had become proverbial.
The history of the forgery and its reception is both long and bizarrely amusing. While
researching in the University of Pisa library in 1976, I found that works by and about the
genuine Berossos, such as Paul Schnabel’s monograph, were catalogued under the forger’s
name. Six years later, I met and interviewed the last living disciple of the pseudo-Berossos
and his forger, a man whose several books on the topic were printed by semi-reputable
publishers.3 Both incidents took place in Italy, an appropriate backdrop since the forger was
himself an Italian.
Known to posterity as Annius of Viterbo or Annius Viterbiensis, Giovanni Nanni was
born at Viterbo, the papal summer retreat fifty miles north of Rome, in 1432. At his death in
1502 he had risen through the ranks of the Dominican order to become Master of the Sacred
Palace, that is, personal theologian to the Pope and supreme censor of books published
in Rome. The story of his career is too long to be recounted here, but can be said to have
1 Verbrugghe / Wickersham 13–15, 27–31; on Scaliger, Syncellus, Berossos, and Annius, see Grafton 1990,
99–123.
2 Stephens 1989, 58–184; Stephens 2004.
3 Stephens 2004, S219–20.
278 Walter Stephens

begun in earnest when Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI in November of 1492.
Beginning the following year, Annius began a systematic program of revising the history of
the world, of Italy, and of his hometown, Viterbo. In addition to forging the text of Berossos,
he forged ten other texts by ancient authors and provided all eleven with a voluminous com-
mentary, in which he coordinated them with the most authoritative historians of antiquity,
both pagan and Judeo-Christian.
His corpus of fake histories and commentaries was not published until 1498, but his
career as forger had begun much earlier, probably by 1493.4 Between about 1488 and 1493,
he concentrated on the interpretation of ancient Etruscan inscriptions, which were abundant
around the territory of Viterbo. The ironies thicken here, for he was in a non-trivial sense the
inventor of Etruscology, freeing it from its exclusive reliance on a few Greek and Latin texts,
and taking it into the field. By 1493, when the newly-elected Borgia Pope came to Viterbo
for the first time, Annius had graduated from amateur fieldwork on real artefacts to staging
spurious discoveries and interpreting their supposed significance.
We may seem to have wandered a long way from the Babyloniaca of Berossos, but in
fact, after 1493 Berossos became essential to the bizarre fictions of the mythomaniac from
Viterbo. As a Christian, Annius feared that the finite ‘revealed’ chronology of the Hebrew
Bible was being undercut by fifteenth-century Latin translations of hitherto unknown works
by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, defining Egyptian history as
many times more ancient5; as a Dominican, he was anxious to defend the supremacy of
the Roman Church, which he believed was under siege by heresy and Islam; as a native of
Viterbo, he wished to vindicate the antiquity and importance of his hometown. He was par-
ticularly offended by the respected antiquarian and geographer Flavio Biondo, who, in his
Italia illustrata, had dismissed Viterbo in a single sentence as not very ancient, and therefore
neither interesting nor illustrious, a civitas parum vetusta.6 Annius had two serendipitous
experiences that inspired his solution to the twin desiderata of religious fealty and local
patriotism. Earlier in his career the Dominican order had posted him to Genoa. Annius
recounted that while he was serving in the monastery of Santa Maria del Castello, it was
visited by two Armenian Dominicans. The visit probably did happen, and historians have
identified two likely candidates for Annius’ visitors, but he made an outlandishly false claim
for the encounter. He declared that the two Armenians had presented him the Chaldaica of
Berossos in an anonymous Latin translation.7
Annius’ second formative experience at Genoa is completely hypothetical, but is ren-
dered probable by textual and historical evidence. I believe that during his time in Genoa
he must have run across a thirteenth-century chronicle of that city composed by his fel-
low Dominican Jacobus of Voragine (d. 1298). Jacobus is well known to mediaevalists as
the compiler of the Golden Legend, the foremost mediaeval compilation of saints’ lives.
Hagiography is not known for its objectivity; likewise, in the fullest spirit of mediaeval
Lokalpatriotismus, Jacobus claimed that Italy had been colonized soon after Noah’s Flood

4 Crahay 1983, 243–9.

5 Translated by Lorenzo Valla, Poggio Bracciolini, and Marsilio Ficino, respectively; cf. Copenhaver
1992, xlv–li; Curran 2007, 51–132.
6 Biondo 2005, 110; Annius 1515, fols. 20v–1r, 159r and 160r. On the riddle of Vetulonia, see Pallottino
1978, 105 and 117.
7 Crahay 1983, 244; Stephens 2011, 000–000. For Chaldaica as an alternative title for the Babyloniaca see
De Breucker, this volume, pp. 15–28.
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus 279

by sons of Noah’s great-grandson Nimrod. Later, said Jacobus, in the time of Moses, an-
other prince came from the east and reigned over Italy; his name was Janus and he founded
Genoa. Janus named the town for himself, Janicula. Later still, when the town grew large,
its inhabitants dropped the diminutive and called it Janua.8 Patriotic claims involving Noah
were common in the later Middle Ages: early in the thirteenth century, Giraldus Cambrensis
(Gerald of Wales) recorded that the Irish claimed Noah’s granddaughter as the original colo-
nizer of Ireland.9
The similarities between the Chronicle of Jacobus and the forgeries of Annius are numer-
ous, but Annius introduced three improvements over his predecessor’s mythology. First, he
backdated the story and exaggerated its importance by making Noah himself the original
colonizer of Italy, rather than his great-great-grandsons. Moreover, on the basis of a Hebrew
word for wine, iaín, Annius declared that Janus was Noah’s cognomen among all ancient
peoples, bestowed in honour of his inventing wine. This identification was to have a great
fortune of its own, even among Jewish commentators of the Renaissance.10
Annius’ third improvement was in many ways more radical. Rather than write a continu-
ous chronicle and merely cite ancient authorities, as Jacobus and other mediaeval patriots
had done, Annius presented his reader with eleven forged primary sources, surrounded them
with his own meticulous commentary, and left the reader to construct the chronicle from
these spurious materials. As I have led you to suspect, Annius’ principal forged authority
was Berossos’ Babyloniaca. Annius forged the Babyloniaca (or Chaldaica, as he knew it)
because, as far as he could tell, it had disappeared sometime in antiquity, like Annius’ other
ten authorities, except for a few quotations and paraphrases preserved by later authors. As
far as anyone knew in Annius’ day, the most abundant traces of Berossos’ Babyloniaca had
been preserved by Flavius Josephus in the Jewish Antiquities and in the work he wrote to
defend them, his diatribe Against Apion the Grammarian.11
Josephus inspired Annius’ revisionist project directly by emphasizing the contrast be-
tween Greek and Biblical versions of human history. In both the Antiquities and Against
Apion, Josephus had asserted that the Hebrew Bible was the oldest and most authentic his-
torical record, and that its account of Noah, Moses, and other heroes was corroborated by
historians who were neither Hebrew nor Greek. Josephus stressed that the Greeks relied
on oral records until the time of Homer, whereas the Hebrews and other barbarian peoples,
particularly the Chaldaeans, Egyptians, and Phœnicians, had kept meticulous written records
of their history. In short, Greek mythology was a pathetic, belated oral substitute for barbar-
ian historiography, which was based on carefully protected chains of written, documentary
evidence, dating from the earliest times.
Annius, who knew little Greek, read Josephus in the Latin translation commissioned by
Cassiodorus in the late sixth century.12 The ‘aha’ moment for Annius came when he under-
stood the importance that Josephus attributed to Berossos as an independent corroborator of
stories that Genesis told about Noah and the Flood. ‘All those who wrote histories of non-
Greek peoples,’ said Josephus, ‘record the Great Flood and the ark. Among these is Berossos

8 Jacobus of Voragine 1995, 84–5, 342–3; Cochrane 1981, 61–2 and n. 5 appears to confuse Jacobus’ Janus
with Annius’.
9 Stephens 1989, 109 and n. 17 (p. 370); cf. Mattiangeli 1981, 319–21.
10 Jewish Encyclopedia, 6:553 and 9:322; Stephens 1979, 191–2 and n. 68.
11 Reproduced in Verbrugghe / Wickersham, passim on pp. 51–64.
12 Scheckenberg 1972, 104–5.
280 Walter Stephens

the Chaldaean’.13 Although Josephus listed other ancient writers who mentioned Noah, the
Chaldaean was his prize exhibit. And so Annius entitled his forgery the Defloratio Berosi
Chaldaica, or Berossos’ epitome of Chaldaean history, modelling his title on the Latin trans-
lation’s reference to Berosus, qui Chaldaica defloravit.14 Inspired by Josephus’ respect for
Berossos, Annius decided to rewrite ancient history at the source, and prove that the Greco-
Roman consensus about ancient history had been a malicious forgery.
However, if discovering Berossos was Annius’ ‘aha moment’, it was not the origin of
his revisionary project. We do not know just when the idea of forging Berossos occurred to
Annius, but it must have come after 1493. By that date Annius had begun forging inscrip-
tions, for he stage-managed an excavation of several at Viterbo, witnessed by the newly-
elected Alexander VI and the papal Curia in late 1493. But the several reports Annius pro-
duced about these epigraphic hoaxes were inspired by Diodorus Siculus rather than Josephus;
they starred Isis and Osiris rather than Noah, and connected the history of Viterbo to that
of Egypt rather than Chaldaea. Nowhere does Annius mention Berossos in these earlier fic-
tions, and he seems not to have intended linking them directly to Biblical history. Instead, he
took advantage of the enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquity that excited humanist scholars in the
second half of the fifteenth century, after Poggio Bracciolini and Marsilio Ficino produced
their Latin translations of Diodorus and the Corpus Hermeticum. Discovering Berossos did
not inspire Annius to discard his earlier pseudo-Egyptian forgeries; instead, he integrated
them, often clumsily and usually with significant modifications, into his new and improved,
pseudo-Chaldaean and pseudo-Biblical mythologies.
In practical terms, this decision made Annius the inventor of scientific forgery: he created
a total pseudo-archaeological experience that coordinated forged inscriptions with pseudo­
nymous texts by means of erudite commentaries. Accordingly, Annius carefully designed
his literary forgeries to exploit contradictions, lacunae, and cruxes in the historical records
known and respected by his contemporaries. Taken as a whole, Annius’ multimedia impos-
ture grounded a seamless revisionist narrative that began with Noah’s colonization of the
Mediterranean basin and proceeded through falsified Chaldaean and Egyptian king-lists
until­it reconnected with canonical accounts of Roman history, and ended with Desiderius,
the Longobard king routed by Charlemagne in 774. At the centre of this grand historical
sweep was little Viterbo. Today the town’s population is around 60,000. In Annius’ day it
was far smaller. In fact, although it was still important as a papal property, it had undergone
serious decline in the fourteenth century during the so-called Babylonian captivity when the
Papacy was removed to Avignon (1308–77).
To construct an illustrious past for the little town, Annius linked Noah, the Babylonians,
and the Egyptians to the civilization of the Etruscans. As I mentioned earlier, Annius had
an intense interest in Etruscan antiquity, and actually made some important discoveries of a
genuine sort.15 From the beginning, Annius focussed his grandiose historical impostures on
the Etruscans, but his exploitation of Diodorus, the Hermetica, and Josephus has frequently
confused modern critics and historians. One still encounters the assertion that he glorified
Chaldaea, presumably because he chose Berossos as the textual anchor of his mythologies.

13 Jewish Antiquities, 1.93–4 (in Verbrugghe / Wickersham, 51).

14 Josephus 1958, 137.
15 Rowland 1998, 53–9.
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus 281

Nothing could be less true. And his use of Egypt in his epigraphic forgeries has compounded
the confusion.
Having observed that Josephus invoked Berossos in order to provide independent cor-
roboration of Hebrew history, Annius applied the same strategy to the history of Etruria.
But he added an astute twist: in his day Berossos’ work resembled Etruscan history in that
little or nothing was known of either besides fragments preserved by Greek and Roman
authors. Thus he decided to propose a rediscovered Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica as the pri-
mary source for resurrecting the history of the Etruscans. Annius blamed Graecia mendax,
or Mendacious Greece, for the oblivion that had engulfed Etruscan history, and so, for
good measure, he attributed Berossos’ own eclipse to a kind of Greek damnatio memoriae.
Josephus inspired these accusations of Annius’ in the diatribe Against Apion, which he
wrote to defend the Jewish Antiquities from Grecophile mockery. Annius not only repeated
Josephus’ claim that Greek mythology and history were erroneous and falsified; he went
further and declared that Greek philosophy was actively and deliberately destructive of true
religion and authentic culture. Distorting a quotation that Pliny had drawn from Cato the
Elder, Annius claimed that the Greek language itself was inimical to truth, being infused
with a virus contra veritatem. The Greek version of history, which magnified Greek civili-
zation and ridiculed the achievements of the barbari, was a monstrous lie, constructed over
centuries, foisted onto the sturdy but naïve Romans, which induced them to abandon and de-
stroy the primeval civilization they had inherited from the Etruscans. The contrary of Greek
mendacity was barbarian piety, the common inheritance shared by Etruscans, Chaldaeans,
Egyptians, and the early Hebrews. Annius understood this barbara pietas in both the Roman
and the Christian senses: it was not mere loyalty to family, race, and cultural tradition, but
also a righteous monotheism. Conversely, the Greeks’ polytheism, like their inveterate men-
dacity, resulted from their hereditary love of sophistic rhetoric, abstruse logic-chopping, and
the prostitution of both for monetary gain.16
Annius was far too well-read to be ignorant that Diodorus, Plato, and countless other
Greeks had exalted the civilization of the Egyptians and, to a lesser extent, the Chaldaeans,
but he needed a culprit nefarious enough to assume responsibility for the destruction of
Etruscan civilization as he imagined it. Conversely, he combined Josephus’ idealization
of Berossos as a beacon of truthful barbarian historiography with the Jewish apologist’s
defence of Hebrew monotheism, and thereby reinvented Berossos as the archetypal pious
Chaldee. Annius’ Berossos was trismegistic: he was not only a historian, but a priest, and
consequently a notary-public with a sacred mission. In his commentary on pseudo-Berossos,
the forger asserts that
Berossos was by birth a Babylonian and by rank a Chaldaeus, as Josephus informs us in his
Against Apion the Grammarian and in the first book of his Jewish Antiquities. Thus he was
necessarily a priest, for the Chaldaei held the same rank in their society that the priests held
in Egypt, as Diodorus Siculus asserts in his third [sic] book. Hence Berossos was also a public
scribe and notary, for no one but priests enjoyed the publicly-sanctioned authority to chronicle
events, exploits, and kings … Accordingly, Berossos condensed all of Chaldaean history, and
in his capacity as a notary invested with public authority, he also transcribed universal history
and ancient occurrences everywhere; he mentioned the flood … and explicitly named Noah and
his sons, as Josephus asserts in his abovementioned books.17

16 Stephens 1979, 110–16.

17 Annius 1515, fol. 104r–v.
282 Walter Stephens

The Annian Berossos was too piously loyal to his own culture to agree with the negative
accounts of Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar given by the Bible, but his loyalties were other-
wise pan-barbarian. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, his Defloratio glorified the Etruscans
above all other barbarians. Annius explains that this feature owed nothing to arbitrary par-
tisanship on Berossos’ part: rather, it derived naturally from the pious Chaldee’s fidelity to
his vocation as documentary historian and scrupulous notary-public. His priestly functions
made him the prefect of the temple archives at Babylon, and over time this library had
grown to be the storehouse of universal history, resembling both the Ptolemaic library of
Alexandria and the archives of the Egyptian priests that Solon visited in the frame-story to
the Timaeus.
The Babylonian library contained the records of all peoples, so its incomparable manu-
script collection naturally included the diaries of the antediluvian patriarchs. These docu-
ments recounted how Noah left Armenia in the year 100 after the Flood, and sailed around
the Mediterranean, leaving substantial colonies of his prolific descendants on all its shores.
In the year 108, Noah sailed up the Tiber and founded the Janiculum, bestowing his vi-
nous nickname on it. Thirty-five years later, Noah’s grandson Comerus Gallus, the Biblical
Gomer, formally introduced laws and letters to the Ianigenae, who would later be known
as Etruscans. A half-century after that, Noah’s great-grandson Nimrod founded Babylon or
Babel. Pseudo-Berossos loyally asserts that Nimrod was a model ruler, but he admits that
Nimrod stole Noah’s books before leaving to found Babylon – Berossos does not specify
whether these were Noah’s autographs or mere copies. In either case, Noah’s books became
the nucleus of the Library of Babylon.
By Berossos’ time, the chronicles and archival documents in Babylon’s library had be-
come so numerous that reading universal history had become a Sisyphean chore – Berossos
criticizes their prolixity – and so he condensed them into the Defloratio. Sometime there­
after, the great library was destroyed, and the true history of the Etruscans went into eclipse
sometime later, when Berossos’ Defloratio fell victim to neglect and the elements. Only the
Latin translation that was brought to Annius from Armenia seems to have survived, and
Annius confided that he did not even know who translated it.18
Annius’ authorial fictions about Berossos are worthy of Jorge Luís Borges, who indeed
seems to have known something about the forger from Viterbo. But despite the grandiose
scene-setting, the Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica was so condensed that Annius’ contempor­
aries immediately began referring to it as fragments, whether they defended its authentic-
ity or denounced it as a forgery. This misinterpretation was doubtless encouraged by the
format Annius chose. He surrounded relatively short segments of pseudo-Berossian text
with extremely long and detailed commentaries that cited and quoted an impressive variety
of genuine ancient, mediaeval, and Renaissance sources, as well as Annius’ own bespoke
forgeries. On several occasions, printers reproduced the entire contents of pseudo-Berossos
on about twenty octavopages in large type, yet when Annius’ commentary is included, the
Defloratio’s total bulk exceeds eighty densely-printed quarto pages.19
As is evident, Noah was the most important figure in pseudo-Berossos’ history. He was
the first Etruscan, and, equally important, the first pontifex maximus. Thanks to him, there
was a continuous succession of pontefices maximi in Rome, from Noah’s Etruscans through

18 For all this, see Stephens 1979, 88–106; Stephens 1989, 111–14; Stephens 2011, 698-702.
19 Comparing Annius 1530 (texts only) to Annius 1515.
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus 283

the Romans to the successors of Saint Peter. Among the books that Nimrod stole from Noah
were the same libri rituales that the Roman priests eventually inherited from their Etruscan
elders. Pseudo-Berossos makes tantalizing references to the ritual books’ contents, claiming
they were essential to the Babylonian priesthood of his day, but unfortunately his holy vows
prevent his divulging even the most trivial details. What a loss to the history of monotheism.
Annius took great pains to coordinate the text of pseudo-Berossos with the inscriptions he
had forged earlier, in his Egyptophile period. Although he was able to sound out inscriptions
in the Etruscan alphabet, he did not forge any of his own. Etruscan language came into his
project in a less spectacular way, through his claim that it was an older form of the Hebrew
language. Not that he knew much about Hebrew. He claimed to have consulted with rabbis
in Viterbo regarding individual words, and may have actually done so on a few occasions.
But most of his knowledge, or rather his guesswork, came from Saint Jerome’s glossaries of
Hebrew names in the Bible. By matching Hebrew syllables to Jerome’s Latin etymologies
of the names, Annius was able to claim knowledge of Hebrew. He then used this pseudo­
glossia to parse phrases and place-names in Greek, Latin, Italian, and even Croatian, so as
to provide Etrusco-Hebraic explanations of their significance. One of his most amusing feats
was the transformation of a humble onion-field outside Viterbo into the scene of a primeval
wedding-feast starring the Great Mother, by deriving the oniony adjective cipollara from
the onomastic Cybellaria.20
Annius’ pseudo-Hebrew erudition, like his fictionalization of Berossos and the Library
of Babylon, derives indirectly from one of the most intriguing features of the genuine
Babyloniaca, that is, Berossos’ history of writing and of historiography. You remember that,
according to Berossos, humanity was originally bereft of all skills and lived like animals
until the man-fish Oannes rose from the sea to instruct them, and that even afterward, hu-
manity never discovered anything on its own. Berossos’ Noah-figure Xisouthros safeguarded
human culture by burying all the books, the first, the middle, and the last, in the citadel of
Sippar, thereby creating the first Renaissance in all of human history when the books were
excavated after the flood. Annius could not have known these tales, for Joseph Scaliger only
retrieved them from Syncellus’ paraphrase of Berossos a century after Annius’ time. But
Annius did have Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and Against Apion.
If Josephus knew anything about Oannes’ teachings, he certainly had no use for them,
and the Bible relates nothing that resembles Xisouthros’ rescue of written culture. However,
Josephus told a story that was remarkably similar to the Babylonian Noah’s exploit, and
could have been partly inspired by it. According to Josephus, Adam’s third son Seth was
both righteous and learned, and passed these traits on to his offspring. The sons of Seth dis­
covered astronomy – that quintessentially Babylonian discipline. Josephus went on to relate
that the Sethians recorded their discoveries on two pillars or stelae, one of stone and one of
brick. This they did because Adam had predicted that the world would be destroyed twice,
once by a flood, and once by a conflagration. Josephus may have been inspired by the second-
century BCE Book of Jubilees, which attributed the astronomical discovery to Enoch, reflect-
ing Enoch-legends now surviving in the Ge’ez or Ethiopic redaction of the Book of Enoch.21

20 Stephens 1979, 176–94; Stephens 2004, S212–13; Collins 2000, 62.

21 Josephus, 2001, 33n.; Jubilees 4:17 (Charlesworth, 2.62); 1 Enoch chaps. 81–2 (Charlesworth 1.59–60);
cf. 2 Enoch chap. 40 (Charlesworth 1.164–7).
284 Walter Stephens

Whatever Josephus’ exact inspiration, his anecdote about the Sethians and their col-
umns was one of the most often repeated tales of the Middle Ages and Early Modern per­
iod. According to Hans Schreckenberg, Josephus’ anecdote was first given prominence
in the West by Isidore of Seville in his early seventh-century world chronicle, and both
Schreckenberg and Cora Lutz have traced variants of it in practically all the important uni-
versal chronicles, both Greek and Latin, right down to Werner Rolewinck’s and Hartmann
Schedel’s late fifteenth-century printed bestsellers. It is without doubt an inspiration for
eighteenth-century Masonic legends about the twin columns of Enoch and the columns
outside the Temple of Solomon, and I have found it discussed with great seriousness as late
as 1852, in an illustrated history of the world.22
As one would expect, a legend with such staying power underwent several transforma-
tions over the centuries. The most bizarre variant was probably initiated by Petrus Comestor,
in his twelfth-century chronicle, the Historia Scholastica. According to Peter the Eater,
Noah’s son Ham, also known as Zoroaster for his invention of magic, transcribed the seven
liberal arts onto seven columns of brick and seven of bronze to preserve them from the twin
cataclysms. Josephus’ story was too good for deliberate impostors to ignore, and so when
Peter’s contemporary Godfrey of Viterbo (d. ca. 1196) composed his own universal history,
he changed the story to enhance his own profile as a historian. After finishing his exposition
of events that took place before the Creation of Adam, Godfrey confronted his reader with
a startling catechism. The rubric asks: ‘Who could have known and narrated the things that
happened before the creation of man?’ and Godfrey answered with a versified proclamation:
Adam, ’tis said, formed great columns of brick
And decreed recording on them all events;
From them we copy all our ancient history.23

Like his fellow townsman of three centuries later, Godfrey claimed to have read the works
of Berossos and Manetho, although he stopped short of providing spurious editions of them.
His claim to have read history from Adam’s columnar chronicles should probably be inter-
preted to mean that, as Annius later did, Godfrey combined Josephus’ references to Berossos
with the anecdote of the Sethians’ columns to imagine that historiography was coextensive
with universal history. According to Godfrey, ‘Before the rise of the Hebrews, indeed be-
fore the Flood, from the time of Adam himself, there were historiographers and notaries of
ancient history. Adam was the first of all and wrote down what he knew about the creation
of the world, and left it to his son Seth’. Godfrey dutifully traces this genealogy of historiog-
raphy down to the time of Noah and his sons, and then onward to Abraham the Chaldaean
and Moses the pupil of the Egyptians. Moreover, he proclaims,
According to the annual record books of the ancient kings, there were other Barbarian or
Gentile historiographers, who wrote down in its entirety everything that happened, and left
nothing unrecorded. I will state some of their names here: Mamenot [sic] who made the de-
scription of the Egyptians, Berossos, who excerpted all the writings of the Chaldaeans, Mochus

22 Schreckenberg 1972, esp. 192; Lutz 1956; Stephens 2005, S65–83; Mackey 1996, 44–9; 397–405;
Goodrich 1852, 66–7.
23 ‘Quis potuit scire et narrare illa quae erant ante hominis creationem?’ ‘Fertur Adam longas laterum
formasse columnas, / In quibus et [rerum] statuit describere summas, / A quibus accipimus, si qua vetusta
damus’, Godfrey of Viterbo 1559, 34; Godfrey of Viterbo MS, fol. 19v; iterum in the 1559 verses corrupts
rerum in MS (cf. Mader 1702, 8; Fabricius 1722, 1:14).
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus 285

and Estius [sic] and Jerome the Egyptian: they and many other Barbarian or Gentile historiog­
raphers are in agreement with my histories and chronicles.24

There can be no doubt that Godfrey was the midwife to Annius’ appropriation of Josephus’
historiographic program. Both of them adapted the Jewish patriot’s implied history of writ-
ing as well as his program of corroborating the Mosaic account of primeval history; both
went far beyond Josephus to claim Adamic authority for their revolutionary revelations about
the supposed truth of history. And both made Berossos central to the transmission of pri-
meval chronicles.
Annius took Godfrey’s revisionary fervour much further, of course, but he revealed his
dependence on Godfrey in his account of the filiation between Adam’s diaries and Berossos’
condensation of the Babylonian archives. He combined Josephus’ references to the Sethian
columns and to Berossos with Pliny the Elder’s invocation of Berossos as a witness to the
antiquity of writing, and with the Apostle Jude’s reference to apocalyptic prophecies of
Enoch, and concluded that
Enoch prophesied future [divine] Judgment[s], by means of both flooding and a final confla-
gration. And Flavius Josephus testifies in the first book of the Jewish Antiquities that Enoch
wrote these things on two columns, one of bronze and the other of brick. Thus, more than a
thousand years before the universal Flood, the arts of writing, casting bronze, brick making,
and prophecy were in use.

The upshot of all this was that Annius’ reader should have absolute faith in the startling
revelations of Berossos about ancient history, since they were consonant with both Josephus
and the Bible.
Thus the Hebrew history of antiquity is as similar as can be to the Chaldaean ancient history,
and for that reason Moses is cited as a witness by Maseas [sic] the Phoenician and Hieronymus
of Egypt, as Josephus asserts in the first book of the Jewish Antiquities and in Against Apion
the Grammarian. Therefore it is no wonder if Moses and Berossos are in agreement, for they
drank together from the same Fountain of History.25

This fons historiae was of course the entire complex of antediluvian chronicles careful-
ly safeguarded by the Biblical patriarchs. Even more cynically than his elder compatriot
Godfrey had done, Annius only pretended to follow Josephus’ example by corroborating
the Biblical account of history. Both Viterbese impostors strongly imply that while the Bible
may be an accurate historical account as far as it goes, it is grossly incomplete. Godfrey re-
ferred to Berossos and the rest of Josephus’ barbarian sources as ‘authors who wrote history
24 ‘Ante tempora vero Ebreorum, immo ante diluvium ab ipso Adam sunt antiquitatum notarii et istorio-
grafi. Adam primo loco quae de mundi constitutione cognovit scripsit, et Seth filio suo reliquid [sic].
… Sunt et alii barbari sive gentiles istoriografi, secundum libros annales antiquorum regum, qui omnia
que contigerant integraliter descripserunt, nec aliquid non scriptum reliquerunt; quorum nomina aliqua
hic dicemus: Mamenot [sic] qui descriptionem fecit Egiptiorum, Berosus, qui defloravit omnia scripta
Chaldeorum, Mochus, et Estius, et Ieronimus Egiptius, et alii multi barbari sive gentiles istoriografi
concordant istoriis et cronicis nostris.’ Godfrey of Viterbo 1872, 95–6.
25 Unde cum historia Chaldaica de antiquitatibus quam simillima est Hebraeae, ac propterea Moyses pro
teste adducitur a Masea Phoenice et Hieronymo Aegyptio, ut asserit Iosephus contra Appionem gram-
maticum et in primo De Antiquitate Iudaica. Non est igitur mirum si Moyses et Berosus conveniunt, qui
ex eodem fonte historiae combiberunt, 1515 fols. 105v–6r.
286 Walter Stephens

more amply than Moses and the other holy fathers’. Annius dared to show just how incom-
plete the Bible’s historiography was by forging those more ample accounts.
I would not imagine that scholars of the historical Berossos have an abiding interest in
the details of pseudo-Berossos and his fortunate reception, but I would expect you to agree
that Viterbian impostures are evidence of the old Chaldaean’s subterranean influence on
Western ideas about history, writing, and indeed, power. I will close with a final ironic twist.
Between 1531 and 1572, the world chronicle written by an obscure Lutheran astrologer was
appropriated and vastly expanded by Martin Luther’s education expert Philipp Melanchthon
and later by Melanchthon’s son-in-law Caspar Peucer. In its original German vernacular,
the little Chronicon Carionis declared that ‘Josephus says that Adam and Seth made two
tables [Tafeln], one of terra cotta and one of stone’. To Josephus’ assertion that the two stelae­
contained astrological and calendrical lore, the Chronicon added the claim that Adam and
Seth wrote ‘God’s Word and Prophecies, and that God’s Word would be fulfilled’. This
embellishment, which may have owed something to Annius’ fiction of Adamic chronicles,
was clearly intended to supplement the Lutheran notion of sola Scriptura, the idea that the
Bible contained all knowledge necessary for salvation. Improving on Luther’s watchword,
the Chronicon also implied that only the Bible was necessary for a knowledge of history, an
idea that it contradicted by its very existence.
Over the ensuing decades, Melanchthon and Peucer improved upon the Chronicon’s an-
ecdote until it read as follows:
Josephus writes that Adam set up two stone tablets, onto which he wrote the beginning of crea-
tion, the Fall of man, and the promise [of the Redemption]. I think those tablets were like a sort
of temple, and the sign of a certain place where Adam was wont to convoke his Church, where
sacrifices were made and doctrines recited. There the voice of the promise was a testimony
distinguishing the true Church from the assembly of Cain, who broke away from his father and
created his own rites and sect. Thus right from the beginning a part of the human race deserted
the true Church and forgot the promise …26

Like Josephus, Melanchthon and Peucer no doubt felt that the history of the world was a
footnote to their own religion. More important, like Berossos himself, and like the impos-
tors from Viterbo, the two Lutherans assumed that the history of writing was necessarily
coextensive with the history of the world, that all worthwhile human knowledge had been
available from the beginning, and that one or more providential gods was standing by to en-
sure that writing would continue to guarantee the survival of culture, civilization, and hope.
It seems likely that the Pseudo-Berossos has thus far received far more commentary and
interpretation than the real one will ever inspire. Between 1500 and 1900, and indeed, on
into the 1960’s and 1970’s, dozens of commentaries and adaptations of ‘Berosus Chaldaeus’
were printed, mostly for patriotic or religious ends, and it was cited, mostly for the same
reasons, in thousands of printed and manuscript works. A few systematic refutations and

26 Scribit etiam Josephus, Adam duas lapideas tabulas collocasse, in quibus scripsit initia creationis, lap-
sum hominum, et promissionem. Has tabulas existimo tanquam templum fuisse, et certi loci signum, in
quem solitus est convocare suam Ecclesiam, et ubi sacrificia facta sunt, et recitata doctrina. Fuitque vox
promissionis testimonium discernans veram Ecclesiam a coetu Cain, qui secesserat a patre, et habuit
suos ritus et suam sectam. Ita statim initio verae doctrinae vocem et veram Ecclesiam pars humani
generis deseruit, et promissionem oblita est … The development can be followed in Carion 1534, sig.
B2v; Carion 1543, fol. 10r–v; Carion / Melanchthon / Peucer 1580, 17.
 From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus 287

hundreds of dismissive or sarcastic comments, in both scholarship and fiction, rounded out
the considerable fortune of this complex and ingenious forgery.27

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