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Updated: June 15, 2025
Associated with Apsu and Tiâmat in council, is a being Mummu, and since Damascius expressly notes on the direct authority of Berosus that Apsu and Tiâmat produced a son Moumis, there is every reason to believe that Mummu represents this offspring. In the subsequent narrative, however, neither Apsu nor Mummu play any part.
These dates are not indeed to be accepted without reserve; but they are approximate to the truth, and are, at any rate, greatly preferable to those of Ctesias. The chronology of Berosus was, apparently, not very different from that of Herodotus.
Nay, if forty-nine ruled between B.C. 2004 and B.C. 1546, covering a space of little more than four centuries and a half which is what Berosus is made to assert these later monarchs cannot even have reigned so long as ten years each, an average which may be pronounced quite impossible in a settled monarchy such as the Chaldaean.
For the period anterior to this we have, in the Assyrian records, one or two isolated dates, dates fixed in later times with more or less of exactness; and of these we might have been inclined to think little, but that they harmonize remarkably with the statements of Berosus and Herodotus, which place the commencement of the Empire about B.C. 1300, or a little later.
How much of the history dealt with the religion of the people, it is difficult to determine, but the extracts of it found in various writers show that starting, like the Old Testament, with the beginning of things, Berosus gave a full account of the cosmogony of the Babylonians.
Upon which words Hezekiah was troubled, and said that he was himself unwilling that his nation should fall into such calamities; yet since it is not possible to alter what God had determined, he prayed that there might be peace while he lived. Berosus also makes mention of this Baladan, king of Babylon.
It is proposed therefore, in the present volumes, to accept the general scheme of Berosus as, in all probability, not seriously in error; and to arrange the Chaldaean, Assyrian, and Babylonian history on the framework which it furnishes. Chaldaean history may therefore be regarded as opening upon us at a time anterior, at any rate by a century or two, to B.C. 2286.
Berosus declared that six dynasties had reigned in Chaldaea since the great flood of Xisuthrus, or Noah. To the first, which consisted of 86 kings, he allowed the extravagant period of 34,080 years. Evechous, the founder of the dynasty, had enjoyed the royal dignity for 2400 years, and Chomasbelus, his son and successor, had reigned 300 years longer than his father.
The story of Noah and the flood has a very close parallel in a record of Berosus, the Babylonian priest Xisuthros had a dream in which the deity announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge of water, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a ship, provide it with ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind.
From the use of the gnomon there naturally grew up the conception of angular measurements; and with the advance of geometrical conceptions there came the hemisphere of Berosus, the equinoctial armil, the solstitial armil, and the quadrant of Ptolemy all of them employing shadows as indices of the sun's position, but in combination with angular divisions.
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