Gerald Verbrugghe

Reading the fragments and testimonies of Berossos and Manetho one can hardly avoid a certain melancholy at what has been lost.

It's interesting to note that while the cases of Berossos and Manetho are in many important ways parallel - both were hellenized native priests who used local written traditions (largely ignored by Greek writers) to write Greek-style histories of their native countries, and both those histories have come down to us only in fragments - the historiographical fates of their work are quite different. Berossos' is effectively a curiosity, with little impact on how we understand Babylonian history. Manetho's still provides the framework for Egyptian chronology and it appears we owe the very word "dynasty" to him.… (meer)