Berossus & Manetho · a new plain-English translation from the original language
F1. (From Alexander Polyhistor, concerning the ten kings of the Chaldeans who reigned before the flood, and the flood itself, and concerning Noah and the ark — in which he also relates, along the way, certain monstrous things as written by Berossus.) 1. Berossus, in the first book of his Babyloniaca, says that he lived in the time of Alexander son of Philip; and that records of many things were preserved at Babylon with great care, covering a span of somewhere above one hundred and fifty thousand years; and that these records contained histories of the heaven and the sea, of the first birth of things, of the kings, and of their deeds. 2. And first he says that the land of the Babylonians lies between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates; that it bears wild wheat and barley and chickpea and sesame, and that the roots growing in its marshes are eaten — they are called gongai, and these roots are the equal of barley. There are date-palms too, and apples, and the other tree-fruits, and fish, and birds of the field and of the marsh. Its parts toward Arabia are waterless and barren, while those lying opposite Arabia are mountainous and barren. In Babylon there was a great crowd of people of foreign stock who had settled Chaldea, and they lived without order, like the beasts. 3. In the first year there appeared out of the Erythraean Sea, at the place where it borders Babylonia, a creature without reason(?) named Oannes — just as Apollodorus also recorded — having the whole body of a fish, but beneath the fish's head another head grown alongside it, and feet like a man's grown out from the fish's tail; and it had a human voice. And its image is preserved even to this day. This creature, he says, would pass the day among men, taking no food, and would hand over to men the knowledge of letters and sciences and crafts of every kind, and teach the founding of cities, the establishment of temples, the introduction of laws, and geometry, and show them seeds and the gathering of fruits — in short, it delivered to men everything that belongs to the taming of life. And from that time nothing further has been discovered. And when the sun set, this creature Oannes would sink back into the sea and spend the nights in the deep; for it was amphibious. Later other creatures like it appeared as well, about which he says he will speak in the record of the kings. And Oannes wrote about birth and government, and gave this account to men. 4. There was a time, he says, in which the whole was darkness and water, and in it monstrous creatures, with forms of strange growth, were brought to life. For men were born with two wings, and some with four wings and two faces; and having one body but two heads, a man's and a woman's, and double genitals, male and female; and other men with the legs and horns of goats, and others with horses' hooves, and others with the hind parts of horses and the fore parts of men — the very form of hippocentaurs. Bulls too were brought forth with human heads, and dogs with four bodies bearing fishes' tails from their hind parts, and horses with dogs' heads, and men likewise, and yet other creatures horse-headed and horse-bodied but finished behind with the tails of fish, and further creatures having the shapes of beasts of every kind. Besides these, fish and reptiles and snakes and many other astonishing creatures, each differing from the others in appearance — whose images are set up in the temple of Belus. Over all these ruled a woman whose name was Homoroka: in Chaldean this is Thalatth, which in Greek is rendered 'sea' [and by the count of its letters, 'moon' — an addition, it seems, of Syncellus]. 5. All things being thus constituted, Belus came up and split the woman down the middle, and made one half of her earth and the other half heaven, and made the creatures in her vanish. And he says this is an allegory of nature: for when the whole was moist and creatures had come to be in it, this god cut off his own head, and the other gods kneaded the blood that flowed out into the earth and formed men — which is why they are rational and share in divine understanding. 6. And Belus, whom they render as Zeus, cutting the darkness through the middle, separated earth and heaven from one another and set the world in order; but the creatures, unable to bear the power of the light, were destroyed. And Belus, seeing a land empty yet fruit-bearing, commanded one of the gods to cut off his own head, knead the earth with the blood that flowed out, and form men, and the beasts able to bear the air. And Belus brought to completion the stars, the sun, the moon, and the five planets. These things, says Alexander Polyhistor, Berossus relates in his first book; and in the second... (see fragment 4).
F1. Berossus, the writer of the Chaldean antiquities, who flourished in the time of Alexander of Macedon, as he says, and who found at Babylon carefully guarded records of many things, spanning somewhere around one hundred and fifty thousand years and a little more, wrote up — with a certain bombast — histories of heaven and earth and sea, of the antiquity of the kings and their deeds, of the situation of the Babylonian land and its fruitfulness, and of certain creatures out of the Erythraean Sea unnatural in form, and other such fabulous matter. [Then:] Wishing to glorify the nation of the Chaldeans and to show it older than all nations, Berossus and those of his line — Alexander called Polyhistor, I mean, and Abydenus — have written these things.
F1. First of all kingdoms, men well known for learning — Alexander Polyhistor, Berossus, Abydenus, and Apollodorus — record that of the Chaldeans; and they first relate 1,058(?) years without a king. For they say that Adam, the first man, led for the span of his life(?), and after him Seth his son for 128 years.