Berossus & Manetho · a new plain-English translation from the original language
F7. For the same Alexander says, following the writing of the Chaldeans, passing again from the ninth king Ardatos (properly Otiartes) to the tenth, called among them Xisouthros, thus: 'On the death of Ardatos his son Xisouthros reigned eighteen saroi. In his time a great flood took place; and the account of it stands written thus. (2) Kronos appeared to him in his sleep and said that on the fifteenth of the month Daisios mankind would be destroyed by a flood. He commanded him, therefore, to dig a hiding-place and deposit the beginnings and middles and ends of all writings in Sispara, the city of the sun; and to build a boat and go aboard with his kinsmen and closest friends; to stow food in it, and when he had made all ready, to sail. If he were asked where he was sailing, he was to say: to the gods, to pray that good things come to mankind. (3) He did not disobey, but built a boat five stades in length and two stades in breadth, gathered together everything as ordered, and put aboard his wife and children and closest friends. (4) When the flood had come, and as soon as it ceased, Xisouthros released some of the birds. Finding neither food nor a place to settle, they came back to the ship. After some days Xisouthros again released the birds, and these came back to the ship with their feet muddied. Released a third time, they came to the ship no more. Then Xisouthros understood that land had appeared; and tearing open part of the ship's seams and seeing that the ship had run aground on a certain mountain, he went out with his wife and his daughter and the pilot, did reverence to the earth, set up an altar, sacrificed to the gods, and — together with those who had gone out of the ship with him — vanished. (5) When those who had stayed in the ship saw that Xisouthros and his company did not come back in, they went out and searched for him, calling him by name. Xisouthros himself was seen by them no more; but a voice came out of the air commanding that they must be god-fearing, for it was because of his piety that he had gone to dwell with the gods; and his wife and his daughter and the pilot shared the same honor. (6) And the voice told them that they would come again to Babylon, and that it was fated for them to take up the writings from Sispara and hand them down to mankind; and that the place where they were was the land of Armenia. Hearing this, they sacrificed to the gods and made their way on foot to Babylon. (7) Of this ship, which came to rest in Armenia, some part still remains in the Kordyaean mountains of Armenia; and some people scrape off asphalt from the ship and carry it away, and use it for warding off evils. So these people came to Babylon, dug up the writings from Sispara, founded many cities, established temples anew, and rebuilt Babylon.' So much stands set forth from Alexander Polyhistor, as from Berossus, that teller of Chaldean falsehoods.
F10. From Alexander Polyhistor, on the building of the tower: 'The Sibyl says that when all mankind spoke one language, some of them built an enormous tower, so as to climb up into heaven; but God blew winds upon it and overturned them, and gave each his own language — for which reason the city was called Babylon. And after the flood came Titan and Prometheus.' So much on the building of the tower from Alexander, who himself also testifies that Babylon was named from the confusion — the city fabled among them to have held kingship many tens of thousands of years before.
F11a. From Nabonasaros onward the Chaldeans fixed with precision the times of the movement of the stars, and from the Chaldeans the mathematicians among the Greeks took them over — since, as Alexander and Berossus say, who have compassed the Chaldean antiquities, Nabonasaros gathered up the deeds of the kings before him and destroyed them, so that the reckoning of the Chaldean kings begins from himself.