The case for interpolation, however, is weak. Nebuchadnezzar’s Iranian wife Amyitis is mentioned elsewhere in the Babyloniaca (BNJ 680 F 7d), which makes it difficult to remove her and her garden from Berossos’s account of Nebuchadnezzar’s building works. Moreover, Josephus, who quotes the decisive passage, had no obvious interest in connecting Nebuchadnezzar with the Hanging Garden. Stephanie Dalley therefore introduces an unknown intermediary whom she thinks responsible for the interpolation (Dalley 2013a: 36). However, we have no evidence that such a figure ever existed. In order to tackle the issue of the Hanging Garden, and indeed other issues of interpretation, we need to broaden the framework of analysis, and ask how Berossos operated.
The Greek historians Herodotus and Ctesias cast world history as a succession of three major empires, those of the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians (Haubold 2013a: 78–98). This scheme became popular among Greek readers, thanks in large measure to the success of Ctesias’s Persica. One consequence was that the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar disappeared from the historical record: it did not feature in Herodotus or Ctesias, and classical Greeks were hardly aware of it. For Berossos that was a problem, as indeed it was for his Seleucid patrons: we know that the Seleucid kings claimed Nebuchadnezzar as an important forerunner.5 The work of introducing him to the Greeks had started as soon as the empire was formed, with the Greek historian Megasthenes (BNJ 715 F 1a). However, it was Berossos who properly established Nebuchadnezzar in the Greek historical imagination, and in so doing replaced the inherited succession of Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, with the sequence Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. And this is where Queen Amyitis and her Hanging Garden becomes important.
In Ctesias, the Iranian princess Amytis, daughter of Astyages, secures the transition from the Median to the Persian world empire. She marries Cyrus, reconciles him with her father, and secures the eastern half of his empire for him (Haubold 2013a: 174–176). This powerful woman reappears in Berossos’s account as the wife of Nebuchadnezzar and recipient of the Hanging Garden. The point of the reshuffle seems clear: by marrying Amyitis just before the sack of Nineveh, Nebuchadnezzar becomes the legitimate heir of the Assyrian Empire, replacing the Medes, or rather incorporating them into his realm. Berossos overwrites the Ctesianic myth of a succession of empires while preserving some of its constituent parts. Moreover, he feeds Greek fantasies about Babylon as a source of oriental wonders, and advertises Nebuchadnezzar as a suitably romantic role model for the Seleucid kings. The legend of an Assyrian king presenting his Iranian wife with a special garden was probably older than Berossos, and seems to have been popular with the Alexander historians (Bichler and Rollinger 2005; Rollinger 2013: 151; Haubold 2013a: 173–174). By attaching it to Nebuchadnezzar, Berossos secured a central place for him in the Greek imagination: from now on, Nebuchadnezzar was not just a great conqueror king but also a devoted husband. Like his Seleucid patrons, he combined world rule with domestic romance. The story of the Hanging Garden thus illustrates how Berossos combined Greek and Mesopotamian historical registers to connect to, and educate, his Greek readers. Far from betraying the hand of an interpolator, it illustrates his approach throughout the Babyloniaca.
Equally instructive is his account of Cyrus the Great, slightly later in Book 3. Cyrus had long served as a model ruler in the Greek imagination, but Berossos’s assessment is interestingly double-edged. On the one hand, he calls Cyrus philanthropos “a friend of humankind” (BNJ 680 F 9a (151)), in the tradition of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (Due 1989: 163–170; Gera 1993: 183–184). On the other hand, Berossos points out that Cyrus razed the outer walls of Babylon to make the city “less difficult to conquer” (BNJ 680 F 9a (152)). This detail not only jars with the claims of the historical Cyrus but also implies a damning indictment from a Babylonian perspective (Haubold 2013a: 164). For illustration, we may consider the so-called Akītu Program, a Hellenistic text which describes the rituals that were performed at the Babylonian New Year’s festival. At one point during the festivities, the king came before the god Bel to make the following declaration (Linssen 2004: 223, lines 423–428):
[ul aḫ]-ṭu EN KUR.KUR ul e-gi ana DINGIR-ti-ku
[ul ú-ḫa-a]l-liq Eki ul aq-ta-bi BIR-šú
[ul ú-ri]b-bi É.SAG.GÍL ul ú-ma-áš-<ši> ME-šú
[ul am-da]ḫ-ḫa-aṣ TE lúṣab-bi ki-din-nu
...[ul] áš-kun qa-lal-šú-nu
[ú-pa-a]q ana Eki ul a-bu-ut šal-ḫu-šú
[I have not sin]ned, lord of the lands, I have not neglected your godhead.
[I have not dest]royed Babylon, I have not ordered it to be dispersed.
[I have not made] Esagila tremble, I have not forgotten its rites.
[I have not st]ruck the people of the kidinnu in the face.
[…] I have [not] humiliated them.
[I have paid attenti]on to Babylon, I have not destroyed its (outer) walls.
At the New Year’s festival, the Babylonians confirmed their king in office, provided he accounted for his past actions, and renewed his commitment toward the city, its élites, and its major buildings. Acording to Berossos, Cyrus would not have passed this test. By destroying the city’s outer walls he did what no Babylonian king should do, his acknowledged capacity for philanthropia notwithstanding. Here, as already in his account of the Hanging Garden, Berossos mixes Greek and Babylonian registers to achieve a strikingly didactic effect: his work taught King Antiochus and his Seleucid Greek élites where to look for positive role models but also how to learn from past failures. For that, Berossos relied on bona fide Mesopotamian sources, but he could do so effectively only because he knew how to manipulate the relevant Greek cultural codes.
This last point is confirmed in Book 1 of the Babyloniaca, where Berossos establishes his credentials as a Chaldaean sage and conveyor of barbarian wisdom. As I have argued elsewhere, Berossos turns his account of Babylonian cosmogony in Babyloniaca Book 1 into a piece of Greek philosophical speculation (Haubold 2013a: 148–153, 2013b). In his paraphrase, the standard Babylonian creation account reads strikingly like contemporary Greek physics, with Tiamat playing the part of passive and malleable matter that is pervaded and shaped by a creator god. In order to develop this reading of his source text, Berossos makes use of allegory as a popular tool in Greek philosophy.
Almost equally telling for Berossos’s self-portrayal as a barbarian sage is his account of human creation. The relevant passage of the Babyloniaca has suffered corruption, but we can say with some confidence that here too Berossos changed the emphasis of his source text. This is what the Epic of Creation had to say (VI.7–8 (Lambert)):
lu-ub-ni-ma lullâ(lú-u18-lu-a). a-me-lu
lu-ú en-du dul-lu ilānī-ma šu-nu lu-ú pa-áš-ḫu
Let me create mankind,
they shall bear the gods’ burden so that the gods themselves may be at rest.
The speaker in this passage is the god Bel, who advertises to his fellow gods his decision to create mankind. Bel promises to free the gods from the chores of an earthly existence, a standard motif in Babylonian epic. The emphasis is on separating gods from humans, and on putting each group in its rightful place. Berossos adopts a different approach (BNJ 680 F 1b (7)):
τοῦτον τὸν θεὸν ἀφελεῖν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ κεφαλήν, καὶ τὸ ῥυὲν αἷμα τοὺς ἄλλους θεοὺς φυρᾶσαι τῆι γῆι, καὶ διαπλάσαι τοὺς ἀνθρώπους· δι᾽ ὃ νοερούς τε εἶναι, καὶ φρονήσεως θείας μετέχειν.
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