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BEROSUS, or the son of Osea, was a priest of Bel in Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great, who wrote in Greek the history of Babylon, about 260 B.C. The history of Berosus gave an elaborate system of early and fabulous chronology; and he seems to have had access to old Babylonian, Chaldean, and Jewish sources. There are marked coincidences between his views and those of the Hebrew Bible, especially as to the Flood. The work is lost; but fragments have been preserved by Josephus and the Christian Fathers, who made much use of his compilation. It was apparently founded on old cuneiform texts.
But the place here assigned to Berosus is due not so much to his historical and chronological labours, of which little positive can be made, as to his work on astronomy. He is mentioned as one of the earliest astronomers by Vitruvius, Seneca, and Pliny. We are told that he became entirely Hellenized, passed into Greece, where he opened a school in the island of Cos, and had a statue erected to him at Athens, in honour of his extraordinary astronomical predictions. Pliny tells us that his works contained astronomical observations for 480 years, the computation of which possibly began at Babylon in the time of Nabonassar (747 B.C.). It is said that Alexander sent over to Aristotle rough records of eclipses recorded at Babylon for 1903 years.
There were undoubtedly very ancient astronomical records of the phenomena of the heavens kept regularly at Babylon, which, through Berosus, Ptolemy and others, were of immense service to subsequent astronomers. Berosus, we are told, maintained that the moon's rotation on her axis was of the same length as her synodical revolution (i.e. her revolution with respect to the sun): it is, in fact, equal to her sidereal revolution (i.e. with respect to the fixed stars). Vitruvius also attributes to Berosus the invention of a hemispherical dial--hemicyclium excavatum ex quadrato--which may mean an instrument for taking the sun's altitude at noon. The Babylonians also had in use the gnomon for measuring solstices, and the astronomical water-clock.
Fabulous stories gathered round the name of Berosus, who has been placed in very fanciful epochs; but there is no reason to suppose more than one, the astronomer of the age of Alexander and his successors. Little as we know of him or of his works, Berosus serves to represent the long series of Chaldean observers on whose continuous labours the early growth of astronomy and of chronology was based.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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