Offprint from

The World of Berossos

Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on The Ancient Near East between Classical and Ancient Oriental Traditions, Hateld College, Durham 7th9th July 2010

Edited by Johannes Haubold, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Robert Rollinger, John Steele

2013 Harrassowitz Verlag . Wiesbaden

From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus: The Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and Their Fortune
Walter Stephens (Johns Hopkins University) The reception history of Berossos Babyloniaca is, to paraphrase the old saw, just one damned contradiction after another. Evidence suggests that it was little appreciated in antiquity, that scant efforts were made to preserve the text, and that it was overshadowed by other accounts of Chaldaean history, especially Ctesias of Cnidus Persica, written a century earlier. Surviving ancient works that quoted or paraphrased Berossos appear to have done so at second or third hand. Moreover, ancient writers created the impression of two Berossoi, or rather of a split authorial personality, half astronomer and half chronicler, although it seems unlikely that he wrote a separate astronomical treatise. Neither his chronicle nor his astronomy was well preserved, and Berossos the historian was particularly ill-served until Joseph Scaliger tracked down the manuscript of Syncellus at the end of the sixteenth century.1 It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that a Latin forgery of Berossos chronicle, published almost a century before Scaliger attempted to reconcile ancient chronologies, had a long and successful publication history and an enormous fortuna, lasting from 1498 to the mid-eighteenth century. Between those dates, many more scholars were familiar with the forgery than with Syncellus excerpts. Stranger yet, there were legions of readers with no Latin or Greek who praised Berossos as one of the most ancient and illustrious historians of all antiquity, on the sole evidence of paraphrases and vernacular translations of the forgery.2 The crowning irony was that classical scholars recognized the forgery as such almost immediately, yet many of them who must have known better continued to invoke it as Gospel truth about ancient history, and to defend it as somehow authentic, long after the forgers ineptitude had become proverbial. The history of the forgery and its reception is both long and bizarrely amusing. While researching in the University of Pisa library in 1976, I found that works by and about the genuine Berossos, such as Paul Schnabels monograph, were catalogued under the forgers name. Six years later, I met and interviewed the last living disciple of the pseudo-Berossos and his forger, a man whose several books on the topic were printed by semi-reputable publishers.3 Both incidents took place in Italy, an appropriate backdrop since the forger was himself an Italian. Known to posterity as Annius of Viterbo or Annius Viterbiensis, Giovanni Nanni was born at Viterbo, the papal summer retreat fifty miles north of Rome, in 1432. At his death in 1502 he had risen through the ranks of the Dominican order to become Master of the Sacred Palace, that is, personal theologian to the Pope and supreme censor of books published in Rome. The story of his career is too long to be recounted here, but can be said to have
1 Verbrugghe/Wickersham 1315, 2731; on Scaliger, Syncellus, Berossos, and Annius, see Grafton 1990, 99123. 2 Stephens 1989, 58184; Stephens 2004. 3 Stephens 2004, S21920.

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begun in earnest when Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI in November of 1492. Beginning the following year, Annius began a systematic program of revising the history of the world, of Italy, and of his hometown, Viterbo. In addition to forging the text of Berossos, he forged ten other texts by ancient authors and provided all eleven with a voluminous commentary, in which he coordinated them with the most authoritative historians of antiquity, both pagan and Judeo-Christian. His corpus of fake histories and commentaries was not published until 1498, but his career as forger had begun much earlier, probably by 1493.4 Between about 1488 and 1493, he concentrated on the interpretation of ancient Etruscan inscriptions, which were abundant around the territory of Viterbo. The ironies thicken here, for he was in a non-trivial sense the inventor of Etruscology, freeing it from its exclusive reliance on a few Greek and Latin texts, and taking it into the field. By 1493, when the newly-elected Borgia Pope came to Viterbo for the first time, Annius had graduated from amateur fieldwork on real artefacts to staging spurious discoveries and interpreting their supposed significance. We may seem to have wandered a long way from the Babyloniaca of Berossos, but in fact, after 1493 Berossos became essential to the bizarre fictions of the mythomaniac from Viterbo. As a Christian, Annius feared that the finite revealed chronology of the Hebrew Bible was being undercut by fifteenth-century Latin translations of hitherto unknown works by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Hermes Trismegistus, defining Egyptian history as many times more ancient5; as a Dominican, he was anxious to defend the supremacy of the Roman Church, which he believed was under siege by heresy and Islam; as a native of Viterbo, he wished to vindicate the antiquity and importance of his hometown. He was particularly offended by the respected antiquarian and geographer Flavio Biondo, who, in his Italia illustrata, had dismissed Viterbo in a single sentence as not very ancient, and therefore neither interesting nor illustrious, a civitas parum vetusta.6 Annius had two serendipitous experiences that inspired his solution to the twin desiderata of religious fealty and local patriotism. Earlier in his career the Dominican order had posted him to Genoa. Annius recounted that while he was serving in the monastery of Santa Maria del Castello, it was visited by two Armenian Dominicans. The visit probably did happen, and historians have identified two likely candidates for Annius visitors, but he made an outlandishly false claim for the encounter. He declared that the two Armenians had presented him the Chaldaica of Berossos in an anonymous Latin translation.7 Annius second formative experience at Genoa is completely hypothetical, but is rendered probable by textual and historical evidence. I believe that during his time in Genoa he must have run across a thirteenth-century chronicle of that city composed by his fellow Dominican Jacobus of Voragine (d. 1298). Jacobus is well known to mediaevalists as the compiler of the Golden Legend, the foremost mediaeval compilation of saints lives. Hagiography is not known for its objectivity; likewise, in the fullest spirit of mediaeval Lokalpatriotismus, Jacobus claimed that Italy had been colonized soon after Noahs Flood
4 Crahay 1983, 2439. 5 Translated by Lorenzo Valla, Poggio Bracciolini, and Marsilio Ficino, respectively; cf. Copenhaver 1992, xlvli; Curran 2007, 51132. 6 Biondo 2005, 110; Annius 1515, fols. 20v1r, 159r and 160r. On the riddle of Vetulonia, see Pallottino 1978, 105 and 117. 7 Crahay 1983, 244; Stephens 2011, 000000. For Chaldaica as an alternative title for the Babyloniaca see De Breucker, this volume, pp.1528.

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by sons of Noahs great-grandson Nimrod. Later, said Jacobus, in the time of Moses, another prince came from the east and reigned over Italy; his name was Janus and he founded Genoa. Janus named the town for himself, Janicula. Later still, when the town grew large, its inhabitants dropped the diminutive and called it Janua.8 Patriotic claims involving Noah were common in the later Middle Ages: early in the thirteenth century, Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) recorded that the Irish claimed Noahs granddaughter as the original colonizer of Ireland.9 The similarities between the Chronicle of Jacobus and the forgeries of Annius are numerous, but Annius introduced three improvements over his predecessors mythology. First, he backdated the story and exaggerated its importance by making Noah himself the original colonizer of Italy, rather than his great-great-grandsons. Moreover, on the basis of a Hebrew word for wine, ian, Annius declared that Janus was Noahs cognomen among all ancient peoples, bestowed in honour of his inventing wine. This identification was to have a great fortune of its own, even among Jewish commentators of the Renaissance.10 Annius third improvement was in many ways more radical. Rather than write a continuous chronicle and merely cite ancient authorities, as Jacobus and other mediaeval patriots had done, Annius presented his reader with eleven forged primary sources, surrounded them with his own meticulous commentary, and left the reader to construct the chronicle from these spurious materials. As I have led you to suspect, Annius principal forged authority was Berossos Babyloniaca. Annius forged the Babyloniaca (or Chaldaica, as he knew it) because, as far as he could tell, it had disappeared sometime in antiquity, like Annius other ten authorities, except for a few quotations and paraphrases preserved by later authors. As far as anyone knew in Annius day, the most abundant traces of Berossos Babyloniaca had been preserved by Flavius Josephus in the Jewish Antiquities and in the work he wrote to defend them, his diatribe Against Apion the Grammarian.11 Josephus inspired Annius revisionist project directly by emphasizing the contrast between Greek and Biblical versions of human history. In both the Antiquities and Against Apion, Josephus had asserted that the Hebrew Bible was the oldest and most authentic historical record, and that its account of Noah, Moses, and other heroes was corroborated by historians who were neither Hebrew nor Greek. Josephus stressed that the Greeks relied on oral records until the time of Homer, whereas the Hebrews and other barbarian peoples, particularly the Chaldaeans, Egyptians, and Phnicians, had kept meticulous written records of their history. In short, Greek mythology was a pathetic, belated oral substitute for barbarian historiography, which was based on carefully protected chains of written, documentary evidence, dating from the earliest times. Annius, who knew little Greek, read Josephus in the Latin translation commissioned by Cassiodorus in the late sixth century.12 The aha moment for Annius came when he understood the importance that Josephus attributed to Berossos as an independent corroborator of stories that Genesis told about Noah and the Flood. All those who wrote histories of nonGreek peoples, said Josephus, record the Great Flood and the ark. Among these is Berossos
8 Jacobus of Voragine 1995, 845, 3423; Cochrane 1981, 612 and n.5 appears to confuse Jacobus Janus with Annius. 9 Stephens 1989, 109 and n.17 (p.370); cf. Mattiangeli 1981, 31921. 10 Jewish Encyclopedia, 6:553 and 9:322; Stephens 1979, 1912 and n.68. 11 Reproduced in Verbrugghe/Wickersham, passim on pp.5164. 12 Scheckenberg 1972, 1045.

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the Chaldaean.13 Although Josephus listed other ancient writers who mentioned Noah, the Chaldaean was his prize exhibit. And so Annius entitled his forgery the Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica, or Berossos epitome of Chaldaean history, modelling his title on the Latin translations reference to Berosus, qui Chaldaica defloravit.14 Inspired by Josephus respect for Berossos, Annius decided to rewrite ancient history at the source, and prove that the GrecoRoman consensus about ancient history had been a malicious forgery. However, if discovering Berossos was Annius aha moment, it was not the origin of his revisionary project. We do not know just when the idea of forging Berossos occurred to Annius, but it must have come after 1493. By that date Annius had begun forging inscriptions, for he stage-managed an excavation of several at Viterbo, witnessed by the newlyelected Alexander VI and the papal Curia in late 1493. But the several reports Annius produced about these epigraphic hoaxes were inspired by Diodorus Siculus rather than Josephus; they starred Isis and Osiris rather than Noah, and connected the history of Viterbo to that of Egypt rather than Chaldaea. Nowhere does Annius mention Berossos in these earlier fictions, and he seems not to have intended linking them directly to Biblical history. Instead, he took advantage of the enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquity that excited humanist scholars in the second half of the fifteenth century, after Poggio Bracciolini and Marsilio Ficino produced their Latin translations of Diodorus and the Corpus Hermeticum. Discovering Berossos did not inspire Annius to discard his earlier pseudo-Egyptian forgeries; instead, he integrated them, often clumsily and usually with significant modifications, into his new and improved, pseudo-Chaldaean and pseudo-Biblical mythologies. In practical terms, this decision made Annius the inventor of scientific forgery: he created a total pseudo-archaeological experience that coordinated forged inscriptions with pseudo nymous texts by means of erudite commentaries. Accordingly, Annius carefully designed his literary forgeries to exploit contradictions, lacunae, and cruxes in the historical records known and respected by his contemporaries. Taken as a whole, Annius multimedia imposture grounded a seamless revisionist narrative that began with Noahs colonization of the Mediterranean basin and proceeded through falsified Chaldaean and Egyptian king-lists untilit reconnected with canonical accounts of Roman history, and ended with Desiderius, the Longobard king routed by Charlemagne in 774. At the centre of this grand historical sweep was little Viterbo. Today the towns population is around 60,000. In Annius day it was far smaller. In fact, although it was still important as a papal property, it had undergone serious decline in the fourteenth century during the so-called Babylonian captivity when the Papacy was removed to Avignon (130877). To construct an illustrious past for the little town, Annius linked Noah, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians to the civilization of the Etruscans. As I mentioned earlier, Annius had an intense interest in Etruscan antiquity, and actually made some important discoveries of a genuine sort.15 From the beginning, Annius focussed his grandiose historical impostures on the Etruscans, but his exploitation of Diodorus, the Hermetica, and Josephus has frequently confused modern critics and historians. One still encounters the assertion that he glorified Chaldaea, presumably because he chose Berossos as the textual anchor of his mythologies.

13 Jewish Antiquities, 1.934 (in Verbrugghe/Wickersham, 51). 14 Josephus 1958, 137. 15 Rowland 1998, 539.

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Nothing could be less true. And his use of Egypt in his epigraphic forgeries has compounded the confusion. Having observed that Josephus invoked Berossos in order to provide independent corroboration of Hebrew history, Annius applied the same strategy to the history of Etruria. But he added an astute twist: in his day Berossos work resembled Etruscan history in that little or nothing was known of either besides fragments preserved by Greek and Roman authors. Thus he decided to propose a rediscovered Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica as the primary source for resurrecting the history of the Etruscans. Annius blamed Graecia mendax, or Mendacious Greece, for the oblivion that had engulfed Etruscan history, and so, for good measure, he attributed Berossos own eclipse to a kind of Greek damnatio memoriae. Josephus inspired these accusations of Annius in the diatribe Against Apion, which he wrote to defend the Jewish Antiquities from Grecophile mockery. Annius not only repeated Josephus claim that Greek mythology and history were erroneous and falsified; he went further and declared that Greek philosophy was actively and deliberately destructive of true religion and authentic culture. Distorting a quotation that Pliny had drawn from Cato the Elder, Annius claimed that the Greek language itself was inimical to truth, being infused with a virus contra veritatem. The Greek version of history, which magnified Greek civilization and ridiculed the achievements of the barbari, was a monstrous lie, constructed over centuries, foisted onto the sturdy but nave Romans, which induced them to abandon and destroy the primeval civilization they had inherited from the Etruscans. The contrary of Greek mendacity was barbarian piety, the common inheritance shared by Etruscans, Chaldaeans, Egyptians, and the early Hebrews. Annius understood this barbara pietas in both the Roman and the Christian senses: it was not mere loyalty to family, race, and cultural tradition, but also a righteous monotheism. Conversely, the Greeks polytheism, like their inveterate mendacity, resulted from their hereditary love of sophistic rhetoric, abstruse logic-chopping, and the prostitution of both for monetary gain.16 Annius was far too well-read to be ignorant that Diodorus, Plato, and countless other Greeks had exalted the civilization of the Egyptians and, to a lesser extent, the Chaldaeans, but he needed a culprit nefarious enough to assume responsibility for the destruction of Etruscan civilization as he imagined it. Conversely, he combined Josephus idealization of Berossos as a beacon of truthful barbarian historiography with the Jewish apologists defence of Hebrew monotheism, and thereby reinvented Berossos as the archetypal pious Chaldee. Annius Berossos was trismegistic: he was not only a historian, but a priest, and consequently a notary-public with a sacred mission. In his commentary on pseudo-Berossos, the forger asserts that
Berossos was by birth a Babylonian and by rank a Chaldaeus, as Josephus informs us in his Against Apion the Grammarian and in the first book of his Jewish Antiquities. Thus he was necessarily a priest, for the Chaldaei held the same rank in their society that the priests held in Egypt, as Diodorus Siculus asserts in his third [sic] book. Hence Berossos was also a public scribe and notary, for no one but priests enjoyed the publicly-sanctioned authority to chronicle events, exploits, and kingsAccordingly, Berossos condensed all of Chaldaean history, and in his capacity as a notary invested with public authority, he also transcribed universal history and ancient occurrences everywhere; he mentioned the floodand explicitly named Noah and his sons, as Josephus asserts in his abovementioned books.17
16 Stephens 1979, 11016. 17 Annius 1515, fol. 104rv.

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The Annian Berossos was too piously loyal to his own culture to agree with the negative accounts of Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar given by the Bible, but his loyalties were otherwise pan-barbarian. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, his Defloratio glorified the Etruscans above all other barbarians. Annius explains that this feature owed nothing to arbitrary partisanship on Berossos part: rather, it derived naturally from the pious Chaldees fidelity to his vocation as documentary historian and scrupulous notary-public. His priestly functions made him the prefect of the temple archives at Babylon, and over time this library had grown to be the storehouse of universal history, resembling both the Ptolemaic library of Alexandria and the archives of the Egyptian priests that Solon visited in the frame-story to the Timaeus. The Babylonian library contained the records of all peoples, so its incomparable manuscript collection naturally included the diaries of the antediluvian patriarchs. These documents recounted how Noah left Armenia in the year 100 after the Flood, and sailed around the Mediterranean, leaving substantial colonies of his prolific descendants on all its shores. In the year 108, Noah sailed up the Tiber and founded the Janiculum, bestowing his vinous nickname on it. Thirty-five years later, Noahs grandson Comerus Gallus, the Biblical Gomer, formally introduced laws and letters to the Ianigenae, who would later be known as Etruscans. A half-century after that, Noahs great-grandson Nimrod founded Babylon or Babel. Pseudo-Berossos loyally asserts that Nimrod was a model ruler, but he admits that Nimrod stole Noahs books before leaving to found Babylon Berossos does not specify whether these were Noahs autographs or mere copies. In either case, Noahs books became the nucleus of the Library of Babylon. By Berossos time, the chronicles and archival documents in Babylons library had become so numerous that reading universal history had become a Sisyphean chore Berossos criticizes their prolixity and so he condensed them into the Defloratio. Sometime there after, the great library was destroyed, and the true history of the Etruscans went into eclipse sometime later, when Berossos Defloratio fell victim to neglect and the elements. Only the Latin translation that was brought to Annius from Armenia seems to have survived, and Annius confided that he did not even know who translated it.18 Annius authorial fictions about Berossos are worthy of Jorge Lus Borges, who indeed seems to have known something about the forger from Viterbo. But despite the grandiose scene-setting, the Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica was so condensed that Annius contempor aries immediately began referring to it as fragments, whether they defended its authenticity or denounced it as a forgery. This misinterpretation was doubtless encouraged by the format Annius chose. He surrounded relatively short segments of pseudo-Berossian text with extremely long and detailed commentaries that cited and quoted an impressive variety of genuine ancient, mediaeval, and Renaissance sources, as well as Annius own bespoke forgeries. On several occasions, printers reproduced the entire contents of pseudo-Berossos on about twenty octavopages in large type, yet when Annius commentary is included, the Defloratios total bulk exceeds eighty densely-printed quarto pages.19 As is evident, Noah was the most important figure in pseudo-Berossos history. He was the first Etruscan, and, equally important, the first pontifex maximus. Thanks to him, there was a continuous succession of pontefices maximi in Rome, from Noahs Etruscans through
18 For all this, see Stephens 1979, 88106; Stephens 1989, 11114; Stephens 2011, 698-702. 19 Comparing Annius 1530 (texts only) to Annius 1515.

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the Romans to the successors of Saint Peter. Among the books that Nimrod stole from Noah were the same libri rituales that the Roman priests eventually inherited from their Etruscan elders. Pseudo-Berossos makes tantalizing references to the ritual books contents, claiming they were essential to the Babylonian priesthood of his day, but unfortunately his holy vows prevent his divulging even the most trivial details. What a loss to the history of monotheism. Annius took great pains to coordinate the text of pseudo-Berossos with the inscriptions he had forged earlier, in his Egyptophile period. Although he was able to sound out inscriptions in the Etruscan alphabet, he did not forge any of his own. Etruscan language came into his project in a less spectacular way, through his claim that it was an older form of the Hebrew language. Not that he knew much about Hebrew. He claimed to have consulted with rabbis in Viterbo regarding individual words, and may have actually done so on a few occasions. But most of his knowledge, or rather his guesswork, came from Saint Jeromes glossaries of Hebrew names in the Bible. By matching Hebrew syllables to Jeromes Latin etymologies of the names, Annius was able to claim knowledge of Hebrew. He then used this pseudo glossia to parse phrases and place-names in Greek, Latin, Italian, and even Croatian, so as to provide Etrusco-Hebraic explanations of their significance. One of his most amusing feats was the transformation of a humble onion-field outside Viterbo into the scene of a primeval wedding-feast starring the Great Mother, by deriving the oniony adjective cipollara from the onomastic Cybellaria.20 Annius pseudo-Hebrew erudition, like his fictionalization of Berossos and the Library of Babylon, derives indirectly from one of the most intriguing features of the genuine Babyloniaca, that is, Berossos history of writing and of historiography. You remember that, according to Berossos, humanity was originally bereft of all skills and lived like animals until the man-fish Oannes rose from the sea to instruct them, and that even afterward, humanity never discovered anything on its own. Berossos Noah-figure Xisouthros safeguarded human culture by burying all the books, the first, the middle, and the last, in the citadel of Sippar, thereby creating the first Renaissance in all of human history when the books were excavated after the flood. Annius could not have known these tales, for Joseph Scaliger only retrieved them from Syncellus paraphrase of Berossos a century after Annius time. But Annius did have Josephus Jewish Antiquities and Against Apion. If Josephus knew anything about Oannes teachings, he certainly had no use for them, and the Bible relates nothing that resembles Xisouthros rescue of written culture. However, Josephus told a story that was remarkably similar to the Babylonian Noahs exploit, and could have been partly inspired by it. According to Josephus, Adams third son Seth was both righteous and learned, and passed these traits on to his offspring. The sons of Seth dis covered astronomy that quintessentially Babylonian discipline. Josephus went on to relate that the Sethians recorded their discoveries on two pillars or stelae, one of stone and one of brick. This they did because Adam had predicted that the world would be destroyed twice, once by a flood, and once by a conflagration. Josephus may have been inspired by the secondcentury BCE Book of Jubilees, which attributed the astronomical discovery to Enoch, reflecting Enoch-legends now surviving in the Geez or Ethiopic redaction of the Book of Enoch.21

20 Stephens 1979, 17694; Stephens 2004, S21213; Collins 2000, 62. 21 Josephus, 2001, 33n.; Jubilees 4:17 (Charlesworth, 2.62); 1 Enoch chaps. 812 (Charlesworth 1.5960); cf. 2 Enoch chap. 40 (Charlesworth 1.1647).

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Whatever Josephus exact inspiration, his anecdote about the Sethians and their columns was one of the most often repeated tales of the Middle Ages and Early Modern per iod. According to Hans Schreckenberg, Josephus anecdote was first given prominence in the West by Isidore of Seville in his early seventh-century world chronicle, and both Schreckenberg and Cora Lutz have traced variants of it in practically all the important universal chronicles, both Greek and Latin, right down to Werner Rolewincks and Hartmann Schedels late fifteenth-century printed bestsellers. It is without doubt an inspiration for eighteenth-century Masonic legends about the twin columns of Enoch and the columns outside the Temple of Solomon, and I have found it discussed with great seriousness as late as 1852, in an illustrated history of the world.22 As one would expect, a legend with such staying power underwent several transformations over the centuries. The most bizarre variant was probably initiated by Petrus Comestor, in his twelfth-century chronicle, the Historia Scholastica. According to Peter the Eater, Noahs son Ham, also known as Zoroaster for his invention of magic, transcribed the seven liberal arts onto seven columns of brick and seven of bronze to preserve them from the twin cataclysms. Josephus story was too good for deliberate impostors to ignore, and so when Peters contemporary Godfrey of Viterbo (d. ca. 1196) composed his own universal history, he changed the story to enhance his own profile as a historian. After finishing his exposition of events that took place before the Creation of Adam, Godfrey confronted his reader with a startling catechism. The rubric asks: Who could have known and narrated the things that happened before the creation of man? and Godfrey answered with a versified proclamation:
Adam, tis said, formed great columns of brick And decreed recording on them all events; From them we copy all our ancient history.23

Like his fellow townsman of three centuries later, Godfrey claimed to have read the works of Berossos and Manetho, although he stopped short of providing spurious editions of them. His claim to have read history from Adams columnar chronicles should probably be interpreted to mean that, as Annius later did, Godfrey combined Josephus references to Berossos with the anecdote of the Sethians columns to imagine that historiography was coextensive with universal history. According to Godfrey, Before the rise of the Hebrews, indeed before the Flood, from the time of Adam himself, there were historiographers and notaries of ancient history. Adam was the first of all and wrote down what he knew about the creation of the world, and left it to his son Seth. Godfrey dutifully traces this genealogy of historiography down to the time of Noah and his sons, and then onward to Abraham the Chaldaean and Moses the pupil of the Egyptians. Moreover, he proclaims,
According to the annual record books of the ancient kings, there were other Barbarian or Gentile historiographers, who wrote down in its entirety everything that happened, and left nothing unrecorded. I will state some of their names here: Mamenot [sic] who made the description of the Egyptians, Berossos, who excerpted all the writings of the Chaldaeans, Mochus
22 Schreckenberg 1972, esp. 192; Lutz 1956; Stephens 2005, S6583; Mackey 1996, 449; 397405; Goodrich 1852, 667. 23 Quis potuit scire et narrare illa quae erant ante hominis creationem? Fertur Adam longas laterum formasse columnas,/In quibus et [rerum] statuit describere summas,/A quibus accipimus, si qua vetusta damus, Godfrey of Viterbo 1559, 34; Godfrey of Viterbo MS, fol. 19v; iterum in the 1559 verses corrupts rerum in MS (cf. Mader 1702, 8; Fabricius 1722, 1:14).

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and Estius [sic] and Jerome the Egyptian: they and many other Barbarian or Gentile historiog raphers are in agreement with my histories and chronicles.24

There can be no doubt that Godfrey was the midwife to Annius appropriation of Josephus historiographic program. Both of them adapted the Jewish patriots implied history of writing as well as his program of corroborating the Mosaic account of primeval history; both went far beyond Josephus to claim Adamic authority for their revolutionary revelations about the supposed truth of history. And both made Berossos central to the transmission of primeval chronicles. Annius took Godfreys revisionary fervour much further, of course, but he revealed his dependence on Godfrey in his account of the filiation between Adams diaries and Berossos condensation of the Babylonian archives. He combined Josephus references to the Sethian columns and to Berossos with Pliny the Elders invocation of Berossos as a witness to the antiquity of writing, and with the Apostle Judes reference to apocalyptic prophecies of Enoch, and concluded that
Enoch prophesied future [divine] Judgment[s], by means of both flooding and a final conflagration. And Flavius Josephus testifies in the first book of the Jewish Antiquities that Enoch wrote these things on two columns, one of bronze and the other of brick. Thus, more than a thousand years before the universal Flood, the arts of writing, casting bronze, brick making, and prophecy were in use.

The upshot of all this was that Annius reader should have absolute faith in the startling revelations of Berossos about ancient history, since they were consonant with both Josephus and the Bible.
Thus the Hebrew history of antiquity is as similar as can be to the Chaldaean ancient history, and for that reason Moses is cited as a witness by Maseas [sic] the Phoenician and Hieronymus of Egypt, as Josephus asserts in the first book of the Jewish Antiquities and in Against Apion the Grammarian. Therefore it is no wonder if Moses and Berossos are in agreement, for they drank together from the same Fountain of History.25

This fons historiae was of course the entire complex of antediluvian chronicles carefully safeguarded by the Biblical patriarchs. Even more cynically than his elder compatriot Godfrey had done, Annius only pretended to follow Josephus example by corroborating the Biblical account of history. Both Viterbese impostors strongly imply that while the Bible may be an accurate historical account as far as it goes, it is grossly incomplete. Godfrey referred to Berossos and the rest of Josephus barbarian sources as authors who wrote history
24 Ante tempora vero Ebreorum, immo ante diluvium ab ipso Adam sunt antiquitatum notarii et istoriografi. Adam primo loco quae de mundi constitutione cognovit scripsit, et Seth filio suo reliquid [sic]. Sunt et alii barbari sive gentiles istoriografi, secundum libros annales antiquorum regum, qui omnia que contigerant integraliter descripserunt, nec aliquid non scriptum reliquerunt; quorum nomina aliqua hic dicemus: Mamenot [sic] qui descriptionem fecit Egiptiorum, Berosus, qui defloravit omnia scripta Chaldeorum, Mochus, et Estius, et Ieronimus Egiptius, et alii multi barbari sive gentiles istoriografi concordant istoriis et cronicis nostris. Godfrey of Viterbo 1872, 956. 25 Unde cum historia Chaldaica de antiquitatibus quam simillima est Hebraeae, ac propterea Moyses pro teste adducitur a Masea Phoenice et Hieronymo Aegyptio, ut asserit Iosephus contra Appionem grammaticum et in primo De Antiquitate Iudaica. Non est igitur mirum si Moyses et Berosus conveniunt, qui ex eodem fonte historiae combiberunt, 1515 fols. 105v6r.

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more amply than Moses and the other holy fathers. Annius dared to show just how incomplete the Bibles historiography was by forging those more ample accounts. I would not imagine that scholars of the historical Berossos have an abiding interest in the details of pseudo-Berossos and his fortunate reception, but I would expect you to agree that Viterbian impostures are evidence of the old Chaldaeans subterranean influence on Western ideas about history, writing, and indeed, power. I will close with a final ironic twist. Between 1531 and 1572, the world chronicle written by an obscure Lutheran astrologer was appropriated and vastly expanded by Martin Luthers education expert Philipp Melanchthon and later by Melanchthons son-in-law Caspar Peucer. In its original German vernacular, the little Chronicon Carionis declared that Josephus says that Adam and Seth made two tables [Tafeln], one of terra cotta and one of stone. To Josephus assertion that the two stelae contained astrological and calendrical lore, the Chronicon added the claim that Adam and Seth wrote Gods Word and Prophecies, and that Gods Word would be fulfilled. This embellishment, which may have owed something to Annius fiction of Adamic chronicles, was clearly intended to supplement the Lutheran notion of sola Scriptura, the idea that the Bible contained all knowledge necessary for salvation. Improving on Luthers watchword, the Chronicon also implied that only the Bible was necessary for a knowledge of history, an idea that it contradicted by its very existence. Over the ensuing decades, Melanchthon and Peucer improved upon the Chronicons anecdote until it read as follows:
Josephus writes that Adam set up two stone tablets, onto which he wrote the beginning of creation, the Fall of man, and the promise [of the Redemption]. I think those tablets were like a sort of temple, and the sign of a certain place where Adam was wont to convoke his Church, where sacrifices were made and doctrines recited. There the voice of the promise was a testimony distinguishing the true Church from the assembly of Cain, who broke away from his father and created his own rites and sect. Thus right from the beginning a part of the human race deserted the true Church and forgot the promise26

Like Josephus, Melanchthon and Peucer no doubt felt that the history of the world was a footnote to their own religion. More important, like Berossos himself, and like the impostors from Viterbo, the two Lutherans assumed that the history of writing was necessarily coextensive with the history of the world, that all worthwhile human knowledge had been available from the beginning, and that one or more providential gods was standing by to ensure that writing would continue to guarantee the survival of culture, civilization, and hope. It seems likely that the Pseudo-Berossos has thus far received far more commentary and interpretation than the real one will ever inspire. Between 1500 and 1900, and indeed, on into the 1960s and 1970s, dozens of commentaries and adaptations of Berosus Chaldaeus were printed, mostly for patriotic or religious ends, and it was cited, mostly for the same reasons, in thousands of printed and manuscript works. A few systematic refutations and
26 Scribit etiam Josephus, Adam duas lapideas tabulas collocasse, in quibus scripsit initia creationis, lapsum hominum, et promissionem. Has tabulas existimo tanquam templum fuisse, et certi loci signum, in quem solitus est convocare suam Ecclesiam, et ubi sacrificia facta sunt, et recitata doctrina. Fuitque vox promissionis testimonium discernans veram Ecclesiam a coetu Cain, qui secesserat a patre, et habuit suos ritus et suam sectam. Ita statim initio verae doctrinae vocem et veram Ecclesiam pars humani generis deseruit, et promissionem oblita est The development can be followed in Carion 1534, sig. B2v; Carion 1543, fol. 10rv; Carion/Melanchthon/Peucer 1580, 17.

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hundreds of dismissive or sarcastic comments, in both scholarship and fiction, rounded out the considerable fortune of this complex and ingenious forgery.27

References
Asher 1993 R. E. Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France: Francus, Samothes, and the Druids. Edinburgh 1993. Annius 1515 Annius of Viterbo [Giovanni Nanni], Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII a venerando et sacr theologi et prdicatorii ordinis professore Ioanne Annio, Paris 1515. Annius 1530 Annius of Viterbo [Giovanni Nanni], Fragmenta vetustissimorum autorum, summo studio ac diligentia nunc recognita. Basel 1530. Biondo 2005 Flavio Biondo [Biondo Flavio], Italy Illuminated, vol. 1, trans. Jeffrey A. White, Cambridge, MA 2005. Borchardt 1971 Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth, Baltimore 1971. Carion 1534 J. Carion, Chronica dorch D. Johan. Carion/vlitich tosamende getagen/menncichlick ntlick tho lesen, Magdeburg 1534. Carion 1543 J. Carion, Chronicorum libellus, maximas quasque res gestas, ab initio mundi, apto ordine complectens, ita ut annorum ratio, ac praecipuae vicissitudines, quae in regna, in religionem, et in alias res magnas incidunt, quam rectissime cognosci ac observari queant. Autore Ioan. Car., Frankfurt 1543. Carion/Melanchthon/Peucer 1580 J. Carion/P. Melanchthon/C. Peucer, Chronicon Carionis, expositum et auctum multis et veteribus et recentibus historiis, in descriptionibus regnorum et gentium antiquarum, et narrationibus rerum ecclesiasticarum, et politicarum, graecarum, romanarum, germanicarum et aliarum, ab exordio mundi usque ad Carolum Quintum imperatorem, a Philippo Melanthone et Casparo Peucero, Wittenberg 1580. Charlesworth 19835 James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols., Garden City, NJ 19835. Cipriani 1980 Giovanni Cipriani, Il mito etrusco nel rinascimento fiorentino, Florence 1980. Cochrane 1981 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago 1981. Collins 1998 Amanda Collins, The Etruscans in the Renaissance: the sacred destiny of Rome and the Historia Viginti Saeculorum of Giles of Viterbo (c.14691532), Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 64 (1998), 33765. Collins 2000 Amanda Collins, Renaissance epigraphy and its legitimizing potential: Annius of Viterbo, Etruscan inscriptions, and the origins of civilization, in: Alison Cooley (ed.), The Afterlife of Inscriptions, (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 75), London 2000, 5776.
27 Stephens 2004, S20213; Asher 1993; Borchardt 1971; Cipriani 1980; Collins 1998; Collins 2000; Rowland 1998, 539.

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Copenhaver 1992 Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction, Cambridge 1992. Crahay 1983 Roland Crahay Rflexions sur le faux historique: le cas dAnnius de Viterbe, Acadmie Royale de Belgique, Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 5e srie, 69 (1983), 24167. Curran 2007 Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy, Chicago 2007. Fabricius 1722 Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, collectus, castigatus, testimoniis que, censuris et animadversionibus illustratus, 2nd ed., 2 vols., Hamburg 1722. Godfrey of Viterbo MS Oxford University, Bodleian Library MS Lat. hist. c. 1. Godfrey of Viterbo 1559 Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, sive universitatis libri, qui chronici appellantur, XX, Omnes omnium seculorum et gentium, tam sacras quam prophanas Historias complectentes: Per V. C. Gotto fri dum Viterbiensem, Basel 1559. Godfrey of Viterbo 1872 Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, ed. Georg Waitz (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum, ed. G. H. Pertz, vol. 22), Hannover 1872. Goodrich 1852 S. G. Goodrich, History of All Nations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time, Cincinnati 1852. Grafton 1990 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, Princeton 1990. Jacobus of Voragine 1995 Iacopo da Varagine, Cronaca della citt di Genova dalle origini al 1297, ed. Stefania Bertini Guidetti, Genoa 1995. Jewish Encyclopedia The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidore Singer et al., 12 vols., New York 19016. Josephus 1958 The Latin Josephus, ed. Franz Blatt (Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet 30.1, Humanistisk Serie, no.44), Copenhagen 1958. Josephus 1997 Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, in Josephus, with an English Translation, vol. 1 of 10 vols., Cambridge, MA and London 1997 (1926). Josephus 2001 Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Books IIII, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, in Josephus, with an English Translation, vol. 2 of 10 vols., Cambridge, MA and London 2001 (1930). Lutz 1956 Cora E. Lutz, Remigiuss Ideas on the origin of the seven liberal arts, Mediaevalia et Humanistica 10 (1956), 3249. Mackey 1996 Albert Gallatin Mackey, The History of Freemasonry: Its Legendary Origins, New York 1996 (1881). Mader 1702 Joachim Johann Mader, De bibliothecis atque archiviis: virorum clarissimorum libelli et commentationes, ed. Johann Andreas Schmidt, Helmstedt 1702. Mattiangeli 1981 Paola Mattiangeli, Annio da Viterbo ispiratore di cicli pittorici, in: Massimo Pallottino (ed.), Annio da Viterbo: documenti e ricerche, Rome 1981, 257342.

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Pallottino 1978 Massimo Pallottino, The Etruscans, trans. J. Cremona, Harmondsworth and New York 1978 (1975). Rowland 1998 Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in SixteenthCentury Rome, Cambridge 1998. Scheckenberg 1972 Heinz Scheckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter, Leiden 1972. Stephens 1979 Walter Stephens, Berosus Chaldaeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Cornell University 1979. Stephens 1989 Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism, Lincoln, NE 1989. Stephens 2004 Walter Stephens, When Pope Noah ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his forged Antiquities, 1498, in: Walter Stephens (ed.), Studia Humanitatis: Essays In Honor of Salvatore Camporeale, Special Supplement to MLN Italian Issue, vol. 119, no.1 (2004), S201S223. Stephens 2005 Walter Stephens, Livres de haulte gresse: bibliographic myth from Rabelais to Du Bartas, in: Samuel Junod/Florian Preisig/Frdric Tinguely (eds.), La Littrature engage aux XVIe et XVIIe sicles: tudes en lhonneur de Grard Defaux (19372004), Special Supplement to MLN Italian Issue, vol. 120, no.1 (2005), S60S83. Stephens 2011 Walter Stephens, Complex pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbos multiple persona disorder, in MLN French Issue, vol. 126, no.4, (2011), 689-708. Verbrugghe/Wickersham 1999 Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham, Introduction to Berossos, in: Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Mesopotamia and Egypt (1996) rpt. Ann Arbor 1999, 13-34.