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Berossos’s main work, the Babyloniaca, was a history of the world from a Babylonian perspective. The work itself is lost, but enough fragments survive to give us a good sense of what it was like. Book 1 described the creation of the world, and of man. Book 2 traced a succession of rulers from the first king Alorus down to the historical Nabonassaros/Nabû-naṣir of Babylon in the eighth century BCE. Book 3 focused on the more recent history of Babylon: the Assyrian occupation from Tiglath-Pileser III to Sarakos/Sīn-šarra-iškun; the Neo-Babylonian Empire; and the Persians under Cyrus the Great and his successors. The work seems to have concluded with the conquests of Alexander (Abydenos BNJ 685 F 7; cf. F 1. For the transmission and early reception of the Babyloniaca see De Breucker 2013: 20–23; Madreiter 2013; Schironi 2013). We do not know when and why precisely Berossos composed the Babyloniaca. What we do know is that he dedicated it to a Seleucid king named Antiochus, probably Antiochus I (ruled 281–261 BCE).3 The work is written in Greek and shows clear signs of addressing a Greek readership, despite Berossos’s claim that he drew on native Babylonian sources (BNJ 680 F 1b (1)). Thus, Book 1 opens with an ethnography of Babylon which would not be out of place in Greek historical and ethnographic literature of the time (BNJ 680 F 1b (2)). Also in Book 1, and indeed throughout the work, Berossos translates native Babylonian gods and historical characters into their Greek equivalents.4 In a famous passage in Book 3, he adopts the voice of a Greek historiographer when he criticizes the Greek writers for “lying” about the deeds of the Assyrian queen Semiramis (BNJ 680 F 8a). Given these decidedly Greek gestures, it is not surprising that Berossos was at one point suspected of being a Greek impostor (Ruffing 2013: 292), who had invented his Babylonian sources just like the fraudster Annius of Viterbo would later fake fragments of Berossos’s own work (Stephens 2013).