Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

125 страница из 236

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