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

128 страница из 236

 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.

[He reports that] this god cut off his own head, and that the other gods used the spilled blood to moisten the earth and form human beings. And that is the reason, he says, why humans are thinking beings and partake in the divine mind.

There are uncertainties about the transmitted text of this passage – did Bel really cut off his own head according to Berossos? (Haubold 2013b: 40–41) – but there can be no doubt about its overall meaning: for Berossos, in contrast with his Babylonian source text, the point of human creation was to make us like the gods. The idea would not have been alien to a Babylonian reader: in fact, it can be spun out of Babylonian creation accounts with relative ease. We may think, for example, of the Poem of the Flood and its play on the Akkadian terms ṭēmu and eṭemmu: man has understanding (Akk. ṭēmu) because he was formed from a god who possessed this quality. The god’s flesh also endows us with a spirit (Akk. eṭemmu), which serves as a memento of the creation process (OB Atra-ḫasīs I.223–30). Berossos, then, is not making a radical break with Babylonian tradition when he emphasizes the divine origins of humankind, but he does deviate from his main source in such a way as to make it conform with Greek philosophy and its project of raising man to a higher state of being. These are subtle manipulations, and they certainly do not amount to a wholesale rewriting of Babylonian myth in a Greek key. Rather, Berossos identifies and draws out convergences between the two cultures and their respective literatures. His perceptiveness in identifying such areas of convergence, and his ability to articulate them, can make reading his work a stimulating experience, despite its poor state of preservation.