Babyloniaca (Berossus)

The Babyloniaca (Koine Greek: Βαβυλωνιακά, Babyloniaka, "History of Babylonia") is a history of the Babylonian civilization, written as three books. It was written in Greek during the Hellenistic period around 281 BCE, by the historian and Babylonian priest, Berossus, in dedication to the ascent of Antiochus I Soter to the throne of the Seleucid Empire.

The first book describes the beginning of Babylonian civilization, geography, and cosmology (a version that resembles the cosmology of the famous creation myth Enūma Eliš), and explains the transition of mankind before and after the revelation of divine law. The second book focuses on the genealogy of Babylon, starting with the antediluvian kings down to Nabu-Naṣir in 747 BCE, and presents an account of the Mesopotamian flood myth. The third book covered the recent history of Babylonia from Nabu-Naṣir to Alexander the Great.

Although the work is now lost in its original form, it survives in substantial fragments from quotations of subsequent ancient authors, especially in the works of the first-century BCE Greco-Roman scholar Alexander Polyhistor and fourth-century CE Christian author and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, and was known to a limited extent in learned circles in late antiquity. As a result, the Babyloniaca is known largely from third and fourth hand quotations. Substantial sections, including one on the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, are also preserved in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, especially in his Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion.

Until the rediscovery and decipherment of cuneiform texts in the 19th century, fragments of the Babyloniaca were the only genuine surviving literary material from Mesopotamian civilization.