30 The New York Review
both present and future time: it closed
off the past.
To illustrate the rupture Kosmin
shows that the Akkadian cunei-
form “Uruk List of Kings and Sages”
abruptly terminated its list of named
kings. Their names had been paired
from the beginning with a sage or
scholar until the Seleucid period. But
then comes the Greek name Nicarchus,
probably given by the Seleucid king An-
tiochus II to a governor of Uruk, and
this name appears without an associ-
ated scholar or sage. Thereby, Kosmin
observes, “a millennia-long paradigm
of Babylonian history” is undone.
Also, in Babylonia, an early-third-
century priest called Berossus, who
knew cuneiform and wrote in Greek,
composed a history of the world from
the creation down to his own time.
Although his work, known as Baby-
loniaca, has been lost, it was read,
excerpted, and summarized in the cen-
turies that followed, so that it is possi-
ble to see what Berossus recorded. The
first of his three books included a Bab-
ylonian account of genesis, narrated by
a primeval sage called Oannes, who is
said to have told the story after emerg-
ing from the waters of the Persian Gulf,
where he had dwelled because he was
part fish and part man. Equipped with
a human voice, which conveniently al-
lowed him to tell his story, he produced
an account that bears a close resem-
blance to the creation narrative in the
great Babylonian epic Enuma Elish.
Oannes’ revelations extended from the
great flood to the days of an unidenti-
fied but early Seleucid king in the third
century BCE.
Berossus’s account of a certain Na-
bonassar in the eighth century BCE
suggests knowledge of the calendar
that Seleucus introduced: “Nabonas-
sar collected and destroyed the deeds
of the kings who preceded him in order
that the enumeration of the kings of
the Chaldeans [i.e., Babylonians] start
f rom h i m.” It is tempti ng to see here the
impact of Seleucus’s erasure of the past
through his own new era. Because the
Seleucids had ensured that the count
of years would go inexorably forward
after his death, the pre-Seleucid cen-
turies had gradually disappeared into a
distant past for all those affected by the
new regime. These were Arabs, Jews,
Persians, Macedonians, and Greeks.
Perhaps in response to the temporal
break these cultures began producing
texts of their own that sought to bring
their histories into the present, estab-
lishing links with a past that might oth-
erwise have been cut off.
The Jews in Judaea, who became sub-
ject to Seleucid rule at the beginning
of the second century BCE, had been
there long before, as they knew from
the Bible, including the Pentateuch and
the Prophets, as well as other writings
from Jewish antiquity. By far the lat-
est biblical book is Daniel, from the
first half of the second century BCE. It
memorably evokes a pre- Seleucid past
by a significant turn to apocalyptic
narrative, or what Kosmin also calls
eschatological narrative. Perhaps the
best-known example of this genre is the
Book of Revelation in the New Testa-
ment, with its dramatically visionary ut-
terances. These allude obliquely to the
past and also to the present in the form
of what is called in Latin vaticinium ex
eventu, a fictive prophecy that predicts
something that actually occurred, or is
imagined to have occurred, in the past.
Kosmin rightly says, “These writings,
although mostly treated as prognos-
tic, future-oriented compositions, are
works of historiography.” As histori-
ography the book of Daniel affirms the
existence and relevance of a past that
the Seleucids had tried to smother. It
becomes a new way of bringing closure
to the remote past.
Daniel, together with comparable
apocalyptic texts from Seleucid Judaea,
including I Enoch, can be reasonably
read, according to Kosmin, as a direct
consequence of the dramatic calendar
change introduced at the end of the
fourth century BCE. This is because
the apocalyptic genre allows, through
its fictive prognosis, a representation of
the remote past that is meaningful for
the present. The well-known linguistic
division of Daniel’s text into Aramaic
and Hebrew can be explained to some
extent by the combination of Babylo-
nian court tales with Seleucid-era fic-
tions about Jews in exile. Kosmin sees
the book of Daniel as “a carefully con-
structed, programmatic unity,” which
allows the Jews of Seleucid Judaea in
the second century BCE to have an
inspiring past during their confronta-
tion with abusive rulers. Although it
is impossible to make a precise cor-
relation of the two languages with the
court tales and the afflictions of exilic
Jews, Kosmin finds Daniel to be more
insightful about his own time than the
second-century Greek historian Poly-
bius. I am not sure he is right about
this, but he has made a strong case.
In an arresting coda to his analysis of
apocalyptic texts, Kosmin aptly invokes
a cuneiform document called the Dy-
nastic Prophecy, which brings the pre-
Seleucid past into the present through
an allegedly secret vision of the great
gods. This vision is called secret be-
cause it appears to allow for the fall of
the Seleucids. A similar project can be
inferred from Zoroastrian apocalyptic
literature with tendentious periodiza-
tions that not only repeat narratives of
the historical past but also create a sce-
nario for regime change in the future.
These texts can be seen as undermin-
ing the Seleucid Empire by claiming
that something else came before it and,
more radically, that something else
would succeed it. According to Kos-
min, “It is a curious thing to oppose an
empire by segmenting history.... The
Seleucid kingdom, despite all its efforts
to establish a limit-horizon of historical
reference, was dragged into the same
space of experience as the empires that
had preceded it.”Hellenistic history came to a spectac-
ular end with the battle of Actium in 31
BCE followed by the suicide of Cleopa-
tra a year later. Her death terminated
the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt and
prepared the way for Augustus and a
vast Roman empire that endured for
three centuries. Recorded history in
the Greek East after Actium began to
flourish once again. Between Seleucus
and Augustus there had been only one
great historian in the Greek-speaking
world, and that was Polybius, whose
crabbed prose mirrored his courageous
attempt to write a kind of serious his-
tory that had long gone out of fashion.
Greek writers of the Hellenistic pe-
riod (323–31 BCE) had done little to
commemorate the world in which they
lived, because Rome was inexorably
expanding its influence at the expenseof the Greeks, but with the collapse of
the Roman republic a new age dawned.
From the Euphrates to the Atlantic
everyone recognized the change. The
poet Horace wrote odes about it. Au-
gustan historians such as Asinius Pol-
lio, whom Horace celebrated, could see
that the exploits of Pompey had under-
mined the old chronological as well as
administrative structures. New eras, in-
cluding a Pompeian era, starting in 63
BCE, sprouted across the region, and
the Roman provincial bureaucracy re-
placed local authorities.
In the early third century CE the
Greek writer Philostratus provided un-
mistakable proof of the long neglect of
the three centuries of the Hellenistic
period. He composed a set of pottedbiographies of flamboyant orators, who
were known in his day as sophists, and
he introduced these biographies with
a survey of Greek rhetoric from the
golden age of Pericles. He singled out
Gorgias in the fifth century BCE and
then advanced to Aeschines and De-
mosthenes in the fourth century BCE.
But after that his story moved abruptly
to the reign of Nero in the first century
CE. That means that Philostratus by-
passed more than three centuries by
naming no more than a few nonenti-
ties whom he considered utterly lack-
ing in talent. He could then begin his
account of later sophists with a certain
Nicetes, who declaimed under Nero.
Philostratus simply expunged the en-
tire Hellenistic period in the Greek
world. Although Philostratus lies out-
side Kosmin’s survey, he illustrates
the lasting impact of the Seleucid era.
His perspective would probably never
have entered the consciousness of any
educated Greek in the Roman Empire
without the calendar reform of Seleu-
cus and its attendant closure of the
classical Greek past at the end of the
fourth century BCE.
That the rhetorical tradition contin-
ued after the Seleucids only proves that
no attempt to erase the past can ever
stop the flow of history. Even the hiatus
that swallowed up the Hellenistic pe-
r iod event ua l ly va n i shed before Rome’s
domination in the lands through which
Alexander had passed. Of course every
nation has its own calendar, to divide
the present from the past. Yet this divi-
sion never holds. In ancient Judaea the
advent of the Seleucid Antiochus IV in
the second century BCE saw a porten-
tous struggle with the Maccabees. This
turned out to be the beginning of the
end for the Seleucid royal line in the
following century.As often happens with ancient his-
tory, new discoveries require new
thinking, and even the subtle and per-
suasive arguments that Kosmin has
given us leave space for new material
and further reflection. It is worth men-
tioning two extraordinary floor mosa-
ics of the fourth century CE that have
recently been unearthed at Apamea in
Syria and at Huqoq in Lower Galilee.
Both evoke, many centuries later but
still vividly, the world that Seleucus
forged in the third century BCE.^2 The
Seleucid heritage was obviously still
important in Syria and Palestine, even
if the interpretation of the new images
is still under discussion. One mosaic
was discovered in an illicit excavation
at Apamea in Syria, where it was pho-
tographed and secretly removed, pre-
sumably for the antiquities market. Its
current location is still unknown. It de-
picts Seleucus’s foundation of the city
of Apamea on the site of Pella, where a
Macedonian military colony, also com-
memorated in the mosaic, had been es-
tablished. Seleucus himself is pictured
prominently with other Macedonian
generals as well as his wife Apamê,
whose memory was preserved in the
name of the city.
The other mosaic of approximately
the same late antique date was dis-
covered in a controlled excavation at
Huqoq in a synagogue with magnificent
mosaics of biblical scenes, including
Noah’s ark, Samson at Gaza, Jonah and
the whale, the tower of Babel, and the
drowning of Pharaoh’s soldiers. But the
most striking of the images comprises
three horizontal registers, of which the
uppermost shows a king with his army,
accompanied by war elephants, facing
a group of men with drawn swords. Be-
tween the king and the sword-bearing
throng is an older man of obvious au-
thority with one hand pointed upward
(to heaven, one supposes). The middle
register shows the same person seated
in the midst of an arcade with eight
others, four on each side of him and
all with lamps above them. The lower
register shows the aftermath of a bat-
tle, with a fallen elephant. The most
obvious interpretation of these three
scenes is that they represent the Jew-
ish resistance to a brutal assault from
the Seleucid Antiochus IV against the
Maccabees in the mid-second century
BCE. Like the mosaic at Apamea, the
one at Huqoq seems evidently to be a
late antique allusion to the Seleucid
age. The elephants, which the Seleucid
armies favored, all but guarantee this.
The problem is that all the other im-
ages at Huqoq are biblical.
Although current debate about these
new images is inconclusive, they illus-
trate above all the long reach of the Se-
leucids into late antiquity. There is no
problem about identifying the founda-
tion of Apamea. But why a synagogue
in Lower Galilee would incorporate a
scene from the Maccabean revolt is by
no means obvious, particularly when all
the other images in the same synagogue
evoke the biblical past. In my judgment
Janine Balty has made the most reason-Fate of Seleucus, from The Fall of Princes
by Giovanni Boccaccio, 1467Bridgeman Images(^2) For Apamea, see M. T. Olszewski and
H. Saad, at popular-archaeology.com/
article/wanted-a-remarkable-piece-of-
history-, September 12, 2017; for Huqoq,
Jodi Magness, Karen Britt, Ra‘anan
Boustan, et al., “The Huqoq Exavation
Project: 2014–2017 Interim Report,”
Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research, No. 380 (2018).