Movses Khorenatsi and the Sibyl of Berossus

​In researching the legends of Semiramis and Ninus recently, I encountered an unusual academic dispute that emerged due to a quirk of grammar. As you will recall, last week I wrote a bit about the legend that the medieval Armenian historian Movses Kohrenatsi recorded about Semiramis and Arai. Well, this prompted me to read a bit more of his History of Armenia, which is where I discovered a strange ambiguity. The problem revolves around a passage (Book 1, chapter 6) discussing what happened when the first kings divided the world after the Flood. Movses cites a source, but scholars can’t agree on who it is.

​In the chapter, Movses describes how Kronos (Cronus/Saturn), whom he calls by the name of the Zoroastrian father of the gods or infinite principle, Zurvan (Armenian: Zrvan), came to reign as the first king. I will extract from his discussion the words he claims are quoted from his source, in my translation:

Before the Tower [of Babel], and the multiplication of languages ​​among humankind, after Xisut’ra’s [Xisuthrus’] voyage to Armenia, Zrvan, Titan, and Iapetus were princes of the earth. No sooner had they divided the entire universe under their dominion than Zrvan established himself as master over his two co-partitioners.
 
Titan and Iapetus opposed the tyranny of Zrvan and engaged in war with him. For Zrvan thought of making his children kings over everyone. In this conflict, Titan seized part of Zrvan’s territory: but their sister Astlik, interposing between them, put an end to the dispute. They agreed to let Zrvan reign, but they agreed by a sworn treaty to kill every male child born to Zrvan, so that he would not reign over them in his posterity: this is why they appointed strong men from among the Titans to oversee the births of Zrvan’s wives. Already two male children were sacrificed to maintain the sworn pact, when Astlik, along with Zrvan’s wives, undertook the project of convincing the Titans to let the other male children live, and to send them to the West on the mountain called Diwts‘enkets‘, now Olympus.

​The trouble is that the grammar of the Armenian original is ambiguous when he cites his source. He credits the source to “my beloved Sibyl Berossus, who is more accurate than many historians” but the grammar makes it equally possible that he meant “my beloved Sibyl, who is Berossus” as he did “my beloved, the Sibyl of Berossus.” The pronouns don’t help, since Armenian lacks grammatical gender and they could equally refer to a male or a female.
 
The English translator of Movses, Robert W. Thompson, took the passage to mean that Movses was poetically calling Berossus a Sibyl, or prophet. This line of thought has a long history, going back to Heinrich Gelzer’s 1898 study Sextus Julius Africanus und die Byzantinische Chronographie. Gelzer concluded that the above quoted passage was in fact a previously unrecognized lost fragment of Berossus’s Babyloniaca.
 
By contrast, the French translator of Movses, P. E. La Valliant de Florival, took it to be mean that Movses was referring to a Sibyl who was connected to Berossus, which, in my limited review of the literature in languages I can read, seems to be now be the more favored view.
 
There are three very good reasons to adopt that perspective. First, Movses doesn’t describe Berossus with such poetic flourish anywhere else, and it would be highly unusual for him to identify Berossus with a woman, much less to say that his work was more accurate than “many historians,” as though he were not citing a history but some other kind of book.
 
Second, there really was a Sibyl of Berossus. Sabbe, the Hebrew Sibyl, was a soothsayer who allegedly lived in “above Palestine” and was said to be the daughter of none other than Berossus himself, as Pausanias recorded in his Description of Greece:

Later than Demo there grew up among the Hebrews above Palestine a woman who gave oracles and was named Sabbe. They say that the father of Sabbe was Berosus, and her mother Erymanthe. But some call her a Babylonian Sibyl, others an Egyptian. (10.12.9, trans. W. H. S. Jones)

​Sabbe also provides the third good reason to favor her as the source Movses intended. Sabbe was thought to be the author of the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, the apocryphal blend of pagan and Judeo-Christian mythologies passed off as the prophetic books of Sibyl once kept in Rome. In book 3 of the Oracles we find the exact passage that Movses paraphrased in his book:

​And then the generation tenth appeared
Of mortal men, from the time when the flood
Came upon earlier men. And Cronos reigned,
And Titan and Iapetus; and men called them
Best offspring of Gaia and of Uranus,
Giving to them names both of earth and heaven,
Since they were very first of mortal men.
So there were three divisions of the earth
According to the allotment of each man,
And each one having his own portion reigned
And fought not; for a father's oaths were there
And equal were their portions. But the time
Complete of old age on the father came,
And he died; and the sons infringing oaths
Stirred up against each other bitter strife,
Which one should have the royal rank and rule
Over all mortals; and against each other
Cronos and Titan fought. But Rhea and Gaia,
And Aphrodite fond of crowns, Demeter,
And Hestia and Dione of fair locks
Brought them to friendship, and together called
All who were kings, both brothers and near kin,
And others of the same ancestral blood,
And they judged Cronos should reign king of all,
For he was oldest and of noblest form.
But Titan laid on Cronos mighty oaths
To rear no male posterity, that he
Himself might reign when age and fate should come
To Cronos. And whenever Rhea bore
Beside her sat the Titans, and all males
In pieces tore, but let the females live
To be reared by the mother. … etc. etc.
(trans. Milton S. Terry) 

​It’s pretty clear, I think, that the passage Movses presents as the words of the “Sibyl Berossus” are condensed and paraphrased from the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, which would make the Sabbe the Sibyl he intended. While Thompson felt Movses was trying to fabricated fake passages of Berossus, and Geltzer thought it was an independent version of the same story from the Oracles, it’s pretty clear from comparing other quotations in the book to their originals that Movses’ pattern and practice was to paraphrase and condense quotations and to substitute in Armenian names.
 
The only question is whether Movses read the Sibyl directly or whether he borrowed the passage, as some scholars think, from the Armenian translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle, known to be one of Movses’ most important sources:

Sibyl states that the people were united and commenced building the lofty Tower, in order to ascend to the heavens. But Almighty God stirred up a wind which destroyed the Tower, and [God] divided each [of the participants] with distinct languages. It is for this reason that the city was called Babylon. It was after the Flood that the Titan Prometheus lived, and stirred up a war with Cronos. This is sufficient about the building of the Tower. […] [If] until that time, [everyone] spoke the same language, [afterwards] the gods introduced many different languages among the multitudes. After this Cronos and the Titans engaged each other in warfare. (trans. Robert Bedrosian)

Movses has many details that are in Sibyl but not in Eusebius’ summary of her, so either Movses had access to the original Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, or his Armenian-language copy of Eusebius included a more extensive quotation from the Oracles than the surviving version we have today.