מסורת המצבות שמלפני המבול בכרוניקות ביזנטיות של תולדות העולם

Traditions about ancient wisdom carved on monuments before the flood form part of a broader discussion in the Hellenistic age about the origins, preservation, and transfer of universal culture. In a much-quoted passage from Plato’s Timaeus (22B-E), an Egyptian priest had already set out the terms of the debate. Compared to the Egyptians, he tells Solon, the Greeks are little more than “children.” This was because favorable geography and a mild climate shielded Egyptian civilization from the floods and fires periodically destroying both Greece and its memories of the past. In their own critique of Greek culture, later polemicists found a powerful ally in the Egyptian priest’s rebuke. Lacking reliable documentation, Greek historians, writes Josephus in the prologue to the first book of Against Apion, could only manufacture the past out of their own imaginations. Severe climate was in Josephus’ view only part of the reason for the lamentable state of Greek historiography. The Greeks were also careless record-keepers, late in acquiring literacy, and negligent in making a fixed record of events in archives, on public monuments, or on some other durable medium. For those nations whose recorded history included a universal flood, traditions about ancient wisdom inscribed on stone and brick monuments helped to explain how the earliest generations protected their accumulated knowledge from regularly recurring natural catastrophes. Versions of the same motif also figured in disputes between nations vying for supremacy in the celestial sciences. According to the Egyptian grammarian Chaeremon (first century CE), the Babylonians claimed that, after the Nile had flooded and destroyed whatever knowledge the Egyptians had previously acquired about the motion of the heavens, they were compelled to appeal to the Babylonians for guidance. Only later did the Egyptians take the added precaution of recording their wisdom on brick monuments, and not simply in books. Other iterations of the same tradition extended the contents of pre-flood stelae into more occult branches of the heavenly sciences. In the prologue to the Book of Sothis, the Egyptian priest Manetho, its pseudonymous author, makes a lofty claim about the contents of this Hermetic work of late antiquity. Dedicated to King Ptolemy Philadelphus I, the Book of Sothis was said to contain revelations “about the future of the universe.” The work also boasted a distinguished and exotic pedigree. According to (ps.-) Manetho, it originated in antediluvian revelations “inscribed on monuments found in the land of Seiris,” and composed by Hermes-Thoth in “a sacred language and priestly characters.” The accounts of antediluvian stelae found in Josephus’s Antiquities and the Book of Jubilees reveal two highly opposing perceptions of their contents. As part of a larger project to transform figures of biblical history into vital links in the discovery and transfer of universal culture, Josephus casts the learning preserved on them in an entirely favorable light. By inscribing their discoveries on stone and brick monuments (again in the land of Seiris), the virtuous offspring of Seth saw to the preservation of their astronomical learning up to Josephus’s own day (Antiquities 1.69–71). By contrast, the decidedly negative perspective of Jubilees, a work with a marked distaste for alien wisdom, treats the discovery of a pre-flood stone monument as one stage in the gradual decay of civilization after the flood. For Jubilees, the legitimate astronomical wisdom recorded in a book by Enoch before the flood had nothing to do with the dangerous and proscribed teachings about heavenly omens carved on stone by the fallen Watchers. Cainan thus committed a grave transgression by reading and transcribing its contents (Jub. 8.3–4).
Older Hellenistic traditions about antediluvian stelae circulated widely and in various forms in Byzantine universal chronicles, most notably in the works of John Malalas (sixth century), George Syncellus (ninth century), Symeon Magister (tenth century), and Michael Glycas (twelfth century). In the chronicle of Malalas, application of the principles of euhemeristic historiography enabled him to weave together the conflicting accounts of Jubilees and Josephus into a unified narrative about the first discoveries of writing and astronomy, and the subsequent dissemination of this learning after the flood. Discussions about the contents of these monuments would also later play a central role in twelfth-century Byzantine discussions about the origins and legitimacy of “Chaldean” science (i.e. astrology). How chroniclers used and reshaped these traditions, and to what end, are the questions examined in the latter half of paper.