RuncimanAward

The Runciman Award, named in honour of the late Sir Steven Runciman and generously sponsored by the National Bank of Greece, is awarded by the Anglo-Hellenic League to a book on Greece or some aspect of the Hellenic scene. Books published in English anywhere in the world are eligible for the Award.

An interview with John Dillery, author of Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho

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Author John Dillery, whose book Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho has been shortlisted for this year’s Runciman Award, kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us.

Clio’s Other Sons is a scholarly work, liberally annotated with footnotes. How long does it take to research a work such as this? Where do you start?

It took me 16 years to write. I started by thinking hard about why these non-Greek priests – Berossus the Babylonian and Manetho the Egyptian – would want to write a history of their native lands in a language not their own, using in some cases methods of treating the past that were not their own, but from elements that were. What was the purpose of these histories?

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An excerpt from Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho, by John Dillery

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An Opportunity: Hellenization and World History

Something obviously very big happened in the history of the world in the Hellenistic period. Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures, each constituting massive contributions to the achievement of organized human life on our planet, were brought into intimate interplay that, while by no means unprecedented, had not occurred on a similar scale before. Greek culture, the one I know best and with which I am principally concerned, went from being the possession of a relatively small number of people clustered around the shores of the Eastern and Central Mediterranean to a tool of communication and social construction in the hands of many, many more people and in many other places, some quite far from the central Greek homelands.

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This week’s focus: Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho by John Dillery

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This week we focus on John Dillery’s shortlisted book, Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho. Here are some of the questions the author seeks to answer: ‘How did the non-Greek members of the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Egypt view the expulsion of the Persians and the conquest of their lands by the … Read more