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Oast house

An oast, oast house or hop kiln is a building designed for kilning (drying) hops as part of the brewing process. They can be found in most hop-growing (and former hop-growing) areas and are often good examples of agricultural vernacular architecture. Many redundant oasts have been converted into houses. The names oast and oast house are used interchangeably in Kent and Sussex. In Surrey, Hampshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire they are called hop kilns.

They consist of a rectangular one- or two-storey building (the "stowage") and one or more kilns in which the hops were spread out to be dried by hot air rising from a wood or charcoal fire below. The drying floors were thin and perforated to permit the heat to pass through and escape through a cowl in the roof which turned with the wind. The freshly picked hops from the fields were raked in to dry and then raked out to cool before being bagged up and sent to the brewery. The Kentish dialect word kell was sometimes used for kilns ("The oast has three kells") and sometimes to mean the oast itself ("Take this lunchbox to your father, he's working in the kell"). The word oast itself also means "kiln".

The earliest surviving oast house is at Golford, Cranbrook near Tunbridge Wells. It dates from sometime in the 17th century and closely mirrors the first documentary evidence on oasts soon after the introduction of hops into England in the mid-16th century. Early oast houses were simply adapted barns, but, by the 18th century, the distinctive tall buildings with conical roofs had been developed to increase the draught. At first, these were square, but around 1800 roundel kilns were developed in the belief that they were more efficient. Square kilns remained more popular in Herefordshire and Worcestershire and came back into fashion in the southeast in the later 19th century. In the 1930s, the cowls were replaced by louvred openings as electric fans and diesel oil ovens were employed.

Hops are today dried industrially and the many oast houses on farms have now been converted into dwellings. One of the best-preserved oast house complexes is at the Hop Farm Country Park at Beltring.

Hop drying

The purpose of an oast is to dry hops. This is achieved by the use of a flow of heated air through the kiln, rather than a firing process.

Hops were picked in the hop gardens by gangs of pickers, who worked on a piece work basis and earned a fixed rate per bushel. The green hops were put into large hessian sacks called pokes (in Kent) or green sacks (West Midlands). These would be taken to the oast and brought into the stowage at first floor level. Some oasts had a man-powered hoist for this purpose, consisting of a pulley of some 5 ft diameter on an axle to which a rope or chain was attached.

The green hops when freshly picked had a moisture content of approximately 80%. This needed to be reduced to 6%, although the moisture content would subsequently rise to 10% during storage.

The green hops were spread out in the kilns. The floors were generally of 1+1/4 in square battens nailed at right angles across the joists, placed so that there was a similar gap between each batten, and covered with a horsehair cloth. The hops would be spread some 12 in deep, the kiln doors closed and the furnace lit. When the hops were judged to be dried, the furnace would be extinguished and the hops removed from the kiln using a scuppet, which was a large wooden framed shovel with a hessian base. The hops would be spread out on the stowage floor to cool, and would then be pressed into large jute sacks called pockets with a hop press. Each pocket contained the produce of about 150 impbsh of green hops. It weighed a hundredweight and a quarter (140 lb) and was marked with the grower's details, this being required under The Hop (Prevention of Fraud) Act, 1866.

The pockets were then sent to market, where the brewers would buy them and use the dried hops in the beer-making process to add flavour and act as a preservative.

Oasts sometimes caught fire, the damage sometimes being confined to the kilns (Castle Farm, Hadlow), or sometimes leading to the complete destruction of the oast (Stilstead Farm, East Peckham in September 1983, and Parsonage Farm, Bekesbourne in August 1996).

Early oasts
The earliest description of an oast dates from 1574. It was a small building of 18 ft by 9 ft in plan, with walls 9 ft high. The central furnace was some 6 ft long, 2 ft high and 13 in internal width. The upper floor was the drying floor, and only some 5 ft above the ground floor, hops being laid directly on the slatted floor rather than being laid on hessian cloth as was the later practice.

Conversions to oasts
In many cases, early oasts were adapted from barns or cottages. In 1779, St. Peter's Chapel, Frindsbury was converted to an oast. A chapel at Horton, near Canterbury was also converted. Part of Hastings Priory was serving as an oast in 1823. The gatehouse to the Bishop's Palace, Bosbury, Herefordshire was also converted.

This was done by building a kiln within the building, dividing it into three, the upper floor being used to receive the "green" hops, dry them and press the dried hops. Examples of this type of conversion can be seen at Catt's place, Paddock Wood, and Great Dixter, Northiam.

Later conversions of barns and cottages would be by either building an integral kiln within one end of the building, as seen at Biddenden, Kent, or by adding kilns externally to the existing building, as seen at Barnhill Farm, Hunton, and also at Sutton Valence, or both, as seen at Ightham Mote.

Purpose-built (custom) oasts

An agreement for the building of an oast in Flimwell in East Sussex in 1667 gave the size of the building as 30 by and another to be built there was to be built in 1671 being 32 by or 17 ft, having two kilns. The earliest surviving purpose-built oast is at Golford, Cranbrook, built in 1750. This small timber framed oast is 21 by in plan, and has a hipped tiled roof. It has one kiln, and a single cowl on the ridge of the roof.

Traditional oasts

In the early 19th century, the traditional oast as we now know it started to be built. A two- or three-storey stowage, with between one and eight circular kilns. Kiln sizes generally ranged from 12 ft to 18 ft diameter, with a conical roof. Towards the end of the 19th century, square kilns were constructed. These generally ranged in size from 16 ft to 20 ft square. An oast at Hawkhurst was built with two octagonal kilns, 15 ft across the flats.

Modern oasts

In the 20th century, oasts reverted to the original form with internal kilns and cowls in the ridge of the roof (Bell 5, Beltring). These oasts were much larger and constructed of modern materials. Oasts were built as late as 1948 (Upper Fowle Hall, Paddock Wood), or 1950 (Hook Green, Lamberhurst).

Very modern oasts bear little resemblance to traditional oasts. These vast buildings can process hops from several farms, as at Norton near Teynham in Kent, built in 1982.

South East
Oasts were built of various materials, including bricks, timber, ragstone, and sandstone. Cladding could be timber weatherboards, corrugated iron or asbestos sheet.

Many oasts were timber-framed buildings, although some were built entirely in brick, or ragstone if this was available locally. Some oasts were entirely brick except the front and floors, which were timber.
 * Stowage

Internal kilns were built of timber or bricks. External kilns were built from bricks, ragstone and bricks, flint, or sandstone. A rare material usage was at Tilden Farm, Headcorn where the kiln was built from Bethersden Marble. During the Second World War, a few kilns were built with a basic timber framing and clad in corrugated iron (Crittenden Farm, Matfield).
 * Kilns

Kiln roofs, where the kiln was external, were generally built of a timber frame and covered in either peg tiles or slate. Some oasts had conical kiln roofs built of brick, these were covered in tar or pitch to keep them weatherproof. A few oasts had square kilns with brick roofs, again covered in tar or pitch. The top of the roof was open, and carried a cowl or louvred vent.
 * Kiln roofs

West Midlands
Oasts were generally built of bricks or local stone.

Bricks were the usual material for building the stowage, wood only being used in floors. Stone was sometimes used too (Madley). Some oasts had a cider mill on the ground floor of the stowage (Little Cowarne Court, Little Cowarne).
 * Stowage

Bricks were the usual material for building kilns. Stone was also used.
 * Kilns

Kiln roofs could be of timber, clad in tiles or slate, or bricks. Brick kiln roofs could be tarred (Little Cowarne Court, Bromyard) or left bare (The Farm, Brockhampton). The roofs would be topped with a cowl (Upper Lyde Farm, Pipe-cum-Lyde), or a ridge ventilator (Kidley, Acton Beauchamp).
 * Kiln roofs

Locations
Oasts can be found in the UK and abroad.

South East England
Oasts are generally associated with Kent, and the oasthouse is a symbol associated with the county. They are also found in Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire.

West Midlands
In the West Midlands, the main hop-growing areas are Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. In Worcestershire and Herefordshire oast houses were known as hop kilns.

Europe
In Belgium, the main hop growing area is around Poperinghe and Ypres, West Flanders. Hops are also grown across the border in Nord, France. Hops are also grown around Aelst, north west of Brussels. Apart from Nord, the main hop growing area in France is around Haguenau, Bas-Rhin and around Dijon and Bèze, Côte-d'Or.

In Germany, hops are grown around Tettnang, Baden-Württemberg; around Hallertau, Hersbruck, Illschwang and Spalt, Bavaria. In the Czech Republic hops are grown around Roudnice, Hradec Králové Region and around Úštěk and Žatec, Ústí nad Labem Region. They are also grown around Olomouc, Olomouc Region. In Slovakia, hops are grown around Trenčín, Trenčín Region. Hops are also grown in Poland and Russia.

Australia

 * See also John Terry

Oast houses are often called hop kilns in Australia. Tasmania is a major hop-growing area, as were parts of Victoria. During the 19th century, some of the Kentish hop growers emigrated, and took hops with them. Initially, Tasmanian oasts were converted from existing buildings (New Norfolk, Ranelagh) but later purpose-built oasts were built (Valley Field, Bushy Park). These oasts had louvred ventilators instead of a cowl. The New Norfolk oast was converted from a watermill and is now a museum. Another location that has oasts was Tyenna. A modern oast of 400 by was built at Bushy Park in 1982.

Conversion
With the increasing mechanisation of the hop-picking process, many oasts fell into disuse. Some were demolished and others became derelict. Increasing demand for housing has led to many oasts being converted into houses. Local councils nowadays are generally much stricter on the aesthetics of the conversions than was the case before the planning law came into being. Often kiln roofs have to be rebuilt, and cowls provided on converted oasts.

The earliest example of an oast being converted to a house is Millar's Farm oast, Meopham, which was house-converted in 1903 by Sir Philip Waterlow.

Other conversions of oasts for non-residential purposes include a theatre (Oast Theatre, Tonbridge, Oast house Theatre Rainham), a Youth Hostel (Capstone Farm, Chatham, another at Lady Margaret Manor, Doddington – now a residential centre for people with learning difficulties), a school (Sturry), a bakery (Chartham), a visitor centre (Bough Beech reservoir), offices (Tatlingbury Farm, Five Oak Green), and a museum (Kent Museum of Rural Life, Sandling, Preston Street, Faversham, Wye College, Wye, and the former Whitbread Hop Farm at Beltring).

The National Trust owns an oast at Outridge, near Brasted Chart, which has very rare octagonal cowls, one at Castle Farm, Sissinghurst, converted to tea rooms, and another at Batemans, Burwash which has been converted to a shop, with the cowl being replaced by a dovecot.

Fake oasts
In recent years, a number of buildings have been erected to look as though they were oasts, although in fact, that is not the case. Examples of this are:
 * Early Bird public house, Grove Green, Maidstone.
 * Harrietsham, a group of offices.
 * The Oast House public house, Normanton.
 * The Oast House public house, Manchester.
 * Langley Court, Beckenham, built by the Wellcome Foundation, now part of Glaxo Wellcome.
 * Caring, Kent – Houses built in the form of oasts.
 * South Harrow, London – a pub built in the form of an oast (now demolished and rebuilt as part of new housing).

title: Oast house


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Joshua Pusey

Joshua Pusey (March 27, 1842 - May 8, 1906 (?)), was an American inventor and an attorney.

In 1827, an English pharmacist named John Walker produced his "sulphuretted peroxide strikables," gigantic, yard-long sticks that can be considered the real precursor of today's match. Small phosphorus matches were first marketed in Germany in 1832, but they were extremely hazardous. In 1836 in the United States, Alonzo D. Phillips of Springfield, Massachusetts, obtained a patent for "manufacturing of friction matches" and called them locofocos crazies. The danger problem was not resolved until the invention of amorphous (red) phosphorus in 1845. Carl Lundstrom of Sweden introduced the first red phosphorus "safety" matches in 1855. These type of matches were large and had to be carried in a wooden box, and Pusey didn't like the bulkiness of this. He decided to make matches in a paper book that was easier to carry. In 1889 he finished and had created strike-able book matches.

Pusey was a Pennsylvanian attorney who was fond of smoking cigars. Fed up with carrying bulky boxes of wooden matches, he set to work to invent paper matches that would be lighter and smaller. His final design had matches secured to a thin paper wrapping with an attached striking surface. Unlike present-day matchbooks, Pusey positioned the striking surface on the inside of the paper fold. This allowed all 50 matches to be lit at once. The Diamond Match Company later put the striking surface on the outside.

He received a patent for his invention of the paper matchbook (which he called "flexibles") in 1889, but the idea did not catch on right away. Eight years later, in 1897, the Mendelssohn Opera Company distributed matchbooks with their logo emblazoned on them to advertise their New York City opening. After this promotion, demand for paper matchbooks soared.

Pusey later sold the invention to the Diamond Match Company for $4000 in 1896.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Joshua Pusey


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Cultural Christians

Cultural Christians are the nonreligious or non-practicing Christians who received Christian values and appreciate Christian culture. As such, these individuals usually identify themselves as culturally Christians, and are often seen by practicing believers as nominal Christians. This kind of identification may be due to various factors, such as family background, personal experiences, and the social and cultural environment in which they grew up.

Contrasting terms are "practicing Christian", "biblical Christian", "committed Christian", or "believing Christian".

The term "Cultural Christian" may be specified further by Christian denomination, e.g. "Cultural Catholic", "Cultural Lutheran", and "Cultural Anglican".

Belarus
The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has identified as cultural Christian, calling himself an "Orthodox atheist" in one of his interviews.

France
French Deists of the 18th and early 19th centuries include Napoleon. The current President of France, Emmanuel Macron, identified himself as an "Agnostic Catholic".

China
Traditionally, Christianity has been considered a "foreign religion" (, means non-local religions) in China, including all the negative connotations of foreignness common in China. This attitude only started to change at the end of the 20th century. In China, the term "Cultural Christians" can refer to Chinese intellectuals devoted to the study of Christian theology, ethics, and literature, and often contribute to a movement known as Sino-Christian theology. Some of the earliest figures in this movement in the late-1980s and 1990s, such as Liu Xiaofeng and He Guanghu, were sympathetic to Christianity but chose not to associate with any local church. Since the 1990s, a newer generation of these Cultural Christians have been more willing to associate with local churches, and have often drawn on Calvinist theology.

Italy
The liberal writer Benedetto Croce, in his book Perché non possiamo non dirci cristiani ('Why we can't not call ourselves Christians'), expressed the view that Roman Catholic traditions and values formed the basic culture of all Italians, believers and non-believers, and described Christianity primarily as a cultural revolution.

United Kingdom
Outspoken English atheist Richard Dawkins has described himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican". In his book The God Delusion, he calls Jesus Christ praiseworthy for his ethics. Similarly, former prime minister Liz Truss described herself as saying "I share the values of the Christian faith and the Church of England, but I'm not a regular practising religious person."

United States
Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father of the United States, considered himself part of Christian culture, despite his doubts about the divinity of Jesus.

Western Europe
European countries have a Christian cultural background, which was significant in inheriting European civilization, and Western Europe also came to be seen as synonymous with "Christendom". Today, many people in Western Europe remain "culturally Christian". According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center; Christianity is still the largest religion in Western Europe, where 71% of Western Europeans identified themselves as Christian. According to Pew Research Center "most Christians in Western Europe today are non-practicing, but Christian identity still remains a meaningful religious, social and cultural marker", where 55% of Western Europeans identified themselves as non-practicing Christians, and 18% identified themselves as church-attending Christians.

The Netherlands
Forms of Christianity have dominated religious life in what is now the Netherlands for more than 1,200 years, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the country was strongly Protestant (Calvinist). The population of the Netherlands was predominantly Christian until the late 20th century, divided into a number of denominations.

The provinces North Brabant and Limburg in the Netherlands are historically mostly Roman Catholic, therefore many of their people still use the term and some traditions as a base for their cultural identity rather than as a religious identity. Since the War of Independence the Catholics were systematically and officially discriminated against by the Protestant government until the second half of the 20th century, which had a major influence on the economic and cultural development of the southern part of the Netherlands.

From the Reformation to the 20th century, Dutch Catholics were largely confined to certain southern areas in the Netherlands, and they still tend to form a majority or large minority of the population in the southern provinces of the Netherlands, North Brabant and Limburg.

However, with modern population shifts and increasing secularization, these areas tend to have fewer and fewer religious Catholics. Since 1960 the emphasis on many Catholic concepts including hell, the devil, sinning and Catholic traditions like confession, kneeling, the teaching of catechism and having the host placed on the tongue by the priest rapidly disappeared, and these concepts are nowadays seldom or not at all found in modern Dutch Catholicism. The southern area still has original Catholic traditions including Carnival, pilgrimages, rituals like lighting candles for special occasions and field chapels and crucifixes in the landscape, giving the southern part of the Netherlands a distinctive Catholic atmosphere, with which the population identifies in contrast to the rest of the Netherlands. The vast majority of the (self-identifying) Catholic population in the Netherlands is now largely irreligious in practice. Research among Catholics in the Netherlands in 2007 shows that even among religious Dutch Catholics only 27% can be regarded as theist, 55% as ietsist, 17% as agnostic and 1% as atheist.

title: Cultural Christians


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User:Rjyanco

Hi.

Well, I thought the T-shirt text was a telling (as well as amusing) example of Smith spirit, and I don't see why it shouldn't be here. . . Credmond 22:14, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

title: User:Rjyanco


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Berossus

Berossus or Berosus ( Βηρωσσος; possibly derived from )  was a Hellenistic-era Babylonian writer, a priest of Bel Marduk and astronomer who wrote in the Koine Greek language, and who was active at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. His original works, including his Babyloniaca, have been lost but fragmentarily survive in some quotations, especially in the writings of the fourth-century Christian writer Eusebius.

Berossus has recently been identified with Bēl-reʾû-šunu, a high priest of the temple Esagila Temple mentioned in a document from 258 BC.

Name
The name Berossus likely originates from a theophoric name whose first component was Bel, meaning "Lord," which was a common title for Marduk. The original name was either either Bēl-rē’ûšunu, meaning "the god Bel is their shepherd," or Bēl-uṣuršu, meaning "O Bel watch over him!"

Life and work
Using ancient Babylonian records and texts that are now lost, Berossus published the Babyloniaca (hereafter, History of Babylonia) in three books some time around 290–278 BC, by the patronage of the Macedonian/Seleucid king Antiochus I Soter (during the third year of his reign, according to Diodorus Siculus ). Certain astrological fragments recorded by Pliny the Elder, Censorinus, Flavius Josephus, and Marcus Vitruvius Pollio are also attributed to Berossus, but are of unknown provenance, or indeed are uncertain as to where they might fit into his History. Vitruvius credits him with the invention of the semi-circular sundial hollowed out of a cubical block. A statue of him was erected in Athens, perhaps attesting to his fame and scholarship as historian and astronomer-astrologer.

A separate work, Procreatio, is attributed to him by the Latin commentaries on Aratus, Commentariorium in Aratum Reliquiae, but there is no proof of this connection. However, a direct citation (name and title) is rare in antiquity, and it may have referred to Book 1 of his History.

He was born during or before Alexander the Great's reign over Babylon (330–323 BC), with the earliest date suggested as 340 BC. According to Vitruvius's work de Architectura, he relocated eventually to the island of Kos off the coast of Asia Minor and established a school of astronomy there by the patronage of the king of Egypt. However, scholars have questioned whether it would have been possible to work under the Seleucids and then relocate to a region experiencing Ptolemaic control late in life. It is not known when he died.

Babyloniaca (History of Babylonia)
Versions at several removes of the remains of Berossos' lost Babyloniaca are given by two later Greek epitomes that were used by the Christian Eusebius of Caesarea for his Chronological Canons, the Greek manuscripts of which have been lost, but which can be largely recovered by the Latin translation and continuation of Jerome and a surviving Armenian translation. The reasons why Berossus wrote the History have not survived, though contemporaneous Greek historians generally did give reasons for the publication of their own histories. It is suggested that it was commissioned by Antiochus I, perhaps desiring a history of one of his newly acquired lands, or by the Great Temple priests, seeking justification for the worship of Marduk in Seleucid lands. Pure history writing per se was not a Babylonian concern, and Josephus testifies to Berossus' reputation as an astrologer. The excerpts quoted recount mythology and history that relate to Old Testament concerns. As historian and archaeologist W.G. Lambert observes: "Of course Berossus may have written other works which are not quoted by Josephus and Eusebius because they lacked any Biblical interest". Lambert finds some statements in the Latin writers so clearly erroneous that it renders doubtful whether the writers had first-hand knowledge of Berossus' text.

Sources and content
The Armenian translations of Eusebius and Syncellus' transmissions (Chronicon and Ecloga Chronographica, respectively) both record Berossus' use of "public records" and it is possible that Berossus catalogued his sources. This did not make him reliable, only that he was careful with the sources and his access to priestly and sacred records allowed him to do what other Babylonians could not. What we have of ancient Mesopotamian myth is somewhat comparable with Berossus, though the exact integrity with which he transmitted his sources is unknown because much of the literature of Mesopotamia has not survived. What is clear is that the form of writing he used was dissimilar to actual Babylonian literature, writing as he did in Greek.

Book 1
Book 1 fragments are preserved in Eusebius and Syncellus above, one of the main sources for knowledge about ancient near eastern cosmology in late antiquity due to its description of the Babylonian creation account and establishment of order, including the defeat of Thalatth (Tiamat) by Bel (Marduk). According to him, all knowledge was revealed to humans by the sea monster Oannes after the Creation, and so Verbrugghe and Wickersham (2000:17) have suggested that this is where the astrological fragments discussed above would fit, if at all.

Book 2
Book 2 describes the history of the Babylonian kings from Alulim down to Nabonassar (747–734 BC). Eusebius reports that Apollodorus reports that Berossus recounts 432,000 years from the first king Aloros (Alulim) to the tenth king Xisouthros and the Babylonian Flood. From Berossus' genealogy, it is clear that he had access to king-lists in compiling this section of History, particularly in the kings before the Flood, and from the 7th century BC with Senakheirimos (Sennacherib, who ruled both Assyria and Babylon). His account of the Flood (preserved in Syncellus) is extremely similar to versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh that we have presently. However, in Gilgamesh, the main protagonist is Utnapishtim, while for Berossus, Xisouthros is probably a Greek transliteration of Ziusudra, the protagonist of the Sumerian version of the Flood.

Perhaps what Berossus omits to mention is also noteworthy. Much information on Sargon (c. 2300 BC) would have been available during his time (e.g., a birth legend preserved at El-Amarna and in an Assyrian fragment from 8th century BC, and two Neo-Babylonian fragments), but these were not mentioned. Similarly, the great Babylonian king Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BC) merits only passing mention. He did, however, mention that the queen Semiramis (probably Sammuramat, wife of Samshi-Adad V, 824–811 BC) was Assyrian. Perhaps it was in response to Greek writers mythologising her to the point where she was described as the founder of Babylon, daughter of the Syrian goddess Derketo, and married to Ninus (the legendary founder of Nineveh, according to Greek authors).

Book 3
Book 3 relates the history of Babylon from Nabonassar to Antiochus I (presumably). Again, it is likely that he used king-lists, though it is not known which ones he used. The Mesopotamian documents known as King-List A (one copy from the 6th or 5th centuries BC) and Chronicle 1 (3 copies with one confidently dated to 500 BC) are usually suggested as the ones he used, due to the synchronicity between those and his History (though there are some differences). A large part of his history around the time of Naboukhodonosoros (Nebuchadnezzar II, 604–562 BC) and Nabonnedos (Nabonidus, 556–539 BC) survives. Here we see his interpretation of history for the first time, moralising about the success and failure of kings based on their moral conduct. This is similar to another Babylonian history, Chronicle of Nabonidus (as well as to the Hebrew Bible), and differs from the rationalistic accounts of other Greek historians like Thucydides.

At the time of the Jewish historian Josephus (1st century AD), the historical records contained in Berossus' third book of his Chaldaic History were still extant and were used by Josephus in citing the regnal years of six Babylonian kings. Josephus' record of regnal years for these kings is also corroborated by Ptolemy of Alexandria in his Canon, excepting for the fact that the king that reigned between Neglissar and Nabonnedus is omitted by Ptolemy.

 * Nabopolassar = reigned 21 years.
 * Nebuchadnezzar b. Nabuchodonosor = reigned 43 years.
 * Evil Merodach (also called Amel-Marduk) = reigned 2 years. (Josephus, elsewhere, contradicts Berossus, saying that Evil Merodach reigned 18 years).
 * Neglissar (Neriglissoor) = reigned 4 years (Josephus, elsewhere, says that Neglissar reigned 40 years, which seems odd that it is a factor of 10).
 * Laborosoarchod (Labosordacus) = reigned 9 months.
 * Nabonnedus (also known as Baltasar) = reigned 17 years, in which year, Cyrus king of Persia and Darius king of Media took Babel (Borsippus) from the Chaldaeans.

Transmission and reception
Berossus' work was not popular during the Hellenistic period. The usual account of Mesopotamian history was Ctesias of Cnidus's Persica, while most of the value of Berossus was considered to be his astrological writings. Most pagan writers probably never read the History directly, and seem to have been dependent on Posidonius of Apamea (135–50 BC), who cited Berossos in his works. While Poseidonius's accounts have not survived, the writings of these tertiary sources do: Vitruvius Pollio (a contemporary of Caesar Augustus), Pliny the Elder (d. 79 AD), and Seneca the Younger (d. 65 AD). Seven later pagan writers probably transmitted Berossus via Poseidonius through an additional intermediary. They were Aetius (1st or 2nd century AD), Cleomedes (second half of 2nd century AD), Pausanias (c. 150 AD), Athenaeus (c. 200 AD), Censorinus (3rd century AD), and an anonymous Latin commentator on the Greek poem Phaenomena by Aratus of Soloi (ca. 315–240/39 BC).

Jewish and Christian references to Berossus probably had a different source, either Alexander Polyhistor (c. 65 BC) or Juba II of Mauretania (c. 50 BC–20 AD). Polyhistor's numerous works included a history of Assyria and Babylonia, while Juba wrote On the Assyrians, both using Berossus as their primary sources. Josephus' records of Berossus include some of the only extant narrative material, but he is probably dependent on Alexander Polyhistor, even if he did give the impression that he had direct access to Berossus. The fragments of the Babylonaica found in three Christian writers' works are probably dependent on Alexander or Juba (or both). They are Tatianus of Syria (2nd century AD), Theophilus Bishop of Antioch (180 AD), and Titus Flavius Clemens (c. 200 AD).

Like Poseidonius', neither Alexander's nor Juba's works have survived. However, the material in Berossus was recorded by Abydenus (c. 200 BC) and Sextus Julius Africanus (early 3rd century AD). Both their works are also lost, possibly considered too long, but Eusebius Bishop of Caesaria (c. 260–340 AD), in his work the Chronicon, preserved some of their accounts. The Greek text of the Chronicon is also now lost to us but there is an ancient Armenian translation (500–800 AD) of it, and portions are quoted in Georgius Syncellus's Ecloga Chronographica (c. 800–810 AD). Nothing of Berossus survives in Jerome's Latin translation of Eusebius. Eusebius' other mentions of Berossus in Praeparatio Evangelica are derived from Josephus, Tatianus, and another inconsequential source (the last cite contains only, "Berossus the Babylonian recorded Naboukhodonosoros in his history").

Christian writers after Eusebius are probably reliant on him, but include Pseudo-Justinus (3rd–5th century), Hesychius of Alexandria (5th century), Agathias (536–582), Moses of Chorene (8th century), an unknown geographer of unknown date, and the Suda (Byzantine dictionary from the 10th century). Thus, what little of Berossus remains is very fragmentary and indirect. The most direct source of material on Berossus is Josephus, received from Alexander Polyhistor. Most of the names in his king-lists and most of the potential narrative content have been lost or completely mangled as a result. Only Eusebius and Josephus preserve narrative material, and both had agendas. Eusebius was looking to construct a consistent chronology across different cultures, while Josephus was attempting to refute the charges that there was a civilization older than that of the Jews. However, the ten ante-diluvian kings were preserved by Christian apologists interested in how the long lifespans of the kings were similar to the long lifespans of the ante-diluvian ancestors in the story of Genesis.

Memory
In later centuries, Berossus was remembered as a great astronomer, prophet, sage, and historiographer. For example, Pliny the Elder reports that a statue of Berossus was put up by the inhabitants of Athens due to the accuracy of his future-predictions. Another figure, Pausanias, says that Berossus was the father of the Hebrew Sibyl.

In an isolated report from Vitruvius, it is claimed that Berossus founded a school of astronomy at the Island of Kos, although this is typically dismissed as a later invention. Some historians have suggested that the tale originated to provide a story that creates continuity between Babylonian and Greek astronomy.

In 1498, Annius of Viterbo claimed to have discovered lost books of Berossus. These were in fact an elaborate forgery. However, they greatly influenced Renaissance ways of thinking about population and migration, because Annius provided a list of kings from Japhet onwards, filling a historical gap following the Biblical account of the Flood. Annius also introduced characters from classical sources into the biblical framework, publishing his account as Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Commentaries on the Works of Various Authors Discussing Antiquity). One consequence was sophisticated theories about Celtic races with Druid priests in Western Europe.

title: Berossus