Berossus the Chaldean, Varro and the Greek Letter Names

A fragment of Varro’s De antiquitate litterarum quoted by Priscianus (fr. 1 Funaioli = fr. 103 Wilmanns = fr. 40 Goetz-Schoell) reports a very interesting piece of information about the origins of the alphabet. This passage identifies a third ‘route’ alongside the two most widely known ones, Phoenician and Egyptian. Varro traces the letter-names back to a ‘Chaldean’ tradition and – what has hitherto gone unnoticed – suggests that the grammatonyms reflected directly the shape of the letters. Such an accurate information stems from a probable source, namely Berossus’ Βαβυλωνιακά (3rd century B.C.), epitomized by Lucius Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor (ca. 110-40 B.C., therefore a contemporary of Varro). Berossus, a priest of the Babylonian god Bēl- Marduk, was the eponym and promoter of the “Chaldean” culture or, better, of the “Chaldean” wisdom among Greeks and Romans. As far as we know, he attributed to the Chaldeans, among other things, the birth of writing. His mother tongue was Aramaic and, therefore, this explains why he could quote semantically transparent grammatonyms (think of well-known cases such as *alp “ox” and so on), exactly as reported by Varro in the fragment of De antiquitate litterarum.