98

R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

rather that the recording of events themselves is always secondary to the recording of
the passage of time. For a text to be considered a chronicle, it must have a chronogra-
phical framework that is maintained as an organizing feature even when no historical
events correspond to a particular entry in the framework.
That primacy of the chronological framework, in turn, helps define a key secondary
characteristic of the genre: the need for the framework imposes brevity, to a greater or
lesser degree, on any events that are recorded. Brevity and the primacy of chronology
are precisely what give the genre its utility: the chronicle gives readers the ability to
apprehend the passage of historical events across a very long span of time, but within
a very small space. For that reason, the genre flourished for millennia despite its ob-
vious lack of detail and nuance by comparison to other historical forms: the primacy
of reckoning time over all other concerns imposed brevity in the describing of events;
the need for brevity produced a particular style - telegraphic, paratactic, and lacking
lengthy authorial analysis and commentary; and the combination of chronology and
brevity gave the genre its utility. As Cicero said of Atticus’ pioneering Latin chronicle,
the reader was now able to grasp history uno a conspectu, “at a glance.”12 No other genre
concerned with past time could do that, and it was what chronicles were for.
In sum, one could say that a chronicle is any historical work that in its style, struc-
ture and content can be placed within the tradition of similar works that extends
unbroken from the beginning of the second millennium BC to the third quarter of
the second millennium AD and beyond: more than three and a half thousand years,
the longest unbroken historical tradition of any historical genre in western literature.
Such a definition of course necessitates a very brief exposition of the evolution of
those historical texts of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world that can
be defined as chronicles, and such a description will be a useful baseline of comparison
from which to return to Malalas later.
The direct ancestor of the late antique and medieval chronicle took shape in
Greece in the third century BC, but these Hellenistic chronicles developed out of a
much older historiographical tradition. In fact, it seems likely that the Greek chron-
icle tradition was inspired by the much earlier tradition of Near Eastern chronicles,
transmitted in the rich intercultural zone that was Asia Minor and the Levant. The
first ancient Near Eastern chronicles belong to the Old Babylonian period in the eigh-
teenth century BC and are slightly expanded king-lists, a chronicling tradition then
copied by the Assyrians. These latter, however, also compiled /zwwzz-lists, which were
lists of the eponymous magistrates who gave their names to each year, as archons did
in Greece and consuls in Rome. Lzwwzz-lists are thus the equivalent of Roman con-
sular fasti, while annotated /zwwzz-lists, which also survive, are the precise equivalents
of Roman consularia (annotated consular fasti, which we will consider further below).
Then, in the Neo-Babylonian period, we find chronicles organized by the regnal years
of successive kings and listing important events under each year.13 The impact of this
12 Cicero, Brutus 15.
13 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 63-80.