“When Josephus named Nebuchadnezzar as
builder of the [hanging] garden, both he and his readers would have been
confused between Nineveh and Babylon, and between Sennacherib and
Nebuchadnezzar, because at the time they were reading his account, the Book of
Judith was already in circulation”.
What a terrific
book! I read it in one go.
I am referring
to Stephanie Dalley’s The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder
Traced (OUP, 2013). Apart from her unscrambling of the Classical texts on
the subject of the Seven Wonders of the World, and being able to conclude that
it was not Nebuchednezzar II the Chaldean, but rather the Assyrian king
Sennacherib, who created the ‘hanging’ gardens that became so famed in
antiquity, Dalley provides an abundance of important information on
Assyro-Babylonian technology, art and architecture.
Despite the necessary technicalities, this book,
written by a most disciplined researcher - “a world expert on ancient
Babylonian language” - is easy to read and enjoyable.
In Chapter 6, “Confusion of Names”, Dalley makes this
important point (p. 107):
Several confusions have been identified. It would be
satisfactory if we could account for them, to strengthen yet further the
argument that the Hanging Garden was built by Sennacherib in Nineveh rather
than by Nebuchadnezzar or Semiramis in Babylon. Four distinct pairs of names
are relevant for tracing the story of the legendary garden: ‘Nebuchadnezzar’
named for Sennacherib, the city name ‘Babylon’ used for Nineveh, the river
‘Euphrates’ named instead of the Tigris, and ‘Semiramis’ confused with other
queens and with ‘Nitocris”. For each of them an explanation can be given.
[End of quote]
When reading
Dalley’s account here of name confusion, I was immediately reminded of the
situation right at the beginning of the Book of Judith, about which I have
written much. And, indeed, the point has not been missed on Dalley either. For
she writes on the next page (p. 108), referring to Judith as a “late” text (but
I would prefer to say a late copy of the original):
Sennacherib was evidently
confused with Nebuchadnezzar in several late texts. In the opening words of the
Book of Judith the two kings are confused: ‘It was the twelfth year of
Nebuchadnezzar who reigned over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh’.
When Josephus named Nebuchadnezzar as builder of the garden, both he and his
readers would have been confused between Nineveh and Babylon, and between Sennacherib
and Nebuchadnezzar, because at the time they were reading his account, the Book
of Judith was already in circulation.
[End of quote]
“Here, then, we have a group of material that indicates
attachment of Naqia’s deeds to the name ‘Semiramis’. As second wife of
Sennacherib, she bears comparison with the historical Sammu-ramat for having
her name on inscriptions written during her lifetime, and for supporting
publicly first her husband and then her own son, both as kings”.
Stephanie Dalley
Continuing with
Stephanie Dalley’s intriguing and helpful Chapter 6, “Confusion of Names” (The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder
Traced (p. 120):
An accretion of legends is attached to the name
‘Semiramis’ in Greek texts, and the use of the name for more than one woman can
be explained through that concept.
She was variously credited with leading campaigns with
her husband ‘Ninus’, and with building works in Babylon, among them the famous
Hanging Garden: Diodorus Siculus wrote that she founded a large city in
Babylonia on the Euphrates including the temple of the Babylonian Zeus and the
Hanging Garden (he does not actually name the city), and Quintus Curtius Rufus
wrote that Semiramis, not Bel, founded Babylon.
[End of quote]
An
original ‘Semiramis’ is posited by some writers to have been contemporaneous
with Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, obviously long before the days of Queen
Sammu-ramat. According to: http://www.rogerswebsite.com/articles/Man'sHistoryfromAdamtoAbraham.pdf
…. Hislop
identifies Ninus as Nimrod, the great hunter that defied God and built the
Tower of Babylon and his wife Semiramis and son Tammuz as the great trinity who
were worshipped all over Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Greece and Rome and other
cultures around the world.
Whilst Roy
Schulz - as we can read at the same site - takes Semiramis back to pre-Flood
times: “Aphrodite was the goddess of beauty and
sensual love. She was actually a harlot or prostitute! Venus was the wife of
Vulcan in pre-Flood times and so is the Semiramis of post-Flood history. She
was actually a very distasteful type of person”.
Queen Sammu-Ramat
and Naqia
Stephanie
Dalley, referring to who she thinks to have been the “original ‘Semiramis’”,
tells of this Queen Sammu-ramat (p. 121):
The original ‘Semiramis’ was a
historical queen at a time when Nimrud, not Nineveh, was the main royal
residence. If you were an Assyrian early in the 8th century BC you
would have known about Sammu-ramat, daughter-in-law of Shalmaneser III, wife of
Shamsi-Adad V, and mother of Adad-nirari III, because she was the most powerful
woman in the world at that time. You would know that she in person, contrary to
the custom of queens at that time, joined her son in a campaign to Arpad in the
vicinity of modern Aleppo with the result that her own name was inscribed on a
royal stela, as partner in heroism with her son the king. That stela was set up
on the border of Assyrian territory on the upper Euphrates, and was discovered
in recent times.
Dalley thinks
that this real event may have inspired the campaigns attributed to ‘Semiramis’
by the later writers: “The inscription shows without a doubt that Sammu-ramat
campaigned with her son, which suggests that the campaigns later ascribed to
Semiramis by Ctesias and others may have had some link, however tenuous or
garbled, with a genuine event”.
Two documents
similarly connect, now Sammu-ramat, now Naqia, to great Assyrian kings. Dalley
continues here:
The extent of [Sammu-ramat’s]
fame during her lifetime is confirmed by the existence of another stela,
inscribed only with her name and titles, found during excavations in the city
of Ashur on the Tigris, and first published in 1913:
Statue
… of Sammu-ramat the palace woman [means ‘queen’, ‘official consort’: Dalley]
of Shamsi-Adad king of the universe, king of Assyria, mother of Adad-nirari,
king of the universe, king of Assyria, daughter-in-law of Shalmaneser, king of
the four quarters ….
[End of quotes]
Compare this text with one that
Dalley now gives for Queen Naqia (on p. 124):
Naqia,
the palace woman of Sennacherib king of the universe, king of Assyria,
daughter-in-law of Sargon king of the universe king of Assyria, mother of Esarhaddon
king of the world, king of Assyria … a palace befitting royalty for Esarhaddon
my beloved son ….
[End of quote]
Based on my article:
Assyrian
King Sargon II, Otherwise Known As Sennacherib
I would immediately have to query here the mention of
“Sargon”, whose name I have shown to have been - in at least one case -
unjustifiably inserted by Assyriologists into a gap in a text.
Continuing on now with Dalley’s account of this latter
queen, Naqia, we read on the same page:
Naqia was closely associated
with Nineveh because her husband built two palaces there and made the city his
capital. Many letters were written directly to her, and we have a document
recording the loyalty oaths that she imposed on members of her family, requiring
them to support her two royal grandsons. Another text particularly relevant
here is that which records the building work she undertook at Nineveh on behalf
of her son Esarhaddon, who ruled vast territories including Babylonia ….
That is the text quoted (in small print) above.
Dalley continues, drawing a further connection of Naqia
with ‘Semiramis’:
Here, then, we have a group of
material that indicates attachment of Naqia’s deeds to the name ‘Semiramis’. As
second wife of Sennacherib, she bears comparison with the historical
Sammu-ramat for having her name on inscriptions written during her lifetime,
and for supporting publicly first her husband and then her own son, both as
kings. There was every reason, therefore, to conflate the two great queens, two
great builders, Naqia would be the wife of the later Assyrian king to whom
Diodorus referred when he wrote: ‘the Hanging Garden, as it is called, which
was built, not by Semiramis, but by a later Syrian [a Greek reference to
Assyrian: Dalley] king …’ His account that ‘Semiramis alongside a Ninus founded
‘Babylon’ on the Euphrates gives details that are applicable to Nineveh: two
palaces, technical details of water supply, walls adorned with hunting scenes.
A Religious
Revolution
“A strange religious revolution
took place in the time of Adad-nirari III, which can be compared with that of
the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton. For an unknown reason Nabu (Nebo), the god of
Borsippa, seems to have been proclaimed sole god, or at least the principal
god, of the empire”.
Francis D.
Nichol
The influence of two historical queens, Nefertiti and Naqia, ought not to be underestimated. Nefertiti may have been the one who religiously spurred on her husband, pharaoh Akhnaton, and may therefore have been instrumental in fostering the strange and somewhat Indic cult of Atonism in EA’s Egypt. If so, then she would have been acting just like the biblical Jezebel. For, the very first we hear of Queen Jezebel is in association with Baal worship (I Kings 16:31): “[King Ahab] also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him”.
And she, again, was apparently the wind beneath his idolatrous wings (I Kings 21:25): “… there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do wickedness in the sight of the LORD, because Jezebel his wife stirred him up”.
Likewise, Queen Semiramis may have been instrumental in the case of the (different) religious reform at the time of Adad-nirari III. Writing of “The Age of Semiramis” in his Chapter XVIII, Donald MacKenzie will make some interesting observations about her, including this one: “Queen Sammu-rammat of Assyria, like Tiy of Egypt, is associated with social and religious innovations”. Here is a part of MacKenzie’s intriguing account of this semi-legendary queen:
…. One of the most interesting figures in Mesopotamian history came into
prominence during the Assyrian Middle Empire period. This was the famous
Sammu-rammat, the Babylonian wife of an Assyrian ruler. Like Sargon of Akkad,
Alexander the Great, and Dietrich von Bern, she made, by reason of her
achievements and influence, a deep impression on the popular imagination, and
as these monarchs became identified in tradition with gods of war and
fertility, she had attached to her memory the myths associated with the mother
goddess of love and battle who presided over the destinies of mankind. In her
character as the legendary Semiramis of Greek literature, the Assyrian queen
was reputed to have been the daughter of Derceto, the dove and fish goddess of
Askalon, and to have departed from earth in bird form.
It is not quite certain whether Sammu-rammat was the wife of
Shamshi-Adad VII [we now take this as V] or of his son, Adad-nirari IV [III].
Before the former monarch reduced Babylonia to the status of an Assyrian
province, he had signed a treaty of peace with its king, and it is suggested
that it was confirmed by a matrimonial alliance. This treaty was repudiated by
King Bau-akh-iddina, who was transported with his palace treasures to Assyria.
As Sammu-rammat was evidently a royal princess of Babylonia, it seems
probable that her marriage was arranged with purpose to legitimatize the
succession of the Assyrian overlords to the Babylonian throne. The principle of
"mother right" was ever popular in those countries where the worship
of the Great Mother was perpetuated if not in official at any rate in domestic
religion. Not a few Egyptian Pharaohs reigned as husbands or as sons of royal ladies.
Succession by the female line was also observed among the Hittites. When
Hattusil II gave his daughter in marriage to Putakhi, king of the Amorites, he
inserted a clause in the treaty of alliance "to the effect that the
sovereignty over the Amorite should belong to the son and descendants of his
daughter for evermore". ….
As queen or queen-mother, Sammu-rammat occupied as prominent a position
in Assyria as did Queen Tiy of Egypt during the lifetime of her husband,
Amenhotep III, and the early part of the reign of her son, Amenhotep IV
(Akhenaton).
The Tell-el-Amarna letters testify to Tiy's influence in the Egyptian
"Foreign Office", and we know that at home she was joint ruler with
her husband and took part with him in public ceremonials. During their reign a
temple was erected to the mother goddess Mut, and beside it was formed a great
lake on which sailed the "barque of Aton" in connection with
mysterious religious ceremonials. After Akhenaton's religious revolt was
inaugurated, the worship of Mut was discontinued and Tiy went into retirement.
In Akhenaton's time the vulture symbol of the goddess Mut did not appear above
the sculptured figures of royalty.
What connection the god Aton had with Mut during the period of the Tiy
regime remains obscure. There is no evidence that Aton was first exalted as the
son of the Great Mother goddess, although this is not improbable.
Queen Sammu-rammat of Assyria, like Tiy of Egypt, is associated with
social and religious innovations. She was the first, and, indeed, the only
Assyrian royal lady, to be referred to on equal terms with her royal husband in
official inscriptions. In a dedication to the god Nebo, that deity is reputed
to be the protector of "the life of Adad-nirari, king of the land of
Ashur, his lord, and the life of Sammu-rammat, she of the palace, his
lady". ….
During the reign of Adad-nirari … the Assyrian Court radiated Babylonian
culture and traditions. The king not only recorded his descent from the first
Shalmaneser, but also claimed to be a descendant of Bel-kap-kapu, an earlier,
but, to us, unknown, Babylonian monarch than "Sulili", i.e.
Sumu-la-ilu, the great-great-grandfather of Hammurabi. Bel-kap-kapu was reputed
to have been an overlord of Assyria.
Apparently Adad-nirari desired to be regarded as the legitimate heir to
the thrones of Assyria and Babylonia. His claim upon the latter country must
have had a substantial basis. It is not too much to assume that he was a son of
a princess of its ancient royal family. Sammurammat may therefore have been his
mother. She could have been called his "wife" in the mythological
sense, the king having become "husband of his mother". If such was
the case, the royal pair probably posed as the high priest and high priestess
of the ancient goddess cult--the incarnations of the Great Mother and the son
who displaced his sire.
The worship of the Great Mother was the popular religion of the
indigenous peoples of western Asia, including parts of Asia Minor, Egypt, and
southern and western Europe. It appears to have been closely associated with
agricultural rites practised among representative communities of the
Mediterranean race. In Babylonia and Assyria the peoples of the goddess cult
fused with the peoples of the god cult, but the prominence maintained by Ishtar,
who absorbed many of the old mother deities, testifies to the persistence of
immemorial habits of thought and antique religious ceremonials among the
descendants of the earliest settlers in the Tigro-Euphrates valley. ….
It must be recognized, in this connection, that an official religion was
not always a full reflection of popular beliefs. In all the great civilizations
of antiquity it was invariably a compromise between the beliefs of the military
aristocracy and the masses of mingled peoples over whom they held sway. Temple
worship had therefore a political aspect; it was intended, among other things,
to strengthen the position of the ruling classes. But ancient deities could
still be worshipped, and were worshipped, in homes and fields, in groves and on
mountain tops, as the case might be. Jeremiah has testified to the persistence
of the folk practices in connection with the worship of the mother goddess
among the inhabitants of Palestine. Sacrificial fires were lit and cakes were
baked and offered to the "Queen of Heaven" in the streets of
Jerusalem and other cities. In Babylonia and Egypt domestic religious practices
were never completely supplanted by temple ceremonies in which rulers took a
prominent part. It was always possible, therefore, for usurpers to make popular
appeal by reviving ancient and persistent forms of worship. As we have seen,
Jehu of Israel, after stamping out Phoenician Baal worship, secured a strong
following by giving official recognition to the cult of the golden calf.
MacKenzie now
proceeds to draw his hopeful religious parallel between EA and Sammuramat
alongside Adad-nirari III:
It is not possible to set forth in detail, or with intimate knowledge,
the various innovations which Sammu-rammat introduced, or with which she was
credited, during the reigns of Adad-nirari … (810-782 B.C.) and his father. No
discovery has been made of documents like the Tell-el-Amarna
"letters", which would shed light on the social and political life of
this interesting period.
…. The prominence given to Nebo, the god of Borsippa, during the reign
of Adad-nirari … is highly significant. He appears in his later character as a
god of culture and wisdom, the patron of scribes and artists, and the wise
counsellor of the deities. He symbolized the intellectual life of the southern
kingdom, which was more closely associated with religious ethics than that of
war-loving Assyria.
A great temple was erected to Nebo at Kalkhi, and four statues of him
were placed within it, two of which are now in the British Museum. On one of
these was cut the inscription, from which we have quoted, lauding the exalted
and wise deity and invoking him to protect Adad-nirari and the lady of the
palace, Sammu-rammat, and closing with the exhortation, "Whoso cometh in
after time, let him trust in Nebo and trust in no other god".
