The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced
Page 13
So sturdily constructed were its canals, dams and aqueduct that they were able to survive the disasters of conquests by Medes, Babylonians and Persians. During the Achaemenid period, around the time when Herodotus was writing, the great satrap Arshama owned estates near to Nineveh and collected revenue from them.51 There continued to be a great incentive to repair and maintain the canals, dams and aqueducts of that region so that the flow of water for irrigation in general was not diminished.
Such a grand scheme linking a major hydraulic project with a superb palace garden can be linked to the king’s perception of himself as god-like (see Figure 32, Plate 13). Very early kings in Mesopotamia had occasionally presented themselves as gods by wearing the horned crown of divinity and by putting the cuneiform sign for ‘god’ in front of their written name. Much later, in the two centuries before the reign of Sennacherib, it was normal practice on monuments to show the Assyrian king standing with symbols of the great gods, such as sun-disc and lunar crescent, above and beside his head. At Maltai and Bavian, however, Sennacherib stood in the assembly of those same great gods who were there depicted in human form no larger than himself: king and gods stood side by side, although the gods were standing upon animals. This blatant style of self-promotion had a near-precedent in images of Ashurnasirpal II in his magnificent North-West Palace at Nimrud, a marvel of the 9th century. Since Ashurnasirpal was especially distinguished for having engineered a project for water supply with a fabulous palace and a garden, the achievements of those two kings are closely comparable, both exceptional, and may be seen as qualifications for claiming god-like status through the subtle use of images.52
Fig. 32 (a) Tentative reconstruction of the stone block at the weir where the canal led off, showing Sennacherib in company with deities, front and side views.
Fig. 32 (b and c) Reconstruction drawings, front and side views of the sculptured block that stood between the canal and a weir at Khinnis, showing the king in the company of great gods.
Subsequently tourists of late antiquity would have viewed the same installations in the vicinity of Jerwan, just as we still can today. The canals, dams and aqueduct were part of the wonder. The fame of the Hanging Garden, dependent on such brilliant works of engineering at the heart of Assyria, helped to disseminate to distant lands tales based essentially on the deeds of Sennacherib and his family.
Postscript
In the summer of 2012 the Italian Archaeological Mission to Assyria directed by Daniele Morandi Bonacossi reported the discovery of six unknown Assyrian rock relief sculptures. They represent a procession of deities along a stretch of canal probably built by Sennacherib at Faideh, a modern village located 10 km south of Maltai (see Figure 29). The remains of five aqueducts along the Khinnis canal were also identified.
6
Confusion of Names
… Assyria, a country remarkable for the number of great cities it contained, and especially for the most powerful and renowned of them all—Babylon, to which the seat of government was transferred after the fall of Nineveh
Herodotus, History I.179
And in ancient time Babylon was the metropolis of Assyria
Strabo, Geography XVI.1.16
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.
At the most fundamental level, the confusions can in part be understood from an ancient Mesopotamian concept known chiefly from mythology. In Sumerian myths the Sumerian word me represented the timeless notions of powers, arts and crafts, archetypal functions which the gods had bestowed on mankind. Among them was kingship. The Sumerian King-list, beginning with the words ‘When kingship descended from Heaven’, gives a specific example of how the concept of kingship comes from heaven and is then exemplified in the rulers of the different cities. Each one of the mes was regarded as a concrete object, an item of insignia which could be handed over physically from one person to another.1
The Sumerian myth Inanna and Enki gives a half-humorous account of how kingship, as an item that could be stolen, passed from one city to the next.2 Although it was transferred from one city to another according to changes of power, it was also available in every city—a paradox typical of many aspects of Mesopotamian thought which saw strength in multiplicity, in the liberality of ideas and possibilities. Among 110 or so abstract concepts including kingship are the many institutions of city life. Each king was a manifestation of the archetype of kingship. The concept exists outside time, independent of individual kings, but the name of a superlative example of the archetype could come to stand for the archetype itself. No doubt the much later Greek concept of ideal forms to which Plato refers in many of his works had something in common with the Sumerian expression for archetypes. In Mesopotamia the notion that more than one city could be a ‘Babylon’, or more than one queen could be a ‘Semiramis’, is never discussed in a philosophical context, but it can be teased out from various strands of information.
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. The Arab writer Tha’labi called Sennacherib ‘a king of the kings of Babylon’.3 One reason for confusion in Hebrew and Arab tradition is the result of military action: that both kings attacked Jerusalem, and so it was easy for later tradition to merge the two events, which were a mere century apart. Although Sennacherib did not in fact sack Jerusalem in 701, for he managed to collect punitive tribute without the need to do so, he had besieged the city. It was Babylon in 689 that he sacked, so in later times people conflated the two events because they fitted the wicked reputation of both kings. Also the name of Nebuchadnezzar was used by two pretenders in the time of Darius I presumably because they wished to associate themselves with an archetypal great king. Seleucid kings too deliberately associated themselves with him, promoting themselves with the promise of past glory restored. This reputation comes from the opposite polarity for Nebuchadnezzar’s fame. As a good king and a great builder he was comparable also with Sennacherib. In these ways both kings could stand as archetypes for the exceptional bad ruler and the exceptional good one.
How did Nineveh come to be known as Babylon? This seemed at first to be a question that defied a satisfactory answer, leaving only the feeble resort to a scarcely convincing explanation: muddle. Greek authors, one might argue, were so far away from Mesopotamia that they confused both its cities and its rivers, and had no particular interest in distinguishing between them. In the case of the cities this would be more plausible if the terrains of northern and southern Mesopotamia were not so very different, as would have been obvious to travellers, soldiers and administrators. Much better reasons can be suggested.
There are many occasions on which the reader of a Classical text suspects that Babylon and Nineveh have been confused. For instance, Xenophon wrote of Babylon as the capital of the Assyrians.4 The story of Sardanapalus dying in the flames of Nineveh, told by Ctesias, is generally reckoned to have taken some details from the death of Ashurbanipal’s brother in the flames of Babylon, thus confusing Nineveh with Babylon.5 This can now be identified as one of several events which Ctesias deliberately and mischievously transpose
d. Another example of ambiguity is found in the description Diodorus Siculus gives of how ‘Semiramis’ decorated her palace in Babylonia,
decorating them with scenes of a hunt, complete in every detail, of all sorts of wild animals, and their size was more than four cubits. Among the animals, moreover, Semiramis had also been portrayed, on horse-back, and in the act of hurling a javelin at a leopard, and nearby was her husband Ninos, in the act of thrusting his spear into a lion at close quarters.6
This fits the style known from hunting scenes in several Assyrian palaces, especially the lion hunts of Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh which include beardless horse-riders brandishing spears. By contrast the throne-room of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon has a static, heraldic design of lions and stylized palm trees, devoid of narrative content (see Figure 33).
Some of the arguments for Nineveh as a Babylon are derived from Sennacherib’s inscriptions. One approach is to compare the naming of the city gates in the two cities. The earliest writing of the name Babylon shows that the city was understood to mean ‘gate (bāb) of the god (ilim)’ or, in some ways of writing it, ‘of the gods’. The city gates were originally named along traditional lines of a kind that can be found in many of the world’s great cities, such as Westgate, North-gate, Eastgate and Southgate; King’s Gate, Great Gate and Little Gate. Babylon certainly had a King’s Gate, an East Gate and a Great Gate in early times. Almost as common are gates named after the speciality of their area: Market Gate, Canongate, Watergate, Smithgate, Bishops-gate. Babylon is known to have had a Market Gate. Also common is the gate named after the destination of the road that passes through it: London gate, Damascus gate, and so on. Babylon had its Akuṣ Gate, leading to the town Akuṣum. Most old cities have a mixture of such names.7 But Babylon had another set of names for the same gates, presumably more ceremonial than vernacular, named after deities: Ishtar Gate, Marduk Gate, Zababa Gate, Shamash Gate and Adad Gate. Those names are related to the understanding of the city’s name as ‘Gate of the Gods’, a name particularly appropriate for a city that played host to all the great gods of other ancient cities. The name implied that Babylon was the world centre of worship. Babylon’s gates had been named after gods since at least the 12th century, and very likely much earlier.
Fig. 33 (a–c) Decorative scheme of colour-glazed brick in the main court of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in Babylon: a continuous band of stylized plant motifs over long pillars; below the pillars, a continuous row of striding lions between bands of stylized plant motifs.
At Nineveh, imitating Babylon, Sennacherib rebuilt the city walls and named its new gates after the great gods, yet mostly retained an older name (see Figure 34). Once again he followed in the footsteps of his father, for Sargon had named his city gates at Khorsabad after the chief deities: Shamash, Adad, Enlil, Mullissu, Anu, Ishtar, Ea, Bēlet-ilī, Ashur and Ninurta.8 As at Babylon, the naming implied that each Assyrian royal city in turn laid claim to be a world centre where all the gods had dwellings.
To signify that a city and its cults were adopted by a royal capital, it is likely that a particular ceremony would mark the introduction. Models of cities shown on wall sculptures at Khorsabad are carried as tribute by foreign emissaries, showing a ceremony which may be linked to Sargon’s policy for making Khorsabad a world centre (see Figure 35).
Sennacherib gave ceremonial names to eighteen of the gates. Of the several listings known, the fullest put the divine names before the traditional ones that related to topographical features.9 Some of the gates or their names shifted as the work of construction and reshaping took place at Nineveh, as plans were modified and new walls and ditches constructed, but the general plan modelled on Babylon is clear. This would have made it appropriate for Nineveh to be known as a Babylon, a ‘Gates of Gods’ city. Sennacherib must have been aware of that, and is likely to have renamed the gates as a deliberate act to match his capital city with Babylon. The lists include a gate named after the god of gardens, Igisigsig ‘Green-green Eye’. Only Nineveh has a garden gate.
Fig. 34 (a) Sketch plan of the citadel of Babylon showing names of city gates.
Another argument is based on a mythological interpretation of Sennacherib’s most literary, hyperbolic inscriptions. One of them is written on the rocks above Bavian; another is inscribed on a clay cylinder. Sennacherib adapted a motif used by much earlier kings who described how an old regime had been swept away by a Flood, making way for a new and better order that rose up from the devastation.10 He contrasted Babylon, where he had caused a deliberate inundation, reducing it to bare, flooded ground after sacking it, with a new era in Nineveh after it too had been damaged—recently, by an accidental flood—as if Nineveh would take the place of annihilated Babylon in the centre of the world, a pivotal place of royal power and worship. His texts include passages that mythologize flood damage done to Nineveh by rivers in the recent past. By this manipulation of real events, Sennacherib portrayed himself as the refounder of Nineveh, superseding earlier foundations. Babylon sank into the waters of chaos as Nineveh arose from them.11
Fig. 34 (b) Sketch plan of the citadel of Nineveh showing names of city gates in the time of Sennacherib.
Fig. 35 Drawing from a sculpture panel from Khorsabad showing models of cities carried as tribute.
In early Sumerian mythology and history the city regarded as the cosmic centre of religious power was Nippur which lies to the south of Babylon. A myth told of a visit to its patron god Enlil from his son Enki, the god of water and wisdom, when a grand occasion was celebrated in the temple Ekur by all the great gods with a huge drinking competition.12 In another myth Nippur was the place where Enlil first created mankind.13 The city was also known as Duranki, the ‘bond of sky and earth’ where an umbilical cord linked the divine and mortal spheres. Those two spheres were themselves named as primeval deities, An-shar ‘sky-sphere’ and Ki-shar ‘earth-sphere’, and the main temple complex at Nippur had the name E-duranki, ‘House of the bond of sky and earth’.
Nippur was exceptional for being a leading religious and educational centre of Mesopotamia even though it had never held temporal power. Priests in temples, rather than kings in palaces, held sway there. It did not boast conquering kings, nor is it found in any version of the Sumerian King-list. Yet it lent its Sumerian temple name Ekur to temples in other cities, and Ekur became a loanword in Akkadian, ekurru meaning any temple, with a change to a generic sense. Its god Enlil and the powers he exercised, enlilūtu, became the epithet and attribute of other great gods, notably Marduk and Ashur, who raised themselves to greater eminence by means of this association. The Babylonian language easily formed abstract nouns according to a standard pattern šarru ‘king’—šarrūtu ‘kingship’, Enlil ‘the god Enlil’, enlilūtu ‘the power of Enlil’. In this way we see the archetype put into use.
Any other city which hoped to add the religious prestige of Nippur to its own aura of power would make use of imagery that originated there. As a relative late-comer in an early developing civilization, Babylon took its cue from that more ancient city. One of the titles and epithets bestowed on Marduk when he had built Babylon in the Epic of Creation was ‘Gilimma who established the cosmic bond of the gods’. With allusive subtlety the title implies that Marduk has taken over the power of Enlil, and that the world’s umbilical cord is now located also in his own city Babylon. Following the tradition established in Nippur, any great city such as Babylon, and eventually Nineveh and Nimrud, could lay claim to be the centre of the universe, but the claim was not exclusive.
The primeval traditions of Nippur were adopted and adapted in Assyria too. Ekur became used as a name for the temple of the Assyrian national god Ashur in his city Ashur.14 Enlil’s consort was Sumerian Ninlil, whose name in Assyrian, Mullissu—itself an esoteric play on the name of Enlil15—was a name for the consort of the god Ashur from quite early times, connecting with his title as ‘the Assyrian Enlil’. The great hymn to Ishtar, found in her temple at Nineveh, calls her ‘the one w
ho holds the bond of the holy firmament’.16 Not only Babylon, therefore, but also Assyria took various traditions of Nippur as a model to enhance their standing in the world. As we have seen, Sargon and Sennacherib adopted the term ‘high garden’ kirimāhu from the famous temple garden of Ninlil at Nippur, and the latter described Nineveh as the bond of sky and earth emanating from its patron goddess Ishtar, ‘the city beloved of Ishtar in which all the ceremonies of gods and goddesses take place, the eternal base, the everlasting foundation whose plan was drawn in the writing of the firmament at the beginning of time’.
Any city claiming to contain the cord linking heaven and earth could reinforce the claim by using the god Anshar ‘sky-sphere’ as a kind of catalyst. In Assyria a syncretism between Ashur or Ishtar and Anshar was plausible because their names were so similar. Such a similarity was regarded as significant, an innate meaning that scholars could discover by applying their own cleverness.17 The earliest spelling Anshar for Ashur is known from the 13th century BC, but became common during the reign of Sargon II. In his reign it is particularly significant because it is attested only in his inscriptions from Nimrud which he made his capital city while he was building Khorsabad. A hymn of Ashurbanipal to Ishtar of Nineveh makes the equation of Ishtar with Anshar clear: ‘Just like Anshar she wears a beard and is clothed with brilliance!’ despite the difference that she was a goddess and he a male god.18 This association means that Anshar would have had an important shrine within her temple at Nineveh; and some writings of Ishtar’s name imply that she too was regarded as a form of Anshar who symbolized the link, the point of attachment between heaven and earth, allowing the temple of Ishtar of Nineveh to claim that the sphere of heaven touched the sphere of earth there. Such subtle indications, expressed through minutiae of language and writing, are only beginning to emerge as more clay tablets are edited by treating different versions separately instead of listing variants as minor deviations from a supposedly fixed text: variation reveals the manipulators, reformers and modernizers at work.19