From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The daughter-in-law of Salmanassar

The king of the four quarters of the earth.[390]

But who was Sammuramat? Surprising as it may seem, she was, as scholars now concede, none other than Semiramis, the famous legendary queen of Assyria.

What a marvelous discovery! What a vindication of long suppressed truth! What an unexpected substitution of reality for fiction, of fact for fancy, of authentic history for myth and legend!

To no other woman of antiquity have there been attributed so many brilliant achievements as to Semiramis. Nor has any one of her sex during the last two thousand years and more, occupied a more conspicuous position in myth and legend, song and story.

From the time of Ctesias, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, until the latter part of the last century, there was no question about the main facts of her marvelous career. During all this time she was regarded as one of the most notable rulers of antiquity—as a queen of consummate military ability and exceptional statesmanship; as a ruler of vaulting ambition and as a conqueror whose dominions embraced the most flourishing regions of Asia and Africa. So great indeed was her reputed activity and genius that Strabo tells us tradition attributed to her all the most stupendous works along the Tigris and the Euphrates and even those in distant Iran.[391] Alexander the Great, it is said, found an inscription of hers on the frontier of Scythia, which was then considered the boundary of the inhabited world. In this inscription the famous queen declares:

Nature has given me the body of a woman but my achievements have made me the equal of the most valiant of men. I have ruled the empire of Ninus which on the east extends to the river Hinamanes, on the south to the country of incense and myrrh, and on the north as far as the Sacæ and the land of Sogdiana. Before me no Assyrian had seen any of the seas; I have seen four of them which were so distant that no one had ever reached them. I have forced rivers to flow where I wished them to, and I have wished them to flow only where they would be useful. I have rendered the sterile earth fecund by irrigating them with these rivers. I have erected impregnable fortresses. With iron I have made roads through impassable rocks. I have constructed for my chariots highways through places which the wild beasts themselves had never traversed. And in the midst of these occupations I have found time for my amusements and my pleasures.[392]

Zenobia and Cleopatra were distinguished for their beauty, their genius, and the brilliancy of their achievements, but, according to the testimony of Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, and other ancient historians, they were completely eclipsed by the wonder-working queen of Assyria. So great, tradition had it, were her abilities as a sovereign that two thousand years after her time the most eminent female rulers of their age were named after this extraordinary woman who had so impressed her personality on the West as well as on the East. Thus it is that Catherine II of Russia, who was almost the rival of Peter the Great, is known as the Semiramis of the North, while the same epithet is given to that remarkable sovereign, Queen Margaret de Valdemar of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

But when, in the second half of the last century, Orientalists began to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia, the majority of them soon showed a marked skepticism regarding the historical character of the renowned Assyrian queen. It was contended that there was no mention of her name in the Babylonian records during the period in which she was supposed to have lived and that the silence of these records respecting a ruler who, according to ancient writers, played so important a rôle in antiquity was conclusive proof that she never existed. It was furthermore asseverated that the work of Ctesias, which for so many centuries had been accepted as sober history, was no more than a romantic narrative which the progress of Assyrian research had completely discredited. And Semiramis, it was further averred, was not a woman of flesh and blood at all but an entirely mythical character,—merely a creation of Ctesias and having no existence outside of his elaborate romance which for more than two thousand years passed as serious history.

But scholars, while denying that Semiramis was the human personage she was so long believed to be, were unwilling to concede that she was nothing more than a mere arbitrary creation of the fertile imagination of a Greek romancer posing as a historian. The assumption that she was nothing more than a creature of fancy would, in view of her conspicuous position in the ancient world, be more difficult of acceptance than the age-old belief that she was really, as so long considered, the great queen and conqueror of Western Asia.