From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

If, then, she was neither a human being nor a mere figment of the imagination, what was she? Scholars, and especially Orientalists, felt the necessity of finding a plausible, if not a satisfactory, answer to this question which became daily more and more insistent. To obtain such an answer they ransacked, as never before, oriental history, mythology, and archæology and with results which, at least to themselves, seemed beyond question.

Semiramis [declares an eminent Orientalist] is not a human personage, but a divinity whom legend, as so often happens in similar cases, transports into the domain of human affairs. Diodorus says formally that she was adored as a goddess and declares that her cult had two principal seats, Assyria and the city of Ascalon in Philistia.... That she was, of a truth, a goddess is evinced by her being the daughter of Derceto as well as by the traditions respecting her birth and by her final metamorphosis, which have all a distinctly mythological color.[393]

Another distinguished Orientalist is positive that “Semiramis was the name not of a human queen but of the goddess Istar whose legend was nationalized by the Persian historians and their Greek followers.”[394] “The name of Semiramis,” he will have it, “belongs not to Babylonian history but to Greek Romance.”[395] He accentuates this statement when he asserts that Ctesias, the creator of Semiramis, who is only the Greek Aphrodite, based his history in great measure on Persian annals which “like those of Firdusi or of later Arabian writers consisted for the most part of mere legendary tales and rationalized myths,” in which we have to seek “not the history but the mythology of the Babylonians.”[396]

Another noted scholar writes a learned paper to prove that “Semiramis is not an historical queen whose legend was enriched in later times with elements borrowed from a religious myth,” but that “she is primarily a goddess, and becomes a quasi-historical queen only by virtues of that euhemerism which in the East is so much older than Euhemerus.”[397]

For several decades these and other distinguished scholars endeavored to account for the origin and exploits of Semiramis in a way that would relieve them from the necessity of conceding that she was either an arbitrary creation of Ctesias or, as historians so long taught, an actual Assyrian queen. Insisting that the character of Semiramis is unmistakably that of the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte, some accounted for her historical character by assuming that she was but an eastern myth translated into “the semblance of a history that would be creditable to the Greeks.” Others maintained that she was the daughter of the fish-goddess Derceto, while still others quite as vigorously contended that “the legend of Semiramis originated in Lydia,” whence it found its way to Persia where Persian imagination transformed the daughter of a fish-goddess into a Babylonian queen. Then again it was asserted that the Semiramis legend arose from the commingling of exaggerated accounts of a royal Assyrian lady named Sammurat and certain myths regarding the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar and the Canaanite Astoreth. To this Semiramis, as to the great Sesostris of Egypt, the Greeks in course of time assigned most of the stupendous works in Asia Minor which were of Hittite or Assyrian origin. Smith, as the result of an exhaustive investigation, comes to the conclusion that “Semiramis is a name and form of Astarte and the story of her conquests in Upper Asia is a translation into the language of political history of the diffusion and victories of her worship in that region.”[398]

But while Orientalists were cudgeling their brains in the vain endeavor to solve the problem on which they had wasted so much midnight oil, Dr. Andræ and his associates of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft unexpectedly made their astounding discovery among the ruins of Assur. By a single stroke of the pick they nullified the carefully constructed theories of nearly a half century and proved beyond peradventure that the romantic and mysterious Semiramis was neither an Aramæan goddess, nor the arbitrary creation of a Persian poet, nor the figment of a Greek romancer, but an actual personality who was closely related to some of the best known sovereigns of Assyria. As the wife of Shamsi-Adad V and the mother of Adadinari IV and the daughter-in-law of Salmanassar III, who reigned over Assyria from B.C. 860 to 826, the place of Semiramis in history is henceforth as certain and as fixed as is that of Sargon II or Tiglath-pileser IV, two of the most brilliant monarchs who ever presided over the destinies of the vast empire of Assyria when in the apogee of her power and splendor.

That romance has so long been busy with the name of Semiramis as to leave small space for history; that the myths about Derceto and Astarte and Ashtaroth were in the course of ages attached to the Assyrian palace lady who made so great an impression on her contemporaries is not an exceptional occurrence. Similar myths and romances have clustered about the names of Alexander the Great, about Charlemagne, about Harun-al-Rashid, about Frederick Barbarossa, about Dietrich von Bern, and other notabilities of ancient and mediæval times.[399]

But the veils of myth and legend and romance, which have so long enveloped the commanding personality of Semiramis, are finally torn away and reveal a woman, like her namesake of Russia, of rare ability and forcefulness, and that at a time when and in a land where participation in public affairs on the part of women was absolutely taboo.[400]

I have dwelt somewhat at length on the fascinating romance of Semiramis because it is so interesting an illustration of the extraordinary progress which the new science of Assyriology has made during the last few decades; because it illustrates how difficult it is in the annals of the nations of western Asia to separate myth and legend from authentic history; because it shows how gradually we are acquiring a more thorough and exact knowledge of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia than was possible for a Berosus or a Herodotus to obtain; and, lastly, because it exhibits in bold relief the importance of the work which the Germans, especially the members of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, have for years been quietly accomplishing in the valley of the Tigris from the source of this storied river in the highlands of Kurdistan to the alluvial plains of ruin-besprent Babylonia.

The first two days after leaving Assur we found but little along the river to attract us from our smoothly-gliding kelek. We encountered, it is true, occasional eddies, or reaches in the river where the current was more rapid than usual, or where small islands were so numerous that navigation was somewhat intricate, but we rather enjoyed this as it roused our crew from their habitual lethargy and from their chronic disposition to spend all their time in kaif. We also met with quite a number of breakers which extended across the river, but none of them were so violent as that of the Zikr ul Aawaze. Many have maintained that the largest of these rapids are due to the ruins of bridges that spanned the Tigris in ancient times, but it seems more probable that they were caused by the ruins of dams which were constructed by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia “to insure a constant supply of water to the innumerable canals which spread like a network over the surrounding country.” This seems clear from what Strabo says of them, although he himself seems to think that they were built to prevent hostile fleets from ascending the rivers of Mesopotamia and Susiana.