The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max

We may assume in explanation that the tradition of Hither Asia has ascribed to the first king and queen of Assyria the construction of the ancient road over the Zagrus, of old dykes and aqueducts in the land of the Euphrates and Tigris, the building, not of Nineveh only, but also of Babylon, the erection of the great monuments of forgotten kings of Babylon—as a fact, Assyrian kings built in Babylon also in the seventh century. We may find it conceivable that this tradition has gathered together and carried back to the time of the foundation all that memory retained of the acts of Assyrian rulers, the campaigns of conquest of a long series of warlike and mighty sovereigns, the sum total of the exploits to which Assyria owed her supremacy. Yet against such an origin of this narrative doubts arise not easy to be removed. It is true that when this tradition explains the mode of life and the clothing of the kings of Asia, and the clothing of the Medes and Persians, from the example of Semiramis, who wore in the camp a robe, half male and half female (p. 6); when this tradition derives the inaccessibility of the kings of Asia and their seclusion in the palace from the fact that Ninyas wished to hide his excesses, and appear to his subjects as a higher being—traits of this kind can be set aside as additions of the Greeks. To the Babylonians and Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, the life and clothing of their rulers could not appear contemptible or remarkable, nor their own clothing half effeminate, though the Greeks might very well search for an explanation of customs so different from their own, and find them in the example and command of Semiramis, and the example of Ninyas. And if in Herodotus the empire of the Assyrians over Asia appears as a hegemony of confederates,[14] this idea is obviously borrowed from Greek models. The opposite statement of the division of the Assyrian kingdom into satrapies, the yearly change of the contingents of troops, comes from Ctesias, who transferred the arrangements of the Persian kingdom, with which he was acquainted, to their predecessors, the kingdom of the Assyrians, or found this transference made in his authorities, Persian or Mede, and copied it.

Yet, after making as much allowance as we can for the amalgamating influence of native tradition, after going as far as we can in setting apart what may be due to the Greeks, how could such an accurate narrative, so well acquainted with every detail of the siege of Bactra, and the battle on the Indus, have been preserved for many centuries in the tradition of Hither Asia, retained even after the overthrow of Assyria, and down to the date when curious Greeks, 200 years after the fall of Nineveh, reached the Euphrates and Tigris? We possess a positive proof that about this time, in the very place to which this tradition must have clung most tenaciously, within the circuit of the old Assyrian country, no remembrance of that mighty past was in existence. When, in the year 401 B.C., Xenophon with his 10,000 marched past the ruins of the ancient cities of the Assyrian kingdom, the ruins of Asshur, Chalah, and Nineveh, before Ctesias wrote, he was merely told that these were cities of the Medes which could not be taken; into one of them the queen of the Medes had fled before the Persian king, and the Persians, with the help of heaven, took and destroyed it when they gained the dominion over Media.[15] From the Assyrians, therefore, Herodotus and Ctesias could not have obtained the information given in their statements about Ninus and Semiramis, nor could their knowledge have come from the Babylonians. The tradition of Babylonia would never have attributed the mighty buildings of that city and land to the queen of another nation, to which Babylon had succumbed. Hence the account of the Greeks about Assyria and her rulers could only come from the Medes and Persians. But our narrative ascribes to Semiramis even the great buildings of the Median rulers, the erection of the royal citadel of Egbatana, the residence of the Median kings; the parks and rock sculptures of Media, even the rock figure on Mount Bagistanon (p. 7). This sculpture in the valley of the Choaspes on the rock-wall of Bagistan (Behistun) is in existence. The wall is not 10,000 but only 1500 feet high. It is not Semiramis who is pourtrayed in those sculptures, but Darius, the king of Persia, and before him are the leaders of the rebellious provinces. It was the proudest monument of victory in all the history of Persia. Would a Persian have shown this to a Greek as a monument of Semiramis? It would rather be a Mede, who would wish to hide from the Greeks that Media was among the provinces a second time conquered and brought to subjection.

The difficulty of ascertaining the sources of our narrative is still further increased in no inconsiderable degree by the fact that the books of Ctesias are lost, and that Diodorus has not drawn immediately from them, but from a reproduction of Ctesias' account of Assyria. Yet the express references to the statements of Ctesias which Diodorus found in his authority, as well as fragments relating to the subject which have been elsewhere preserved, allow us to fix with tolerable accuracy what belongs to Ctesias in this narrative, and what Clitarchus, the renewer of his work, whom Diodorus had before him, has added.[16] It is Ctesias who enumerates the nations which Ninus subdued (p. 3). With him Semiramis was the daughter of a Syrian and Derceto, who throws herself into the lake of Ascalon, and is then worshipped as a goddess there.[17] To Ctesias belongs the nourishment of the child Semiramis by the doves of the goddess, her rise from the shepherd's hut to the throne of Assyria. He represents her as raising the mountain or the tomb of Ninus; he ascribes to her the building of Babylon, its mighty walls and royal citadels, the aqueducts, and the great temple of Bel. He represented her as marching to the Indus[18] and afterwards towards Media; as making gardens there and building the road over the Zagrus. He represented her as raising the mounds over the graves of her lovers;[19] he told of her sensuality, of the designs of her sons by the first marriage, and the plot of Ninyas; he recounted her end, which was as marvellous as her birth and her youth: she flew out of the palace up to heaven with a flock of doves. If the conquest of Egypt by Semiramis also belongs to Ctesias,[20] the march through Libya, and the oracle given to her in the oasis of Ammon, together with the version of her death, which rests on this oracle (she caused herself to disappear, i.e. put herself to death, in order to share in divine honours), belong to Clitarchus.

      If, therefore, we may regard it as an established fact that our narrative has not arisen out of Assyrian or Babylonian tradition, that the views and additions of Greek origin introduced into it leave the centre untouched; if we have succeeded in discovering, to a tolerably satisfactory degree, the outlines of the narrative of Ctesias, the main question still remains to be answered: from what sources is this narrative to be derived? In the first attempt to criticise this account we find ourselves astonished by the certainty of the statements, the minute and, in part, extremely vivid descriptions of persons and incidents. Not only the great prince who founded the power of Assyria, and the queen whose beauty and courage enchanted him, are known to Ctesias in their words and actions. He can mention by name the man who nurtured Semiramis as a girl, and her first husband. He knows the names of the princes of the Arabs, Medes, Bactrians, and Indians with whom Ninus and Semiramis had to do. The number of the forces set in motion against Bactria and India are given accurately according to the weapon used. The arrangements of the battle beyond the Indus, the progress of the fight, the wounds carried away by Semiramis, the exchange of prisoners, are related with the fidelity of an eye-witness. Weight is obviously laid on the fact that after Semiramis had conquered and traversed Egypt and Ethiopia, after her unbroken success, the last great campaign against the Indians fails because she attacked them without receiving any previous injury. The message which Stabrobates sends to her, the letter which he writes, the reproaches he makes upon her life, the minute details which Ctesias gives of the relation of Onnes to Semiramis, of the conspiracy of the sons by this marriage, who felt themselves dishonoured by the conduct of their now aged mother, of the letter of the Mede, whose fidelity discovered the plot to her, of the speeches which Semiramis made on this occasion, carry us back to a description at once vivid and picturesque. If we take these pictures together with the account of Ctesias about the decline of the Assyrian kingdom, in which also very characteristic details appear, if we consider the style and the whole tone of these accounts of the beginning and the end of the Assyrian kingdom, we cannot avoid the conclusion that Ctesias has either invented the whole narrative or followed