Rediscovery of Sargon II
After centuries of Sargon being forgotten, there were important developments in Assyriology in the 19th century and the traditional reconstruction of Assyrian history became increasingly challenged in the scholarly community. In 1825,
Background
Sargon's death and its implications
Sargon II acceded to the throne of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BC.[1] By the time of his death in 705, he had ruled the empire with remarkable success for 17 years. Sargon significantly expanded the empire's borders, defeated its most prominent enemies and founded a new capital city named after himself, Dur-Sharrukin.[2] His final military campaign, directed to the notoriously difficult to control region of Tabal in southeastern Anatolia, ended in disaster as the Assyrian camp was attacked by Gurdî of Kulumma and Sargon was killed in the fighting, with the soldiers unable to retrieve his body.[3]
Sargon's legacy in ancient Assyria was severely damaged by the manner of his death; his battlefield death and the inability to recover his body was a major psychological blow for the empire.[3] The ancient Assyrians believed that unburied dead became ghosts (eṭemmu) that could come back and haunt the living;[3][4] these ghosts were further believed to have a miserable existence, being constantly hungry and restless.[5][6] Sargon's son and successor, Sennacherib (r. 705–681) was horrified by Sargon's death and believed that he must have committed some unforgivable sin which made the gods abandon him,[7] perhaps that he had offended Babylon's god upon his capture of that city in 710.[8] As a consequence of the theological implications of Sargon's death, Sennacherib did everything he could to distance himself from his father and never wrote or built anything in his memory; he transferred the capital to Nineveh[3][4] and worked to rid the empire of Sargon's imagery and works. Images Sargon had created at the temple in Assur were for instance made invisible through raising the level of the courtyard.[9]
Sargon in ancient sources
Due to Sennacherib's efforts, Sargon is scarcely mentioned in ancient sources. He was mentioned as an ancestor in the inscriptions of some later Assyrian kings, such as his grandson
The local population of northern Mesopotamia never forgot ancient Assyria or its most prominent rulers.[14] That Sargon was remembered in some capacity in Mesopotamia comes from scant later Aramaic-language sources. According to the 6th-century AD History of Karka, twelve of the then contemporary noble families of Karka (ancient Arrapha) were descendants of ancient Assyrian nobility, explicitly noted as living there in the "time of Sargon".[15] The personal name Sargon also survived, with there for instance being records of a priest at Mardin in the 8th century AD called Sarguno.[16] These scant sources had little impact on later scholarship in Western Europe, where knowledge of Assyria was mainly derived from the writings of classical Greek and Latin authors as well as the accounts of the Assyrian Empire in the Bible.[14]
Though some Assyrian kings, such as Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, are mentioned in multiple places in the Bible, Sargon's name appears only once (Isaiah 20.1) and he is unmentioned in Classical sources.[17] Early Assyriologists were puzzled by the appearance of the name Sargon in the Bible and tended to identify it as a second name of one of the better known kings, typically Shalmaneser V, Sennacherib or Esarhaddon.[18] Sargon is recorded in Ptolemy's 2nd century AD Canon of Kings as one of the rulers of Babylon, though under the Greek name Arkeanos. Though scholars found it difficult to identify Arkeanos, it was not the only name in the Canon of Kings at the time unsupported by other known sources. Various explanations were proposed for the identity of Arkeanos; as late as 1857, Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker suggested identifying Arkeanos as a brother of Sennacherib and a vassal ruler of Babylonia.[19][a]
Rediscovery of Dur-Sharrukin
Mesopotamia was long ignored by western archaeologists. Unlike other ancient civilizations, Assyria and other Mesopotamian civilizations left no magnificent ruins above ground; all that remained to see were huge grass-covered mounds in the plains which travellers at times believed to simply be natural features of the landscape.
Using funds secured by Mohl, Botta conducted extensive excavations at Nineveh. Because the ruins of the ancient city were hidden very deep below layers upon layers of later settlement and agricultural activities, Botta never reached them.
Academic developments
Sargon in early scholarship
Dependent on classical and Biblical information, early Assyriologists reconstructed the line of Assyrian kings as beginning with the legendary Ninus and Semiramis[b] in the 28th century BC, followed by a long gap where no rulers were known, and resuming with Pul,[c] Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and finally Sardanapalus,[d] under whom the Assyrian Empire fell. Ninus and Semiramis were sometimes omitted given that scholars doubted the historicity of their legend, but the sequence from Pul onwards was produced identically by virtually all scholars in the 18th century.[17][e] As mentioned, Sargon's name appearing only once in the Bible led scholars to identify the name as a secondary name of one of the more well-known kings; among others, Campegius Vitringa and Humphrey Prideaux identified Sargon with Shalmaneser, Robert Lowth identified Sargon with Sennacherib, and Perizonius and Johann David Michaelis identified Sargon with Esarhaddon.[18]
In the early 19th century, the straightforward academic vision of Assyria based primarily on the Bible began to be increasingly challenged. Particularly in German scholarship, the first half of the 19th century saw some historians suggesting that Sargon was a distinct historical king. The first historian to do so was Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller in 1825, who placed Sargon as Tiglath-Pileser's successor. Sargon was also counted as a distinct king by Wilhelm Gesenius in 1828, August Wilhelm Knobel in 1837, Heinrich Ewald in 1847 and Georg Benedikt Winer in 1849; he was sometimes placed after Tiglath-Pileser and sometimes after Shalmaneser.[30]
Dur-Sharrukin and cuneiform
Shortly after the finds at Dur-Sharrukin were publicized, the German Assyriologist Isidore Löwenstern was the first to suggest that the city had been constructed by the Sargon briefly mentioned in the Bible, though he also identified Sargon with Esarhaddon. Löwenstern's identification, published in 1845, was more of a bizarre accident than thorough scholarship. Löwenstern worked two years before cuneiform was deciphered and based his identification primarily on a relief from Dur-Sharrukin depicting a seaside city under Assyrian attack. In the inscription accompanying the relief, Löwenstern erroneously read Ashdod, a city mentioned in conjunction with Sargon in the Book of Isaiah. Löwenstern isolated the signs he believed to represent the king's name and, based on their resemblance to Hebrew characters, thought they spelled rsk, which he interpreted as Sarak, further interpreted as a version of Sargon. Though this analysis was wrong at every step, Löwenstern was by coincidence correct that the royal name in the inscription was Sargon.[13]
After the decipherment of cuneiform in 1847,[17] the French archaeologist Adrien Prévost de Longpérier in the same year confirmed that the name of the builder of Dur-Sharrukin was Sargon. This reading was also supported somewhat reluctantly by the British orientalist Henry Rawlinson in 1850, although Rawlinson still considered Sargon and Shalmaneser to be one and the same. Though some proponents of the traditional chronology of kings would remain undecided on the historicity of Sargon, translations of the inscriptions found at Dur-Sharrukin and further exhibitions of finds at the Louvre had made Sargon a textbook entity by the 1860s.[13]
An anonymous article in the
By 1886, there was no longer any dispute surrounding Sargon's existence; in that year Sargon received his own entry in the
See also
Notes
- ^ Duncker's proposal postdated the rediscovery of Dur-Sharrukin and the emergence of the idea that Sargon was a separate king. Recognition of Sargon's existence was closely followed by scholars recognizing him and "Arkeanos" as the same figure. In the same year as Duncker's proposal (1857), Julius Oppert and Joseph Bonomi the Younger had for instance already identified Sargon and "Arkeanos of Ptolemy" as the same king.[20]
- ^ Ninus is a purely legendary figure, with no analogue in actual Assyrian history. Semiramis was based on the historical 9th-century BC queen Shammuramat but misplaced in the chronology.[25]
- ^ "Pul" was used in later Greco-Roman texts as the name for Tiglath-Pileser III,[26] but was erroneously interpreted by western scholars as a separate king. The name was long entrenched in Assyriology, with scholars for decades after cuneiform was deciphered misreading inscriptions and trying to find a historical analogue.[27]
- Shamash-shum-ukin and Sinsharishkun.[28]
- ^ The Assyria reconstructed by Assyriologists prior to archaeological discoveries in Mesopotamia and the decipherment of cuneiform is so markedly different from the historical civilization that some scholars view it as a distinct intellectual construct referred to as "classical Assyria".[29]
References
- ^ Elayi 2017, p. 25.
- ^ Elayi 2017, p. 202.
- ^ a b c d Frahm 2017, p. 183.
- ^ a b Elayi 2017, p. 213.
- ^ Foster 2016, p. 278.
- ^ Helle 2021, A Poem for the Ages.
- ^ Elayi 2017, p. 241.
- ^ Brinkman 1973, p. 91.
- ^ Frahm 2014, p. 203.
- ^ Luckenbill 1927, pp. 224–226.
- ^ Karlsson 2017, p. 10.
- ^ Luckenbill 1927, p. 413.
- ^ a b c d Holloway 2003, pp. 70–71.
- ^ a b c d e Trolle Larsen 2017, pp. 583–584.
- ^ Payne 2012, p. 217.
- ^ Palmer 1990, p. 155.
- ^ a b c Holloway 2003, p. 68.
- ^ a b Holloway 2003, pp. 69–70.
- ^ Duncker 1863, p. 711.
- ^ Bonomi 1857, p. 520.
- ^ Reade 2018, p. 286.
- ^ Dalley 1993, p. 134.
- ^ a b c d e Trolle Larsen 2017, pp. 584–585.
- ^ a b c d Elayi 2017, p. 7.
- ^ Gera 1997, p. 68.
- ^ Frame 1992, pp. 303–304.
- ^ Holloway 2003, p. 74.
- ^ Rosa 2019, pp. 330–331.
- ^ Holloway 2003, p. 69.
- ^ Holloway 2003, p. 70.
- ^ Holloway 2003, p. 71.
- ^ Elayi 2017, p. 4.
Bibliography
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- Foster, Benjamin R. (2016). The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-90971-7.
- Frahm, Eckart (2014). "Family Matters: Psychohistorical Reflections on Sennacherib and His Times". In Kalimi, Isaac; Richardson, Seth (eds.). Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem: Story, History and Historiography. Leiden: ISBN 978-90-04-26561-5.
- Frahm, Eckart (2017). "The Neo-Assyrian Period (ca. 1000–609 BCE)". In E. Frahm (ed.). A Companion to Assyria. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-444-33593-4.
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- Helle, Sophus (2021). Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic. London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-25118-0.
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