NINEVEH THAT GREAT CITY

Transcription

1 ISSUE 7 // KARWANSARAY PUBLISHERS DEC / JAN 2017 US/CN $10.99 // NINEVEH THAT GREAT CITY THEME - SENNACHERIB'S PALACE // ISHTAR // WHY DID ASSYRIA COLLAPSE? // XENOPHON SPECIALS - HYPATIA // CONSTANTINE THE GREAT // FACT-CHECK: MARATHON // THE SCEPTICS

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3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Publisher: Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier Managing Director: Jasper Oorthuys Editor: Jona Lendering Contributing Editor: Josho Brouwers Proofreading: Naomi Munts, Marie Smit-Ryan Design & Media: Christianne C. Beall Design 2016 Karwansaray Publishers Contributors: Kees Alders, Radu Alexander, Maura Andreoni, Sidney E. Dean, Marc DeSantis, Roel Konijnendijk, Sean Manning, Daan Nijssen, Andrei Pogăciaș, John Richardson, Sara Van Hoecke, Lauren van Zoonen Illustrators: Milek Jakubiec, Julia Lillo, Maxime Plasse, Radu Oltean, Vilius Petrauskas, Graham Sumner Advice: Alessandro Frassine, M. Piacentino, David Stronach, Suzanne Bott, Mary Prophit, Diane Siebrandt Print: Grafi Advies Editorial office PO Box 4082, 7200 BB Zutphen, The Netherlands Phone: (NL), (Europe), (US) Customer service: Website: Contributions in the form of articles, letters, reviews, news, and queries are welcomed. Please send to the above address or use the contact form on Subscriptions Subscriptions can be purchased at via phone, or by . For the address, see above. Distribution Ancient History Magazine is sold through retailers, the internet, and by subscription. If you wish to become a sales outlet, please contact us at service@karwansaraypublishers.com Copyright Karwansaray B.V. All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written consent of the publishers. Any individual providing material for publication must ensure that the correct permissions have been obtained before submission to us. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but in few cases this proves impossible. The editor and publishers apologize for any unwitting cases of copyright transgressions and would like to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged. Articles and the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the editor and/or publishers. Advertising in Ancient History Magazine does not necessarily imply endorsement. THEME: We take a look at Nineveh, the last capital of the ancient Assyrians, who were the first to unite the Near East NINEVEH, THAT GREAT CITY The rise and fall of Nineveh A city without rival The wonder of Nineveh The palace of King Sennacherib Survival of the fittest Counting the words that remain The Lady of Heaven Ištar of Nineveh SPECIAL FEATURES 6 Superhuman features The colossus of Constantine Caught between religions The death of Hypatia Birds greeting emperors The parrot in antiquity DEPARTMENTS 4 Prolegomena Editorial, on the cover, and more 47 Fact-check A clash of civilizations? Why did Assyria collapse? A look at the imperial structure The ruins of empire Xenophon's visit to Nineveh Discovering Assyria Nineveh in the 19th century Moors and mountains The Romans in Scotland Fundamental uncertainty The philosophy of the sceptics Book reviews Recent writing on the ancient world How do they know? How to reconstruct ancient texts Ancient History Magazine is published every two months by Karwansaray B.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands. PO Box 1110, 3000 BC Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ISSN: Printed in the European Union. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos are copyright Karwansaray Publishers or Livius.org. THE WRITE STUFF There are many ancient languages. But how do we determine the most important ones? HELLO BIRDY In antiquity, parrots were a source of wonder (and an exotic ingredient for Roman chefs). Ancient History Magazine 7 3

4 PROLEGOMENA PROLEGOMENA Editorial I was nineteen years old, serving as a soldier, when I read about Mesopotamia for the first time. When you think about it, that is quite late. After all, the ancient Near East witnessed many firsts : agriculture, sanctuaries, domesticated animals, metal working, interregional trade, monumental architecture, cities, the wheel, writing, empires, literature, mathematics all quite important, all documented for the first time in the land of the Euphrates and Tigris, all practically ignored when I went to high school. This blind spot is the consequence of a western view on history, which uses a kind of template. In this view, the people of the ancient Near East were deeply religious and tended towards obscurantism, while the Classical West invented rationalism, philosophy, science, art, freedom, democracy. Growing interest in the Greeks and the irrational and the publication of thousands of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia a corpus that is about as large as all Latin literature (see page 26) have made this template obsolete. To the list of Mesopotamian firsts, we can now add early forms of scientific thought. Still, the two great Mesopotamian civilizations, Babylonia in the south and Assyria in the north, are not as well-known as Greece, Rome, or Judaea. This may have been one of the reasons why heritage organizations received so little support when vandals started to loot the ancient sites of Iraq in 2003, a process that gained momentum after the Arabian Spring, and has reached its nadir with the demolishing of archaeological sites by IS terrorists. Although vandals, terrorists, and the buyers of illegal antiquities do their best to erase the cradle of civilization from history, it is ironic that they achieve precisely the opposite: because of the destruction of so many ancient sites, there has been more attention for the old cultures of the Near East than ever. This issue of Ancient History Magazine will not repair the damage but can give you a sense of the scope of the first world empire of Antiquity. AHM Jona Lendering Editor Ancient History Magazine Hiatus: Texts Ancient texts were written on scrolls of papyrus. The vulnerability of this writing material forced ancient library owners to have their scrolls copied about every hundred years, which was a great effort. One solution was to replace the scrolls with parchment books, which were more durable. They were also more expensive, but the fact that papyrus ultimately went out of fashion proves that parchment was considered a good investment. Still, all texts had to be copied and if there was no immediate audience, library owners would not waste money on them. To put it simply: every ancient text was bound to disappear sooner or later unless it continued to find a readership and people willing to pay for copies. Therefore, much ancient literature has been lost. Nobody was interested in the last book of Polybius World History, in which he told about his sources. The poetry of Sappho went out of fashion, was not copied, and is now lost except for some 200 fragments. Of the twelve large poems 4 Ancient History Magazine 7

5 On the cover The cover, made by Radu Oltean, shows a scene in the Lachish Room of the Palace of King Sennacherib in Nineveh. The king himself is based on a relief from Khorsabad that constituted the Greek Epic Cycle, only the Iliad and the Odyssey survive: about one third of the entire corpus. A surprisingly great number of ancient texts have survived in only one copy, which shows how vulnerable the process of transmission was. If this one copy was damaged, the contents are forever lost. The final chapters of Aristotle s Poetics are missing, perhaps because the last part of a scroll was torn off. The same can be said about the manuscript of the six first books of Tacitus Annals: there is a gap at the end of Book 5 and the beginning of Book 6, which suggests that several leaves of a book have disappeared. Only occasionally, something important is added to the corpus of ancient texts. In Herculaneum, one of the towns destroyed when the Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, burnt scrolls have been found: a library with texts by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. Two years ago, new fragments of Sappho surfaced. The number of authentic plays by Euripides rose from eighteen to nineteen when in 2007 a large part of the Phaethon was rediscovered. (Seventy-six plays are still lost.) Discoveries like these are exceptional. The Roman writer Suetonius published Lives of famous prostitutes and Physical defects of man but we will never know what is behind these intriguing titles. This is very disappointing, but on the other hand, this lack of evidence leaves us free to speculate about the lyrics of Nero s song about the destruction of Troy. AHM that is now in the Paris Louvre; the courtier is inspired by representations on reliefs from Khorsabad and Nineveh. King Sargon II (right) and his son Sennacherib (left) on a relief from Khorsabad, now in the Louvre, Paris. THE NUMBER: 753 When Rome had become a great power, it would occasionally build completely new cities. There was an official ritual for this and it could be said that these new towns had been built in a particular year. This made the Romans believe that the founding of their own city had been a precisely datable event as well. Today, we think that this was the wrong question. There were peasants living in what is now called Rome as early as the second millennium BC; their villages clustered together during the Iron Age; this conglomerate would become a real city in the course of some two centuries. Unlike later city foundations, Rome wasn t built in a day. Still, the Romans tried to establish a year in which their city had been founded. Towards the end of the third century BC, a historian named Fabius Pictor thought that it was the first year of the eighth Olympiad, which is between the summers of 748 and 747 BC. His contemporary Cincius Almenus believed it was 728/727, and one generation later, Marcus Porcius Cato pointed at 752/751. This date was also used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, and Velleius Paterculus. In the mid-first century BC, Marcus Terentius Varro said that Rome had been founded in 754/753. As it happens, we know how he arrived at this date. Erroneously believing that Rome had become a republic in 509/508, he added thirty-five years for each of Rome s seven kings. This is clearly an unscientific approach. Of all possible dates, the date that is nowadays most often given for the foundation of Rome, the year 753 BC, is the only date about which we know why it is wrong. AHM Correction On page 3, you will find some small print: unless otherwise indicated, all photos Karwansaray Publishers or Livius.org. Other photographers are credited more fully and we regret that we forgot, in our sixth issue, to mention the Satricum Project of the University of Amsterdam for the photos on page Ancient History Magazine 7 5