His young son, Adad-nirari III, was too young to rule. By the time Shamshi-Adad died in 811 B.C., the empire was financially and politically weakened. King -Shamshi-Adad V appears to have spent a great deal of -resources in defeating his rebellious elder brother, who wanted to take the throne.
The empire that Ashurnasirpal II’s grandson inherited may have been stable and wealthy, but it did not stay that way for long. Some, I impaled upon the column on stakes and others I bound to stakes around it. I had a column built at the city gate and I flayed all the leaders who had rebelled and I covered the column with their skins. One inscription tells of the vengeance meted to rebels at one particular city of his realm: Ashurnasirpal II stabilized the empire, putting down revolts with a level of cruelty that he made no attempt to hide. This event is commemorated by the Banquet Stela, which recorded thousands of guests and a celebration that lasted for 10 days. Her husband was the grandson of Assyria’s great ruler, Ashurnasirpal II, a flamboyant monarch who built a magnificent palace at Nimrud in the early ninth century B.C. With these key facts in place, historians have formed a clearer idea of her significance, and know that she entered Assyrian history at a critical moment for the empire. , was married to King Shamshi-Adad V, who reigned from 823 to 811 B.C., and was the mother of King Adad-nirari III. Taken together, the four inscriptions establish at least the bare bones of her story: The queen definitely lived in the Assyrian Empire between the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. There are also two stelae, one from Kizkapanli, a town in present-day Turkey, and the other from Assur in Iraq, that mention her. In the ancient city of Nimrud (in modern-day Iraq), two statues dedicated to Nabu, the Babylonian god of knowledge and writing, mention her name. The question lingers: What did she achieve 2,800 years ago that so fascinated the world and allowed romantic legends to sprout around her legacy?Īrchaeologists have found four principal artifacts that offer at least some evidence to piece together her biography. The true story of the flesh-and-blood Sammu-ramat remains elusive. She later inspired the Italian medieval poet Dante, who placed her in his Inferno where she is punished for her “sensual vices.” The French Enlightenment writer Voltaire wrote a tragedy about her, which was later made into Rossini’s 1823 opera, Semiramide.
Classical authors attributed great accomplishments to Semiramis: commander of armies, and builder of the walls of Babylon and monuments throughout her empire. Some cast her as a beautiful femme fatale in a tragic love story. From here, the Assyrian queen passed from the world of facts into the realm of legend. She was Sammu-ramat, thought to mean “high heaven.” Her five-year rule, while brief, appears to have inspired long-lasting respect among her subjects and the world.Ĭenturies after her reign, Greek writers, and historians focused on Sammu-ramat and her achievements.
In the Neo-Assyrian regime of the ninth century B.C., one woman commanded an entire empire stretching from Asia Minor to what is today western Iran. But those who did rule made their mark on history. Female rulers in ancient Mesopotamia were rare.
0 kommentar(er)
