On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

​​The new book Graham Hancock is writing is based on the history and mythology of Mesopotamia and the Levant, so I have been brushing up on my knowledge of Near Eastern literature. I recently read through the fragments of Ctesias’ Persica, the early fourth-century BCE account of Assyrian, Median, and Persian history that was more or less the defining version of Mesopotamian history for the Greeks, overshadowing Berossus’ more accurate work, which was written in response to Greek romances like those of Ctesias.

In reading through the fragments of the Persica, I came across an unusual story that I hadn’t heard before but struck me as quite resonant of something else. The story tells of the great (but semi-mythical) Assyrian queen Semiramis, the wife of the first great king, Ninus (also mythical), and the daughter of the Syrian goddess Atargatis (Derceto). Semiramis was inspired by the real queen Shammuramat, who ruled Assyria as regent for five years in the ninth century BCE. When the legendary version ruled in her own right after Ninus’ death, Ctesias tells us that she took many lovers and wantonly committed adultery in the open (Nicolas of Damascus in the Excerpta de insidiis), but she killed them all. There are two versions of the story. Diodorus (2.13) gives one version, which is probably not Ctesias’ original: “She forbore marrying lest she should then be deposed from the government, and in the mean time she made choice of the handsomest commanders to be her gallants; but after they had lain with her she cut off their heads.”
 
The second version of the story, closer to Ctesias’ own words, appears in both the fragments of John of Antioch preserved in the Excerpta Salmasiana and in George Syncellus’s Chronicle (p. 71), both times specifically attributed to Ctesias: “The famous Semiramis raised mounds of earth in many parts of the land, allegedly because of floods; but these were, in fact, the graves of her lovers, buried alive.”
 
It has long been recognized that the Semiramis story contains rationalized elements of mythological stories originally told about goddesses. For example, in the nineteenth century, scholars recognized in the birth of Semiramis from a fish goddess in the sea, where she was abandoned to be raised by doves, a story probably drawn on the birth of Aphrodite from the sea-foam. In the story of her dead lovers, scholars of the time saw a reflection of the famous Mesopotamian myth of Ishtar (Inanna) and Tammuz (Dumuzi), in which the goddess’ young lover is torn apart and dies each year after making love to her, as well as the passage in Table 6 of the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Gilgamesh, refusing Ishtar’s advances, recounts the carnage Ishtar visited on her many lovers.
 
This led me to an interesting observation in John Gilmore’s edition of the fragments of Ctesias, in which he compares this version of the story to a version given in the History of the Armenians of Movses Khorenatsi from the fifth century, in which the story of one of Semiramis’s lovers, Ara (or Arai) the Armenian, is about as close to a rationalized version of the story of Aphrodite and Adonis or Cybele and Attis as you might expect to find in a book of history. Since this story will be unfamiliar to most readers, I give it here in my translation from the French edition of the Armenian original:

Movses Khorenatsi
History of the Armenians 1.15
 
Ara, a few years before the death of Ninus, obtained the government of his homeland, deemed worthy of such a favor by Ninus, as (previously) his father Aram had been. But the shameless and voluptuous Semiramis (Armenian: Schamiram), having heard for many years of Ara’s beauty, burned with the desire to gratify her passion; however, she could not act openly. But after the death of Ninus, or rather (as I believe), after the flight of Ninus to Crete, Semiramis, now safely able to pursue her passion, sent messengers to the handsome Ara, with rich gifts, accompanied by earnest entreaties and magnificent promises, to urge him to come to her at Nineveh, to marry her and reign over the entire empire of Ninus, or simply to gratify her ardent passion, and then return in peace to his own states, laden with gifts.
 
Already the embassies had followed one another without interruption, and Ara still refused. Then Semiramis, furious at the failure of her entreaties, raised the whole multitude of her troops, hastened to arrive on the territory of the Armenians, and fell upon Ara. But it was evident that it was not so much to kill Ara or to rout him that she was thus hastening, as to subjugate him, to seize him to satisfy her passions; for having become mad with love at the mere description she had heard of Ara, as if she had seen him herself, she burned with an all-consuming passion. She hastened, throwing herself into the plain of Ara, called Ararat after his name. At the moment of engaging in combat, she ordered her generals to take care, if possible, to spare Ara’s life. But in the thick of the fray, Ara’s army was torn asunder, and he died in the battle, struck down by Semiramis’s soldiers. After the victory, the queen sent those who stripped the corpses to the scene of the battle to search among the dead for the object of her love. Ara was found lifeless among his brave comrades-in-arms. Semiramis had him placed on the terrace of her palace.
 
Meanwhile, as the Armenian troops rallied in battle against Queen Semiramis to avenge Ara’s death, she said: “I have ordered my gods to lick Ara’s wounds, and he will return to life.” She hoped by the power of her spells to resurrect Ara, so much had the fury of her passion led her astray.
 
But when the corpse had rotted, she had it thrown [by her servants] into a deep pit to hide it from everyone’s view. Then, having secretly disguised one of her lovers, she proclaimed the following news about Ara: — “The gods, by licking Ara’s wounds, restored him to life, and thus fulfilled our dearest wishes; so from now on we must worship and glorify them all the more, as the authors of our happiness and the fulfillment of our desires.” — Semiramis erected a new statue to the gods and offered sacrifices to it, as if the power of these gods had saved Ara. With the help of these rumors she spread throughout Armenia concerning Ara, Semiramis persuaded every soul and brought an end to the war.
 
As for everything concerning Ara, it is enough to speak of it in these few words: Ara fathered Gartos.

​Presumably, this story is a much later addition to the Semiramis myth, drawn explicitly on Classical models, but it is interesting to see how old stories were adapted to new contexts. (Some scholars such as María Paz López Martínez suggest it may derive from a lost Greek romance of Semiramis, similar to the Ninus Romance.) Ctesias’ version, which seems to rationalize and euhemerize stories of Mesopotamian goddesses (as John Gilmore and James George Frazer argued in the Victorian era, and those scholars that still study this, such as Matt Waters, do today), was written three or four decades before Euhemerus first tired to turn mythology into “true” history by rendering the gods as ancient humans.