Читать книгу Reception of Mesopotamia on Film - Maria de Fatima Rosa - Страница 14

The Book of Daniel constituted a fundamental vehicle for the knowledge of the final moments of the Neo-Babylonian empire before the archaeological discovery of Mesopotamia. The Book describes the events that contributed to the takeover of the city by the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great. However, given it was written during the second century BC,³¹ and is contextually dated to the government of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, there is a distance of about four centuries from the time it was written to the episodes it reports. Plus, despite Daniel being a captive who learned “the language and literature of the Babylonians,”³² becoming a reader of dreams, as an exiled he could hardly dissociate himself from his Jewish cultural and religious matrix. Thus, conflicts with the Babylonian authorities were soon felt.

As we read the Prophet’s Book, now that we are able to compare his account with the Babylonian sources exhumed during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations, an important question arises: why is Nabonidus, the last king of the eleventh dynasty of Babylon, not mentioned? We know that he was absent from the city for years,³³ settling in the desert of Tayma³⁴ and leaving his son Belshazzar (known in Akkadian sources as Bêl-shar-uṣur³⁵) in charge of the throne. Notwithstanding, his return to Babylon took place long before the fall of the empire³⁶ and he was the one who fought against the final incursion of the Persians. Daniel’s account includes the names of Nebuchadnezzar II and Belshazzar, but not a word is given about Nabonidus. Why did the Old Testament choose to forget him?

Several reasons may have contributed to this. One hypothesis is that Cyrus the Great, after the takeover, intended to denigrate (or even erase) the name of his predecessor. Cuneiform sources denote that there was already opposition to the Babylonian king within society. According to some accounts, possibly also instigated by Cyrus,³⁷ Nabonidus neglected the cult of the “national”³⁸ god Marduk, granting his preference to a deity who was not the patron of the city of Babylon, the lunar god Sîn.³⁹ The spheres linked to power, perhaps those associated with the cult of Marduk and the elite of scribes, certainly did not approve these circumstances.⁴⁰ It is therefore likely that a pro-Persian faction was formed within society. This group saw more benefits in Cyrus’s arrival than in the perpetuation of Nabonidus’s policies. Isaiah himself seems to corroborate the idea of the yearning for the Persian arrival, giving voice to the Babylonian exiles.⁴¹

Besides this campaign against the king, there is another factor that must have contributed to his obliviousness. The Book of Daniel states that Belshazzar is the son of Nebuchadnezzar,⁴² which leads us to consider the impact that the writer intended to achieve by making the first the direct descendant of the one responsible for Jewish captivity. The memory of the exile would last ad aeternum in the memory of the captives and the final ruin of Babylon would be forever associated with the acts perpetrated in the past. To evoke Nebuchadnezzar II meant placing the fall of the Mesopotamian empire in a successive line of events that had in its genesis the expatriation of the children of God, the improper occupation of their land, and the subtraction of their sacred relics.

The curious episode in which is narrated the madness that took over Nebuchadnezzar II during “seven times,”⁴³ and which finds no parallel in Mesopotamian sources, may also be associated not with this monarch but with his successor Nabonidus.⁴⁴ Transferring the supposed illness of Nabonidus⁴⁵ to the infamous Nebuchadnezzar meant imputing to him a divine punishment worthy of his actions and concluding in a remarkable way his cycle of misfortune. The only possible outcome would follow: the conversion to Yahweh’s religion. This episode would not go unnoticed by the cinema. In Slaves of Babylon (1953), Leslie Bradley gives body to the Mesopotamian monarch. In one of the most caricatured scenes in the film, Nebuchadnezzar harvests and tastes “grass like the oxen”⁴⁶ in his garden, leaning on his hands and knees as befits a human who has just lost his dignity.

Besides the madness of Nebuchadnezzar, another crucial event of the Book of Daniel is often portrayed in the cinema: the one in which the prophet is thrown into the lions’ den for remaining faithful to a god foreign to the precepts of other eastern religion(s).⁴⁷ However, the cinema often uses merely the idea transmitted by the prophet – the brutality of the punishment and the violence of the heretic monarch – often changing the context and the characters involved. Thus, in the Babylonian fiction presented in Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), when an insubmissive Christian girl descends into the lions’ pit after the ultimatum launched by the sovereign in order to submit to him, it is not so much survival through the call of the biblical God that is at stake, but the revolt against authoritarian power. The entire episode was certainly inspired by the account of the Book of Daniel as well as motivated by the persecutions of Christians in the time of the Roman empire. The fact that the young woman is designated in the film’s intertitles as “Christian” may be related to this aspect. DeMille had introduced an episode in his modern story set in ancient Babylonia as a means to alert to some disparities within society, namely the crossing between male and female roles. In doing so he mixed the ancient Mesopotamian legacy with Classical history. But he was not the only one to do so. The massacre of Christians is also presented in Lucien Nonguet’s Martyrs Chrétiens (1905). In a first sequence, the film exhibits a classic Roman arena where Christian sacrifices take place. A second sequence is dedicated to the punishment of Daniel in a scenario showing a bas-relief reminiscent of the statue believed to represent the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh⁴⁸ (Figure 1.2). The sequence and association between the two episodes is obvious.

Figure 1.2 Martyrs chrétiens, a film by Lucien Nonguet. Pathé frères, 1905. © Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.

Finally, from the Book of Daniel cinema retrieved the idea that the final ruin of Babylon was closely associated with the banquet. Showing all his irreverence and impiety, Belshazzar had the silver and gold chalices brought from the plunder of Jerusalem’s temple and with them entertained several guests. The banquet became a crucial theme in cinematographic narrative on Mesopotamia⁴⁹ as it highlights some aspects considered indivisible from this civilization: 1) Excess and exoticism; 2) Moral degradation – in addition to the meal, the banquet is usually presented on screen as a moment where all the pleasures of the body are satiated; and 3) Abandonment in the face of threat – the party accentuates a political choice that involves capitulation instead of war.