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1 1 i.e., Cyrus.

2 2 Isa. 48, 14.

3 3 Montero Fenollós 2012, p. 250.

4 4 Rev. 17, 5.

5 5 According to Van de Mierrop, Babylon was a true global city: “It was a city with people from all over the Babylonian empire and beyond: Medes from western Iran, Judeans from the Levant, Egyptians, and others, rubbed shoulders with Babylonians and other long-term residents of the region. Many still spoke their native languages – ‘a confusion of tongues’– and probably wore their distinctive dress. City quarters with people of diverse origins existed, each with their own atmosphere, smells, and sounds. This is a Babylon we can only imagine” (Van de Mierrop 2003, p. 273).

6 6 i.e., the Book of Revelation.

7 7 Seymour 2014, Chapter 3: “Tyrants and wonders: The biblical and classical sources”.

8 8 The episode of the fall of Jerusalem is the theme of the German film Jeremias (1922). About its plot, vide Horak 2005, pp. 29–30.

9 9 Reinhartz refers to the common use in biblical films of familiar illustrations from the Bible such as those by Gustave Doré or by James Tissot (Reinhartz 2013a, p. 25).

10 10 Born William Schloss, from a Jewish family.

11 11 We should also bear in mind that the Star of David is a symbol present in the flag of the State of Israel, founded only five years before the shooting of the film in question. We will discuss this in Chapter 7.

12 12 2 Chron. 36, 20.

13 13 2 Kings 25, 29. Vide also Jer. 52, 32.

14 14 Although he may be a composite figure and although he was also a captive, prophet Daniel himself circulated freely within the king’s court. As his Book attests, he won the trust of the monarch. He and his colleagues “they entered the royal service” (Dan. 1, 19). As a dream interpreter, he was certainly in close proximity to the king. So, it is likely that Daniel had the right to enter the palace to give information to the him on matters regarding divination and the welfare of Jews (Wiseman 1991, 98).

15 15 Geographical name that must correspond to the area of ​​ancient Sumer.

16 16 Gen. 11, 4.

17 17 Montero 2010b and 2011.

18 18 From the Sumerian “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”.

19 19 As one of Etemenanki’s founding cylinders indicates, he himself carried out the project started by his father Nabopolassar with the following plan: “set to work on finishing E-temen-anki (to) the top so that it vied with the heavens” (George 2011, p. 167). See also Montero 2010b, p. 67. On the so-called Tower of Babel Stele, where the measures of the monument are presented, see George 2011.

20 20 AJ 1.113–114.

21 21 Gen. 11, 7.

22 22 Gen. 10, 9.

23 23 Petrovich 2013, p. 227, and Toorn and Horst 1990, p. 18.

24 24 Could Cush be related to the Kassites (from the Akkadian Kaššū) ​​and not to Nubia? (Levin 2002).

25 25 Levin 2002, p. 366.

26 26 About this identification, vide Petrovich 2013.

27 27 “Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God” (AJ 1.113).

28 28 Philo, Quaestiones 2.82.

29 29 “Nimrod raised the bow above his head; the dropped cable made the sound of a storm, and, like a flash of lightning dies when we close our eyes, the frightening spear disappeared into the sky” (Hugo 1886, p. 83). Similarly, in La Princesse de Babylone, a fable composed by Voltaire in 1768, it is the weapon of hero Nimrod, transformed into a kind of Excalibur, which guarantees the success of whoever manages to tame it (Voltaire 2008, p. 8).

30 30 Vide Part II, Chapter 4, note 71.

31 31 Charles 1929, pp. xv–xviii and Lacocque 2018, pp. 18–19.

32 32 Dan. 1, 4.

33 33 The king must have been away for 10 years (ANET 562), probably from 553 BC to 542 BC.

34 34 Despite being shrouded in mystery, his stay in Tayma had three major motives: the place was an important sanctuary of Sîn; it was closer to Egypt and Palestine making it possible to control and monitor these regions; and it was ideal to oversee certain trade routes.

35 35 That is, “Bêl [another name for god Marduk] protect the king!”.

36 36 Beaulieu 1993.

37 37 We refer to the Verse Account of Nabonidus (Idem, p. 244) and the Cyrus Cylinder.

38 38 Although we cannot speak of true socio-cultural or religious cohesion, the cult of the god Marduk sought to affirm him as the most important deity in the whole territory occupied by the neo-Babylonian empire.

39 39 According to the Verse Account (ANET 313), the king omitted the celebration of the New Year’s Festival (the akītu) during which, among other activities, donations to the deities were reinforced to obtain a good year of agricultural harvests. Cyrus claims in his cylinder that he was the one who restored the cults threatened by Nabonidus. This strategy of assuming the restoration of rituals was common and must have been one of the ways found by Cyrus to impose himself (Waerzeggers 2001, p. 62).

40 40 Spek 2014, p. 250, Beaulieu 2007, p. 160.

41 41 Isa. 48

42 42 Dan. 5, 2.

43 43 Dan. 4, 32.

44 44 He is described in the Verse Account as someone of “utter blasphemy” (Beaulieu, 2007, p. 162.) and carries out “unholy action” (ANET, 286)? Attitudes like these could only be perpetrated by someone with no mental insight.

45 45 According to the Dead Sea papyrus known as the Prayer of Nabonidus, the king had a disease that disfigured him (Seymour 2014).

46 46 Dan. 4, 30.

47 47 We should not speak of a religion, but of the coexistence of various religions, a true system, within Mesopotamia (Oppenheim 1977, pp. 180–181, Bottéro 1998a, pp. 108 and ff.). Plus, we should bear in mind that the episode in question intends to highlight the conflict between the Bible monotheistic god and the polytheist religions of the Near East.

48 48 The statue is named “The Hero Overpowering a Lion” by the Louvre Museum. https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/hero-overpowering-lion (accessed 19 November 2020).

49 49 Vide Part II, Chapter 9.

50 50 Hdt. Hist., 1.1.0.

51 51 Although the term “barbaric” originally intended merely to refer to those whose language was not Greek (Pagden 2008, p. 42).

52 52 According to Cartledge: “by the time of Aeschylus’ Persians, produced at the Athenian Greta Dionysia festival of 472, the process of ‘othering’ and indeed inventing ‘the barbarian’ as a homogenized stereotype was well underway in Greece” (Cartledge 2002, p. 54).

53 53 Pagden states that a writer like Herodotus did not see the Persians as the other, at least in the sense we now attribute to the term (Pagden 2008, p. 41). On the contrary, Cartledge acknowledges that to some extent “Herodotus endorses, as almost all Greeks unthinkingly did, a negative stereotype of the barbarian Other” (Cartledge 2002, p. 77). Hence, we must bear in mind that although the Greek historian accepted the existence of a “shared humanity” between Greeks and Persians, there were different political and cultural conceptions that profoundly differentiated them leading to a discourse about otherness.

54 54 Cartledge 2002, p. 54.

55 55 Said 1993, p. 16.

56 56 Hdt. Hist., 1.196.

57 57 The Mesopotamian goddess that equates her is Inanna/Ishtar.

58 58 Hdt. Hist., 1.199.

59 59 Idem, 1.199.2.

60 60 Kuhrt 1995a, p. 58.

61 61 Xenophon says that “Babylon was accustomed to drink and revel all night long” (Xen. Cyr., 7. 15). The statement shows the bohemian spirit of Babylonian society.

62 62 Berossus’s three-volume work is only known through secondary sources such as Flavius Josephus or Eusebius of Caesarea.

63 63 Berossus was an Hellenistic Babylonian priest of the third century BC. He wrote a work on Babylon, dedicated to Antiochus I, having consulted sources available at the Esagil (the temple of Marduk), as well as at other temples and royal archives in the city of the Euphrates.

64 64 Beaulieu 2006, p. 133.

65 65 idem, 137.

66 66 Stephanie Dalley advances the hypothesis that the hanging gardens correspond to the description presented in the prism of Sennacherib, now on display at The British Museum, and therefore were located in the former Assyrian capital of Nineveh (Dalley 2013b, pp. 61 and ff.).

67 67 The Old Testament also mentions a character that we can identify with a ruler from ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps Ashurbanipal, in the excerpt which recalls the peoples with “whom the great and noble Asnapper brought over, and set in the cities of Samaria, and the rest that are on this side the river, and at such a time” (Ezra 4, 10).

68 68 In the character Sardanapalus it is possible to find traces of different monarchs: Ashurbanipal, one of the most powerful monarchs of Assyria, Shamash-shumu-ukin, who died in a fire, and Sîn-shar-ishkun, one of the last monarchs of the neo-Assyrian empire, who was on the throne when Nineveh fell (Lenfant 2001, p. 45, n. 3, Schmiesing 2015, p. 1).

69 69 Although the name Semiramis seems to evidence a misrepresentation of the anthroponym Sammu-ramat (Novotny 2002, pp. 1083–1084), the wife of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad V, it is possible that traces of other well-known women make up this legendary character. Sammu-ramat’s role was preeminent after the death of her husband and during the minority of her son, Adad-nirari III. In this period, she assumed the regency of the empire (from c. 810 to 805 a.C.). Her importance is evident in issues such as the officialization of territorial agreements, the recognition by her peers, the political campaigns in which she participated, the dedications made to her (Siddall 2014). On the other hand, Dalley considers that it is possible to observe in the actions carried out by Ninus, sovereign with whom, according to the classics, she married, references to the governments of Sargon II and Sennacherib. Therefore, Semiramis may also be associated with their wives, Atalya and Naq’ia respectively (Dalley, 2005).

70 70 Pomarè 2014, p. 261. Byron said, in a letter dated to 13 January 1821: “Sketched the outline and Drams. Pers. of an intended tragedy of Sardanapalus, which I have for some time meditated. Took the names from Diodorus Siculus (I know the history of Sardanapalus, and have known it since I was twelve years old,) and read over a passage in the ninth vol. octavo of Mitford’s Greece, where he rather vindicates the memory of this last of the Assyrians” (Chew 1915, pp. 104–105).

71 71 Piffaut 2015, p. 53.

72 72 According to Polyene, Semiramis stated that “la nature m’a fait naître femme, mais j’ai égalé par mês actions les hommes les plus courageux” (Polyaenus 1994, Strat., VIII 26).

73 73 Juv. Sta, X 361–362.

74 74 Pol., 1312a.

75 75 Arbaces/Arbace is a character who is later transposed to the opera librettos and who also appears in the cinema, played by Giancarlo Sbragia in Le sette folgori di Assur (1962).

76 76 Belesys was also transposed to the European stages where popular tragedies were staged under the name of Beleso or Beleses. However, he did not reach the cinema.

77 77 At the time when Ctesias wrote his account, the vision that Persian rulers did nothing more than abandon themselves to the pleasures of the senses was in vogue among the Athenians. It was a way of emphasizing the decay of the East (Lenfant 2001, p. 49).

78 78 Although his work Persica is lost, it is reproduced by Diodorus Siculus (1933).

79 79 The future representations of the queen wearing male clothes were born from this reference.

80 80 It is possible that the name Ninus is related to the toponym Nineveh (Dalley 2013a, p. 121).

81 81 Diod. Sic., 2.13.

82 82 Just. Epit., 1.2.

83 83 According to authors like Plutarch, Cleopatra also represented everything that Western women (in this case, Roman women) should not be (Arciniega 2000, p. 149). Over time, Cleopatra has become the prototype of the femme fatale (Pucci 2003, pp. 621–622).

84 84 In the Arab legends, the way Zenobia uses her feminine seduction to defend the city of Palmira stands out (Weststeijn 2013, pp. 303–304).

85 85 In an interesting poem, possibly medieval, it is told that Alexander the Great pursued Semiramis. The queen rejected him and proposed to him to solve three riddles that had already led to the death of several previous suitors. Vide Moennig 2004.

86 86 Vide Part II, Chapter 8.

87 87 Diod. Sic., 2.23.

88 88 An aspect which is also explored in Byron’s play (Poole 1999, pp. 161–163).

89 89 Asher-Greve 2007, pp. 323 and 325.

90 90 Lenfant 2001, p. 50. Vide also Chapter 2, note 37.

91 91 Asher-Greve 2007, p. 335.

92 92 At the end of the classical period and in medieval times, the persona of Semiramis is also explored as an anti-model, the woman who was in the antipodes of the virtuous figure of Christian female. Examples of authors who address her are Pliny, Paulus Orosius, and Dante.

93 93 Layard 1854–58, p. 58.

94 94 Dumont 2013, p. 113.

95 95 Idem, p. 114.