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.
1.2 Greek Ethnocentricity and the Emergence of Legendary Figures
1.2.1 A Discourse About the Other
At the beginning of Histories, Herodotus explains to the reader the reasons that led him to write his work: “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.”50 In the words of the Greek historian there is a marked polarization between the “Hellenes”51 and the “Barbarians,” composed, as evidenced by his account, by the Asian peoples. In contrasting them, Herodotus accentuates the chasm of a cultural distinction, perhaps more evident in Aeschylus,52 which would become even more acute in the subsequent centuries. As we can easily understand, the concept of Orientalism, far beyond a terminology applicable to the centuries of European imperialism, can also be understood as a notion of otherness already expressed in antiquity.53 In fact, it is possible that the first form of the “derogatory stereotype now known as ‘Orientalism’”54 was forged with the Greeks.
Nevertheless, as Said himself said, Greek authors recognized their hybrid cultural past (with Semitic and Egyptian roots) and it was only later that philosophers redraw this ancestral memory, forgetting some features of their history considered more embarrassing to build a manufactured speech.55 Although Herodotus does not transmit the idea of cultural superiority, but merely of differentiation, it is visible, in the way the historian of Halicarnassus depicts the people he calls “barbarians,” which include Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, a significant divergence in customs and modus vivendi. Thus, in Babylon, traditions were as unusual and peculiar as marriage auctions56 or the obligation for all women to enter Aphrodite’s57 temple to have sex with a stranger at least once in their lives. And it was this fabled and fabricated image under the ethnocentric point of view of a Greek that survived for posterity.58
Regarding the donation of women for sexual relations in the temple or their offering to a goddess, we can say that the cinema was fruitful in reproducing this narrative. The sacrifice of virgins, and no longer mere γυνή (“women”), perhaps a derivation of the conservative Christian society of the contemporary era, is reproduced in films such as L’eroe di Babilonia (1963), Maciste, l’eroe più grande del mondo (1963), or the American horror film The Mole People (1956). Ishtar’s temple is usually the setting where the tribute of young women, usually paid by vassal cities, is carried out. Films such as L’eroe di Babilonia (1963) inclusively portray women “with crowns (…) on their heads”59 and wrists. It goes without saying that such a custom
