by Joshua J.

Mark
published on 18 August 2014
Definition
Sammu-Ramat, more famously known as
Semiramis, was the queen regent of the
Assyrian Empire (reigned 811-806
BCE) who held the throne for her young
son Adad Nirari III until he reached
maturity. She is also known as
Shammuramat or Sammuramat. She was
the wife of Shamshi-Adad V (reigned 823-
811 BCE) and, when he died, she assumed
rule until Adad Nirari III came of age, at
which time she passed the throne to him.
According to historian Gwendolyn Leick,
This woman achieved remarkable fame
and power in her lifetime and beyond.
According to contemporary records, she
had considerable influence at the Assyrian
court (155). This would explain how she
was able to maintain the throne after her
husbands death. Women were not
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WOMEN WERE NOT
ADMITTED TO
POSITIONS OF
AUTHORITY IN THE
ASSYRIAN EMPIRE;
SEMIRAMIS MUST HAVE
HAD ENOUGH POWER TO
TAKE AND HOLD IT.
admitted to positions of authority in the
Assyrian Empire, and to have a woman
ruler would have been unthinkable unless
that particular woman had enough power
to take and hold it.
This, however, is precisely the problem with
Sammu-Ramats reign: there is very little
information about what she did and how
she went about doing it and some scholars
refer to her simply as an obscure Assyrian
lady of the eighth century B.C. of whom we
know nothing for certain except that she is
named on an inscription as lady of the
palace (rbedrosian.com, 2). It would
seem, however, that she was much more
than that and, however little may be left to
record her reign, there is enough to
suggest that she was the equal of her
predecessors and secured the kingdom
after the death of her husband.
SEMIRAMIS' ANCESTRY
Shamshi-Adad V was the son of King
Shalmaneser III and grandson of
Ashurnasirpal II. Their successful reigns
and military campaigns would have
provided Shamshi-Adad V with the stability
and resources to begin his own successful
reign had it not been for the rebellion of his
older brother. Shalmaneser IIIs elder son,
Ashur-danin-pal, apparently grew tired of
waiting for the throne and launched a
revolt against Shalmaneser III in 826 BCE.
Shamshi-Adad V took his fathers side and
crushed the rebellion, but this took him six
years to accomplish. By the time Ashur-
danin-pal was defeated, much of the
resources which Shamshi-Adad V would
have had at his disposal were gone, and
the Assyrian Empire was weakened and
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unstable.
SEMIRAMIS' REIGN
It is at this time that Sammu-Ramat
appears in the historical record. It is not
known what year she married the king, but
when her husband died and she took the
throne, she was able to provide the nation
with the stability it needed. Historians have
speculated that, since the times seemed so
uncertain to the people of Assyria, the
successful reign of a woman would have
engendered a kind of awe greater than that
of a king because so unprecedented. She
was powerful enough to have her own
obelisk inscribed and placed in prominence
in the city of Ashur. It read:
Stele of Sammuramat, queen of
Shamshi-Adad, King of the
Universe, King of Assyria, Mother
of Adad Nirari, King of the
Universe, King of Assyria,
Daughter-in-Law of Shalmaneser,
King of the Four Regions of the
World.
What exactly Sammu-Ramat did during her
reign is unknown, but it seems she
initiated a number of building projects and
may have personally led military
campaigns. According to the historian
Stephen Bertman, prior to Shamshi-Adads
death, Sammu-Ramat took the
extraordinary step of accompanying her
husband on at least one military campaign,
and she is prominently mentioned in royal
inscriptions (102). After his death, she
seems to have continued to lead such
campaigns herself, although this, like much
else in her reign, has been questioned.
Whatever she did, it stabilized the empire
after the civil war and provided her son
with a sizeable and secure nation when he
came to the throne. It is known that she
defeated the Medes and annexed their
territory, may have conquered the
Armenians and, according to Herodotus,
may have built the embankments at
Babylon on the Euphrates River which
were still famous in his time. What else she
did, however, merged with myth in the
years after her reign. The historian Susan
Wise Bauer comments on this, writing:
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The Babylonian princess Sammu-
Ramat stepped into the place of
power. A woman on the Assyrian
throne: it had never been done
before, and Sammu-Ramat knew
it. The stele she built for herself is
at some pains to link her to every
available Assyrian king. She is
called not only queen of Shamshi-
Adad and mother of Adad-Nirari,
but also daughter-in-law of
Shalmaneser, king of the four
regions. Sammu-Ramats hold on
power was so striking that it
echoed into the distant historical
memory of a people just arriving
on the scene. The Greeks
remembered her, giving her the
Greek name Semiramis. The
Greek historian Ctesias says that
she was the daughter of a fish-
goddess, raised by doves, who
married the king of Assyria and
gave birth to a son called Ninyas.
When her husband died,
Semiramis treacherously claimed
his throne. The ancient story
preserves an echo of Adad-
Niraris name in Ninyas, the son of
the legendary queen; and it is not
the only story to hint that
Sammu-Ramat seized power in a
manner not exactly aboveboard.
Another Greek historian,
Diodorus, tells us Semiramis
convinced her husband to give her
power just for five days, to see
how well she could manage it.
When he agreed, she had him
executed and seized the crown for
good (349).
These legends concerning Semiramis and
her marriage to Ninyas (also known as
Ninus) inspired still more tales of the
queen's reign. According to the Gesta
Treverorum (12th century CE), an account
of the Germanic Treveri tribe, Semiramis
even exerted influence over ancient
Germania. According to the story, Ninyas
had a son by an earlier marriage named
Trebeta. Semiramis hated her stepson and
saw him as a threat. After Ninus' death,
she either exiled him or he, fearing for his
life, left Assyria with a band of followers
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and eventually founded the city of Trier,
which would become one of the largest
cities in the Roman Empire. Other
ancient accounts, such as those by
Diodorus Siculus, also seem to have
combined earlier accounts of Sammu-
Ramats reign with myths and legends
relating to the goddess Astarte and
Ishtar/Inanna so that, in time, the
historical queen became the mythical,
semi-divine, Semiramis. This theory is
contested, however, and there are those
historians who claim Sammu-Ramat had
nothing to do with the later figure of
Semiramis and even those who claim that
Sammu-Ramat never ruled as regent. The
historian Wolfram von Soden, to cite only
one example, writes, That Sammu-Ramat,
the Semiramis of Greek literature, was
temporarily regent after 810 BCE cannot,
however, be proven (67). Von Soden is not
alone in this opinion but other historians,
such as Bauer, are just as adamant in their
claims that Sammu-Ramat not only
reigned over the Assyrian Empire but was
the inspiration for the myths and legends
surrounding Semiramis.
SEMIRAMIS IN LITERATURE
She remains, therefore, one of the more
controversial figures from ancient history
and has become more so since the 19th
century CE when the Christian minister
Alexander Hislop published his book The
Two Babylons (1858 CE), linking
Semiramis with the whore of Babylon from
the biblical Book of Revelation, Chapter 17.
Even though The Two Babylons is clearly
anti-Catholic propaganda and has no claim
to biblical or historical accuracy, it is still
cited by certain protestant Christian works
as an authority on the subject, and the
book therefore contributes to the
controversy surrounding Semiramis. The
book claims, to cite only two examples of
biblical inaccuracy, that Semiramis was
Nimrods wife, whereas Chapter 10 of
Genesis says no such thing, and famously
insists that Semiramis is the whore of
Babylon when her name is nowhere
mentioned in the Bible. The historical
inaccuracies in the work are too numerous
to mention. Even so, the book continues to
exert a powerful influence over certain
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readers and their understanding of ancient
history in general and Semiramis
specifically. Whether Sammu-Ramat was
the model for Semiramis continues to be
argued by modern historians, who often
cite the same ancient inscriptions for their
conflicting arguments, and it does not
seem to be a debate that will be settled
anytime soon. Based simply on the
evidence of Sammu-Ramat being able to
erect her own stele at the prestigious city
of Ashur, however, it would appear she was
a very impressive and very powerful
Assyrian queen who was known to later
generations as Semiramis.
Written by Joshua J. Mark, published on 18
August 2014 under the following license: Creative
Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike . This license lets others remix,
tweak, and build upon this content non-
commercially, as long as they credit the author
and license their new creations under the identical
terms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ctesias and the Semiramis Legend: R.Bedrosian
Diodorus Siculus on Semiramis
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/2A*...
Stele Inscription of Sammu-Ramat
The Encyclopedia of Ancient History
The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop
Bauer, S. W. The History of the Ancient World. W.
W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Bertman, S. Handbook to Life in Ancient
Mesopotamia. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Leick, G. The A to Z of Mesopotamia. Scarecrow
Press, 2010.
Van De Mieroop, M. A History of the Ancient Near
East ca. 3000 - 323 BC, 2nd Edition. Blackwell
Publishing, 2006.
Von Soden, W. The Ancient Orient. Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.
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by Mark Carroll Photography
published on 18 August 2014
SEMIRAMIS
Semiramis by William Wetmore Story,
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