Tiamat ... and other dragons

Tiamat is the most famous dragon of ancient Near Eastern mythology. Just a small hitch: no ancient Babylonian text actually describes her as a dragon.

But it isn’t actually a problem after all. This story has a twist: we probably should think of Tiamat as a great serpent, even though there’s no direct testimony. It’s just that the reasons for thinking that are indirect.

Marduk fighting Tiamat? Or Marduk charging into battle alongside the mušḫuššu, his personal symbol and ally? Or some other god with a serpent-like monster? (Assyrian cylinder seal, ca. 800-750 BCE)

The following summaries, at least, are straight-up wrong —

Some sources identify [Tiamat] with images of a sea serpent or dragon. ... In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, she ... wars upon her husband's murderers, taking on the form of a massive sea dragon ... Tiamat is usually described as a sea serpent or dragon ...

Wikipedia, ‘Tiamat’ (retrieved 14 Oct. 2018)

The dragon’s form varied from the earliest times. The Chaldean dragon Tiamat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings ...

Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Dragon’ (retrieved 14 Oct. 2018)

The Wikipedia article does give a citation for the claim that some sources identify her with images of a serpent. But the source it cites — Jacobsen (1968), a very competent and clear article — says nothing of the kind. And where Wikipedia claims that Tiamat is ‘usually described as a sea serpent’, there’s a conspicuous absence of citations. The reason for that absence is that no such descriptions exist.

As for the Britannica article, its description is pretty clearly based on the illustration below, from Nimrud in what is now northern Iraq. We definitely don’t have any textual source giving Tiamat four legs, scales, or wings. Yet you’ll often see this same illustration cited as if it’s a typical ancient depiction of Tiamat.

Just one thing: Tiamat is a primordial female divinity, right? So ... notice a tiny problem?

Definitely NOT Tiamat: this monster has a penis. (Drawing of a Neo-Assyrian relief from the temple of Ninurta at Nimrud, 800s BCE. Source: Layard, The monuments of Nineveh vol. 2 (1853), plate 5)

(You’ll probably need to click on the image and zoom in. Yes, it is tiny, yes that’s very funny, ha ha.) Anthony Green (1997a: 142, 1997b: 258) points out that the relief comes from a temple of Ninurta, and suggests that the monster might be Asakku or Asag, slain by Ninurta in the poem Lugal-e.

Moreover, the Britannica claims to be talking about a Chaldaean Tiamat; the illustration is Assyrian. And just in case you weren’t sure already that the Britannica article is garbage: a couple of lines later it claims, as a matter of historical fact, that it was Uther Pendragon himself who established dragons’ role in English heraldry. Yes, seriously.

How is Tiamat really depicted?

In the Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation epic, Apsu and Tiamat are primordial divinities of the cosmic waters, husband and wife, and the ancestors of the gods. Misbehaviour among the gods leads to battles between Ea and Apsu (tablet 1), and then between Marduk and Tiamat (tablets 2-5). Marduk’s conquest of Tiamat, who is the stormy salt sea, is a key step in bringing about cosmic order.

However, the poem is short on physical descriptions. Marduk gets a bit of a description in tablet 1; Tiamat, not so much. We’re told that she creates or gives birth to eleven monsters in preparation for the battle:

She created the Hydra, the Dragon, the Hairy Hero,
the Great Demon, the Savage Dog, and the Scorpion-man,
(three?) fierce demons, the Fish-man, and the Mighty Bull ...

Enuma elish 1.141-143 = 2.27-29, 3.31-33, 3.89-91 (trans. Lambert)

Some of her physical features get mentioned. She has a throat (4.31), blood (4.32), entrails (4.41), a mouth (4.65), legs (4.91), lips and a belly (4.98-99), a head (4.130), and eyes, nostrils, and breasts (5.55-56).

There’s just one clearly non-human detail: Tiamat has a tail (5.59), which Marduk uses to make the Durmahu or ‘great bond’ that holds the earth in place. So whatever she is, she isn’t totally humanoid. Still, it’s not exactly specific.

Another couple of possible candidates for depicting Marduk fighting Tiamat. Left: cylinder seal, yellow frit, glazed, 17 mm high; Assyrian, Nineveh, ca. 900-700 BCE (Berlin VA 7951). Right: cylinder seal, serpentine, 17 mm high; Assyrian, Nineveh, ca. 800-600 BCE (Pierpont Morgan Library, NY).

Do the pictorial arts help? Well, potentially. But they don’t exactly simplify things.

1. Text ≠ image. There’s no reason to expect that textual sources and pictorial arts should resemble each other, or even try to resemble each other. Verbal narratives and visual myths are very different things, with different storytelling techniques, different symbols, and maybe even completely separate stories. For example, in the Ninurta relief above, it may be surprising to see Ninurta carrying lightning bolts; but one variant makes Adad, the storm god, the hero of the Asakku story instead. From the point of view of someone that relies on texts, this looks like distinct stories leaking into each other, contaminating each other. For someone who begins with the pictorial arts, it’ll seem artificial to unravel the textual sources into distinct variants.
2. No name tags. Mesopotamian pictorial arts don’t give many clues as to who’s who. There are several options for identifying a giant serpent. It might be Tiamat. But it might also be another sea divinity, Irhan, whose name is written with a symbol for ‘snake’. It might be the mušḫuššu serpent that serves as Marduk’s symbol and ally. It might be another monster which is Nabu’s symbol. It might be one of Tiamat’s eleven monstrous offspring. Or it might be an entity that doesn’t even get mentioned in any textual source.

... and other dragons

That brings us to the subject of other dragons. What do we know about them? Do we have stories about battles with them? The Greek god Zeus has links to storm gods in other mythologies, like Jupiter and Thor: does Tiamat have links to actual dragons?

The story-type of a god battling a Chaos Monster in order to establish the order of the cosmos is a widespread one, and the Chaos Monster is quite often a serpent. In Babylonian-Assyrian myth Marduk defeats Tiamat and Nergal defeats a giant serpent called a bašmu. In Greece Zeus defeats Typhoeus, and Apollo defeats Python, both giant serpents. In Ugarit Baal defeats Yamm and Litan, and in Israel Yahweh defeats Leviathan, all of them serpents.

There are poetic and linguistic links between many dragon-slaying stories, too, as argued by Calvert Watkins in his classic study How to kill a dragon (1995).

Tiamat as a five-headed dragon in the game Dungeons and Dragons. Left: Monster manual, 1st edition (1977); right: The rise of Tiamat (2014).

Don’t think of explaining this as some cultures copying their myths from another. That isn’t how myth works. Think instead of people drawing on a common pool of myths, story-types, and imagery, a bundle of mythical elements that they have all inherited.

A good example is the parallels between Job, in the Hebrew Bible, and the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. Job has Yahweh defeating several monsters, and the Baal Cycle talks about Baal’s and Anat’s conquests. Take this passage where Anat boasts of her victory over Yamm:

I (Anat) fought Yamm, the Beloved of El,
surely I finished off River (Nahar), the Great God [or: god of the great waters],
surely I bound Tunnanu and destroyed (?) him.
I struck down the Twisty Serpent,
the Powerful One with Seven Heads.

Baal Cycle 3.iii.38-42 Smith (= CAT 1.3)

and compare it with this passage from the Hebrew book of Job —

By his power he stilled the sea (yam);
by his understanding he struck down Rahab.
By his wind the heavens were made fair;
his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.

Job 26.12-13

In the Baal Cycle Yamm is a sea divinity/monster, in Job the same name may simply mean ‘the sea’, lower-case — though I think it’s worth considering it a possible personification there too. The Baal Cycle passage isn’t a list of different enemies, but a list of titles for Yamm (Smith and Pitard 2009: 248-249); the same may be true of the Job passage. Tunnanu is cognate with Hebrew tannin, ‘serpent’ or ‘dragon’.

Later on Job devotes an entire chapter to Yahweh’s victory over Leviathan (Job 41). There Leviathan is a sea monster that spits fire and breathes smoke, and has glowing eyes. Other passages in the Hebrew Bible make it clearer that Leviathan is a serpent. In Psalm 74.13-14 Leviathan is a water serpent with multiple heads. And then there’s this passage:

On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon (tannin) that is in the sea (yam).

Isaiah 27.1

Compare this to the Baal Cycle passage above, and to the following passage about Litan:

Litan, the Fleeing Serpent,
... the Twisty Serpent,
the Powerful One with Seven Heads

Baal cycle 5.i.1-3 Smith (= KTU 1.5)

We get the same formulas referring to both Yamm and Litan in Ugaritic, and to Leviathan in Hebrew: ‘fleeing serpent’, ‘twisty serpent’, ‘Tunnanu/tannin’, multiple heads.

Leakage between dragon stories. I think it’d be a mistake to draw a firm distinction between Yamm and Litan, because the sources seem to make a point of blurring sea serpents together.

Should Yamm/Litan/Leviathan be equated with Tiamat as well? Well, given how much blurring we’ve already got ... maybe. Hebrew does have a cognate for Tiamat as well — tehom, the ‘sea’, and also the word for the primordial waters before creation in Genesis 1.1. We don’t have any multi-headed dragons in Mesopotamian textual sources, but there are a couple of pictorial depictions.

{Correction, three days later: we do in fact have a seven-headed serpent in a Sumerian myth: it is one of the ‘Slain Heroes’ killed by Ningirsu or Ninurta in the poem Lugal-e. Green 1997a: 141, 1997b: 259 identifies it with one or both of the serpents shown below.}

Left: engraved shell plaque of unknown provenance; 39 mm high, ca. 2600-2300 BCE (Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem). Right: stone cylinder seal from Tell Asmar, Iraq; 32 mm high, ca. 2271-2154 BCE (Iraq Museum, Baghdad). Source: Green 1997a, plates 13 and 14 (= ANEP 671 and 691).

The dragon dies one head at a time. In the left figure a god (Ningirsu/Ninurta?) has already killed one head; in the right, two figures are fighting the dragon and four of its heads are drooping dead. In both pictures, flames seem to be shooting from the monster’s back.

Some later sources, ranging from the Greek world to Mesopotamia, also feature multi-headed dragons, with varying degrees of similarity:

• Zeus vs. Typhoeus (Hesiodic Theogony 810-868, Greek, ca. 700 BCE): Typhoeus is a serpent with a hundred heads (825, cf. 855-856), and flames shoot from his body when he is struck (859-867).
• Heracles vs. Hydra (ps.-Apollodoros Library 2.5.2, Greek, ca. 100-1 BCE): the Hydra has nine heads, and its blood is a deadly poison; Heracles’ ally Iolaus burns the root of each head as Heracles defeats it, one by one. The final head is immortal and ends up being buried under a rock. After the battle, Heracles cuts up (anaschis-) the Hydra’s body.
• The Christian New Testament, Revelation (Anatolian/Syrian?, ca. 80-100 CE): ‘a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns’ (Rev. 12.3-4). A ‘beast’ with the same number of heads and horns (13.1-14) has had one head mortally wounded, but the wound heals. (One or both of these also symbolises Rome, with its seven hills.)
• Rav Acha vs. the demon: the Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 29b (ca. 500 CE) tells how Rav Acha bar Ya’akov defeated a demon in the shape of a serpent with seven heads, and how one head died each time that he bowed and prayed.

It’s not hard to draw parallels between the pairing-up of two figures in the Tell Asmar seal, and Heracles and Iolaus; or between the flames shooting from the dragon’s body in the Mesopotamian images and the Typhoeus story; the one immortal head in the Heracles story and in Revelation 13; or the one-head-at-a-time procedure that we see in most of these variants.

Does Tiamat herself belong to the same family? That’s another question. On the one hand, there aren’t many echoes between the Tiamat story and the multi-headed dragons.

But there are some. When Heracles ‘cuts up’ the Hydra, explicitly a water dragon (hydr- = ‘water’), that’s reminiscent of Marduk cutting up Tiamat. The stormy sea winds that come from Typhoeus (Theogony 869-880) are reminiscent of the storm winds that Marduk appoints ‘to harass Tiamat’s entrails’, that is, to create storms at sea (Enuma elish 4.42-48). And the narrative of a divine battle to destroy chaos and establish order in the cosmos is a common theme.

That probably isn’t enough to justify identifying Tiamat with the seven-headed dragon, specifically. However, there’s a lot of leakage between dragon stories. It probably is justified to imagine Tiamat as some kind of dragon. And it doesn’t seem like it would have been impossible for an ancient Assyrian to have interpreted a seven-headed dragon as a picture of Tiamat.

References and further reading

• Blust, R. 2000. ‘The origin of dragons.’ Anthropos 95.2: 519-536. [JSTOR]
• Green, A. 1997a. ‘Myths in Mesopotamian art.’ In: Finkel, I. L.; Geller, M. J. (eds.) Sumerian gods and their representations. Cuneiform Monographs 7. Styx. 135-158.
• Green, A. 1997b. ‘Mischwesen. B. Archäologie.’ In: Meissner, B., et al. Reallexikon der Assyriologie. Berlin: De Gruyter. Vol. 8, 246-264.
• Jacobsen, T. 1968. ‘The battle between Marduk and Tiamat.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.1: 104-108. [JSTOR]
• Lambert, W. G. 2013. Babylonian creation myths. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
• Miller, R. D. 2014. ‘Tracking the dragon across the ancient Near East.’ Archiv Orientální 82.2: 225-245. [Universiteit van Pretoria repository]
• Smith, M. S. 1997. ‘The Baal cycle.’ In: Parker, S. B. (ed.) Ugaritic narrative poetry. Society of Biblical Literature. 81-180.
• Smith, M. S.; Pitard, W. T. 2009. The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.

The hanging gardens: ‘seven wonders’ postscript

Eight months ago I wrote a post on the ‘seven wonders’, as canonised in several ancient lists. I pointed out that the make-up of the list changed over time; that the lighthouse of Alexandria wasn’t in the ancient canon; that there’s no reason to imagine the Colossus of Rhodes stood at the harbour (and it certainly didn’t stand astride the harbour); and that the pyramids are described as ‘shadowless’ in two sources, possibly because ancient tourists were impressed at the shadowless view from the top in the middle part of the day.

I also committed my share of blunders. In particular, I pointed out that the extant lists of seven wonders that mention the gardens -- Antipater, Greek Anthology 8.177, and Philon -- do not tell us where the hanging gardens were. But I blithely ignored several sources that do tell us the hanging gardens were at Babylon.

The hanging gardens as imagined in Lego by ‘Brickman’, Ryan McNaught (‘Let’s go build’ exhibition, Te Papa, Wellington, Dec. 2017. Photo by T. Schaefer.)

This is just a short note to correct that blunder. (I’ve also annotated the older post with some corrections, leaving my blunders present but stricken out.)

Greco-Roman sources

First, here are the extant sources that state that the hanging gardens counted among the ‘seven wonders’:

• Megasthenes (C. 4-3 BCE) or Abydenus (C. 2 CE). Megasthenes’ Indica book 4, reported by Abydenus’ History of the Chaldaeans, reported in turn by Eusebius in the Armenian text of the Chronika. Translations: p. 19.13-17 Karst; p. 39 Petermann; pp. 55-6 Aucher Ancyranus. Citation of Megasthenes at p. 41 ed. Petermann (mistranslated in Karst).
• Antipater of Sidon (C. 2 BCE), Greek anthology 9.58.
• Strabo (C. 2 CE), Geography 16.1.5.
• Greek anthology 8.177 (date unknown).
• Philon (C. 4-5 CE), On the seven wonders.

Abydenus-Eusebius and Strabo don’t give complete lists of seven wonders, but they do count the hanging gardens among the seven.

Antipater, Gk. anth. 8.177, and Philon don’t specify locations for the gardens, but Megasthenes(-Abydenus-Eusebius) and Strabo do. They tell us the gardens were in Babylon. So do three other sources. Here’s a complete list of sources that report a location for the hanging gardens:

• Berossus of Babylon (C. 4 BCE), Chaldaean histories book 3, reported in Josephus Against Apion 140-141 and Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 — Babylon.
• Megasthenes (C. 4-3 BCE), Indica book 4, reported in Josephus (C. 1 CE), Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 (= FGrHist 715 F 1a); and with Abydenus (C. 2 CE) as an intermediary source, in the Armenian texts of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica 9.41 (= FGrHist 715 F 1b) and the Chronica, p. 19.13-17 Karst = p. 39 Petermann = pp. 55-6 Aucher Ancyranus (citation of Megasthenes at p. 41 ed. Petermann) — Babylon.
• Diodorus of Sicily (C. 1 BCE) 2.10.1-6 — Babylon.
• Pliny the Elder (C. 1 CE), Natural history 36.94 — Thebes (i.e. Luxor), Egypt. (Possibly also reflected in Gregory of Nazianzus (C. 4 CE), Oration 34.63, who lists six remarkable places and buildings including ‘Egyptian Thebes’.)
• Quintus Curtius Rufus (C. 1 CE?), History of Alexander 5.1.31-35 — Babylon.
• Strabo (C. 2 CE), Geography 16.1.5 — Babylon.

The earliest sources, Berossus and Megasthenes, do not survive. But they are probably the most important sources. Berossus came from Babylon and wrote about his home city. Megasthenes lived shortly after the time of Alexander and wrote extensively about his travels to the east. But they’re not the only possible sources. Diodorus cites Ctesias for his description of the wall of Babylon (2.8.5), another of the seven wonders in Antipater’s canon. Ctesias was a Greek doctor who worked in the Achaemenid Persian court around the time of Herodotus (late C. 4 BCE): it’s possible he wrote about the hanging gardens as well. As for Pliny’s testimony, I think we can all agree to disregard it as an aberration.

And here’s one last list of sources, this time on the story of the gardens’ origin. See above for links.

• Megasthenes-Abydenus-Eusebius — the gardens were built by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (C. 6 BCE) as an adornment for his palace.
• Josephus, Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 citing both Megasthenes and Berossus, and Against Apion 140-141 citing just Berossus — the gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar II, with the appearance of mountains, to please his wife who was a Mede (i.e. from northern Iraq).
• Diodorus — built by an Assyrian king (which suggests C. 7 BCE or earlier), at some point later than the legendary Semiramis (Shammuramat), in order to please one of his concubines, who was Persian and missed the mountainous countryside of her home.
• Curtius Rufus — built by an Assyrian king to please his wife, who missed seeing groves and forests.

The hanging gardens as imagined in Minecraft by ‘lonestarr86’. (‘I only know what these are because of Sid Meier[’s Civilization games].’ -- noseonarug17)

... or Nineveh?

Stephanie Dalley has made an alternative argument that the gardens were actually at Nineveh. This is in her book The mystery of the hanging garden of Babylon (Oxford, 2013). Nineveh is some 440 km to the north of Babylon, at modern Mosul. The evidence is circumstantial -- there is no direct testimony supporting it -- but that is not to say that it is weak.

• The references to Nebuchadnezzar that Josephus attributes to Berossus may have been inserted by an intermediate source.
• The theme of homesickness is not one that is seen in Babylonian or Assyrian literature, and therefore likely to be a spurious Greek addition.
• Some parallels to Berossus can be found in Babylonian epigraphy, but that is not the case for the hanging garden story.
• The ‘mountainous’ appearance of the gardens as described by Josephus and Diodorus is typical of Assyrian gardens, as shown by illustrations of gardens in bas-relief panels found at Khorsabad and Nineveh. Babylon, by contrast, is flat.
• Nebuchadnezzar’s citadel at Babylon was 13 metres above the level of the river Euphrates, making hands-free irrigation impossible.
• Nineveh had an excellent canal system.
• Sennacherib is known from epigraphic evidence to have built a garden irrigated by a canal at Nineveh.
• Dalley interprets a difficult passage on an inscription from the time of Sennacherib (early C. 7 BCE) to mean that he had access to so-called ‘Archimedean’ screws, used for raising water by applying horizontal force.

I am impressed by Dalley’s argument, but it’s not all plain sailing:

• You can sway between Nineveh or Babylon depending on whether you think the point of the gardens is to be typical for their location, or to be an exceptional reminder of a faraway place. The Greek sources firmly opt for the latter. They specifically state that the gardens were so striking because of Babylon’s flatness, and the point of the story about the king’s wife or concubine is that she missed the hills of her home.
• Much of Dalley’s argumentation is designed to cast Nineveh as a possible location, rather than to make Babylon impossible. For example, the ‘Archimedean’ screws. If Sennacherib did have access to Archimedean screws (which is perfectly plausible), that doesn’t mean they didn’t also exist at Babylon. The Greek sources unhesitatingly put screws at Babylon, as Dalley herself points out: Strabo refers to a screw (kochlias) used to raise water from the Euphrates, and Philon refers to water being raised by a spiral engine (kochlioeidōs ... ton helika tōn mēchanēmatōn). This tells us nothing about the location of the gardens.
• In a similar vein, absence of reference to gardens in Babylonian inscriptions doesn’t mean absence of gardens. We can’t expect a perfect match between Berossus and epigraphic evidence. (It’s not as though we have direct testimony linking the hanging gardens to Nineveh, either.)
• Dalley has overlooked Megasthenes’ testimony. Now, she does posit a Greek intermediate source between Berossus and Josephus, to explain why Josephus’ story features Nebuchadnezzar, which Dalley regards as spurious, without committing to calling Berossus a liar. I suspect if she had been aware of Megasthenes, she’d certainly want to identify him as that vehicle. Megasthenes wrote about Nebuchadnezzar’s western campaigns (so Josephus tells us), which are certainly fictional, and the link between the gardens and Nebuchadnezzar also appears in Megasthenes as reported by Eusebius. It looks pretty likely that it really was Megasthenes that introduced Nebuchadnezzar into the story. But that doesn’t mean that the gardens weren’t at Babylon: it means that Diodorus and Curtius Rufus, who make an Assyrian king the star of the story, didn’t draw on Megasthenes. They’re independent evidence putting the gardens at Babylon.

The idea of homesickness as a Greek literary motif is the one really cogent argument against Babylon: it shows that the Greco-Roman testimony is heavily fictionalised. That carries a lot of weight.

On the other hand, if we’re deciding to disregard every scrap of testimony, why imagine any hanging gardens at all? What Dalley has shown, to my mind, is that it’s very possible the hanging gardens were completely fictional, and that the idea of them was inspired by Assyrian gardens. The choice is between that, and the gardens of Babylon being a real thing. I’m still leaning towards the latter, because of the independent lines of testimony from Berossus-Megasthenes-Josephus-Eusebius, Diodorus, Curtius Rufus, and Strabo. Either way, it doesn’t look like any Greek list-maker ever included a specific garden at Nineveh in the Greek canon of ‘seven wonders’.

Salting the earth

At the end of that space, a second Scipio, the son of Paulus Aemilius, the conqueror of Perseus, took the city by storm, and destroyed it, razing it to the ground, passing the ploughshare over its site, and sowing salt in the furrows, the emblem of barrenness and annihilation.

The New American Cyclopaedia, vol. 4 (1858) p. 479

The setting: the Romans are sacking Carthage in 146 BCE. Supposedly the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus salts the earth to eradicate Carthage for good, making a fertile land into desert.

The destruction wrought by the Romans was absolutely real, and truly horrific: Appian’s account of it is real nightmare fuel. The salting-the-earth story, though, is pure myth. There isn’t a shred of ancient evidence to suggest that it happened. The story didn’t appear until the 1800s.

The myth evaporates easily enough. But it’s still a very interesting topic. For one thing, there was such a thing as ploughing over a city and salting the earth — it’s just that it didn’t happen to Carthage.

For another thing: when we look closely, it turns out ‘salting the earth’ isn’t about destroying fertile land and turning it into desert. Oh no. The salt is actually meant to be a fertiliser.

Confused? Read on.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The capture of Carthage (1729; NY Met)

Even some professional ancient historians believed the salt myth until the late 1980s, when it got torn to shreds by a cluster of articles in the American journal Classical Philology. First, in 1986, an article by R. T. Ridley dismantled the myth and criticised scholars who had helped perpetuate it. The earliest example Ridley could find was in a volume of the Cambridge Ancient History from 1930. In 1988 another three authors — including one Ridley had criticised, B. H. Warmington — added afterthoughts to Ridley’s article (plus an apology in Warmington’s case). Between them, they managed to push the date of the salt myth back to an essay published in 1905.

One of them, S. T. Stevens, argued that the myth was an extension of the symbolic act of ploughing the land when founding a city (widely attested) or destroying it (attested in one Greco-Roman source). Long before the salt myth came along, it had been widely believed that Carthage had been ploughed over. Now, the ploughing myth has no foundation either. But it pops up in some eminent historians in the late 1800s; it also appeared in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 4 p. 215, in 1797, and was repeated verbatim until at least the 6th edition in 1823.

In fact the ploughing myth goes back a lot further. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII personally reported how he demolished the city of Palestrina, as part of his feud with the Colonna family, as follows: ‘I subjected it to the plough, following the example of Carthage of old in Africa’. He goes on, ‘we also made salt in it, and commanded that it be sown over, so that it should have neither the condition, nor name, nor title of a city.’ There are strong connections between the ploughing myth and the salt myth: we’ll see more about these connections below.

So the ploughing myth goes back at least to the 13th century. What about the salt myth? Moving on to the internet age, and Wikipedia, we find that it has now been pushed back to 1863. In fact it’s a little older still: its earliest appearance is indeed in Ripley and Dana’s New American Cyclopaedia, but the volume with the ‘Carthage’ article dates to 1858 (see link at top).

Most observers agree that the modern idea of salting the earth is inspired by an incident in the Hebrew Bible, in Judges 9:45, where the Israelite king Abimelech ‘razed the city and sowed it with salt’ at Shechem.

Cover of the 2012 album Salt the Earth by Carthage, a deathcore band based in Maryland

In 2007 The Straight Dope covered the myth. There, Cecil Adams tried to estimate how much salt you’d actually need to make land effectively infertile. His estimate: 31 tons per acre. This works out to 7 kg per square metre, or a coating of about 6 mm. In the 3rd edition Britannica and the New American Cyclopaedia, Carthage’s walls supposedly had a perimeter of 23 miles (37 km). I haven’t tried to find out where they got this factoid from. But assuming they’re right, that limits its area to 109 square km. The amount of salt required to make it infertile, then, could be up to 7.63 × 10⁸ kg, or 763,210 tonnes. Standard Roman merchant ships in the Republican era could carry between 70 and 150 tonnes. So to transport this much salt you’d need a fleet of somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 ships, all packed to the brim with salt.

Here endeth the myth. All nice and tidy. There is a little more to talk about, though. And you know what happens when we get into the details ...

First: given that you’d need such a vast quantity of salt to make a place infertile, why then do we find ‘salting the earth’ going on in the bible, and in Pope Boniface’s misdeeds at Palestrina? And second: if it turns out that they’re not literally making the area devoid of life, what is really going on?

Ploughing and salting in the ancient Near East

Parts of the answer to the first question can be found in the Wikipedia article I already cited. There’s a handful of parallels in mediaeval accounts. But much more interestingly, there’s a whole set of parallels for ploughing over cities and salting the earth in several ancient Near Eastern sources. Here they are, all reported by Ridley (1986: 145):

• a record of the proto-Hittite king Anitta of Nesa (ca. 1720 BCE), who destroyed the city of Hattusa and sowed it with weeds (‘and in its place I sowed weeds’, pe-e-di-is-si-ma ZÀ.AH-LI-an a-ne-e-nu-un; source. Dörfler et al. 2011: 113-14 interpret the weeds as a bioweapon, suggesting that they might have been bearded darnel, which can devastate wheat production, or greater dodder, which destroys legumes and survives for years in fallow soil);
• an inscription where the Assyrian king Adadnirari I (early 1200s BCE) destroys the city of Taidu and strews something called kudimmu over it, a plant whose identity is unknown but which may be linked with salt somehow;
• another Assyrian inscription where Shalmaneser I (mid-1200s BCE) destroys Arinu and strews kudimmu over it;
• another (Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions vol. 2 no. 238) where Tiglath-Pileser I (early 1000s BCE) destroys Hunusa and strews something called sipu-stones over it;
• another where Ashurbanipal (600s BCE) destroys Elam and scatters it with salt and sahlu seeds, where sahlu is an unknown plant;
• the Hebrew bible, Judges 9:45, written in the 7th century BCE, reporting how Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem: ‘he razed the city and sowed it with salt’;
• and the latest parallel, again in the Hebrew bible, Jeremiah 26:18: ‘Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.’

Most of the mediaeval and modern examples owe a lot to the incident in Judges 9. But the blend of salting and ploughing is not a modern invention. It wasn’t invented by Pope Boniface VIII either.

Salt = fertiliser

In the Hebrew bible, salt is regularly a symbol of barrenness: see Deuteronomy 29:23, Jeremiah 17:6, and Psalm 107:34. Yet in the other ancient testimony cited above, it’s strikingly clear that the salt is not meant to make the soil infertile. Ashurbanipal uses both salt and seeds; Judges 9:45 specifies that the salt is sown (וַיִּזְרָעֶהָ), not dumped in a layer.

Boniface, too, clearly meant his ploughing-and-salting at Palestrina to have fertile results. His exact words were

ac salem in ea etiam fecimus & mandavimus seminari

and we also made salt in it, and commanded that it be sown over

bull of 1299, section 6

In the 21st century, and back in the 20th century too, most of us are accustomed to thinking of salt as something that eradicates life. If soil is too saline, nothing will grow in it. This is going to be especially on your mind if you’re thinking of places like the Dead Sea, or the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah: both of them salty as all hell, both iconically barren places.

Will Smith drags an alien across the Bonneville Salt Flats (Independence Day, 1996)

In fact, salt was regularly used as a fertiliser in the past. You have to be much more careful with it than with other fertilisers — too much will kill off the plants, it only works for some plants, and you don’t put it on the roots (according to ancient sources, at least) — but within those limits, it has been used regularly and, it may well be, very effectively. Plants need salt too. Even in the modern era, there were many experiments with salt as a fertiliser in the 1800s (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). And yes, we’re talking specifically about sodium chloride, not Epsom salt or saltpetre.

Nowadays salt has mostly gone out of fashion. Soil salinity is a real problem. Growers in the past may have had success with salt, but it is really really easy to overdo it. It does still see some use: some cattle farmers use it for growing feed, as cows need a lot of salt. Some organic farmers use it too. But before you try this in your own garden, check the salinity of your soil first.

On to the actual testimony. Greco-Roman witnesses have a fair amount to say on the subject. First, Theophrastus’ On effects in plants:

Still, saline water is beneficial even for some vegetables, as cabbage, beet, rue and rocket, ... This improvement occurs, and in a word salinity is good for these vegetables, because they have a certain bitterness in their natures, and the salt water, by penetrating the plants and as it were opening outlets, extracts it (which is why cabbage is best in briny soil) ...

Theophrastus De causis 2.5.3-4 (tr. Einarson and Link)

And again:

We said earlier that salinity is also suited to some vegetables, and that soda is used with others. And so it seems we must accept the salinity here too [in pomegranate and almond trees] as appropriate to the plants, since it is evident that the sweetness of these vegetables comes from the saline water and the food.

Theophrastus De causis 3.17.8

Elsewhere he repeats that cabbage and purslane grow sweet and have little bitterness in saline soil (De causis 6.10.8); and he claims Egyptian olive oil isn’t as good as the Greek stuff because it doesn’t get enough salt (Historia plantarum 4.2.9).

But he really goes all out when it comes to date palms. Ancient date growers didn’t just add a few grains of salt, according to Theophrastus. To borrow a phrase from Quentin Tarantino, they drowned ’em in that shit.

(The date palm) likes a soil which contains salt; wherefore, where such soil is not available, the growers sprinkle salt about it; and this must not be done around the actual roots: one must keep the salt some way off and sprinkle about a hēmiekton (i.e. about 4.3 litres; ca. 5 kg). ... When the tree is a year old, they transplant it and give plenty of salt, and this treatment is repeated when it is two years old, for it delights greatly in being transplanted.

Theophrastus Historia plantarum 2.6.2-3 (tr. Hort, adjusted)

Elsewhere he mentions that Babylonian date growers use salt but no manure for their fertiliser, and that another method of application is manually applying lumps of salt to the trees (De causis 3.17.1-4; also Historia 4.3.5). Theophrastus’ experience must have been with very salt-starved soil. Modern research has shown that date palms do tolerate relatively high salinity, but as with anything, that tolerance has limits. According to this 2015 study, the limit is around 9 to 12.8 dS m^-1 (roughly 6-8 g per litre of soil). Modern date growers don’t use salt as a fertiliser, even in the region that was once Babylonia.

Theophrastus’ enthusiasm about salt isn’t quite as visible in other ancient sources. They do mention it though. Pliny the Elder comes up with a rather imaginative explanation — he obviously doesn’t have as much growing experience as Theophrastus —

salsaeque terrae multa melius creduntur, tutiora a vitiis innascentium animalium.

And many (plants) are better entrusted to salted earth, as they are safer from being harmed by animals breeding there.

Pliny, Natural history 17.29

Pliny is also aware that cattle, sheep, and yoke animals love salty pastures, and that the salt improves their milk and cheese (Nat. hist. 31.88).

A much more striking allusion is in the New Testament, in the gospel of Luke

καλὸν οὖν τὸ ἅλας· ἐὰν δὲ καὶ τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ, ἐν τίνι ἀρτυθήσεται; οὔτε εἰς γῆν οὔτε εἰς κοπρίαν εὔθετόν ἐστιν· ἔξω βάλλουσιν αὐτό.

Salt is good; but if the salt goes bad, in what how will it be used for seasoning? It isn’t suitable for the ground or for a manure heap. They throw it away.

Luke 14:34-35 (my translation)

As with almost anything in the New Testament, I need to add a caution. These verses are paralleled in Mark 9:50 and Matthew 5:13, but those passages aren’t as clear about the use of salt as a fertiliser. As a result, New Testament scholars tend to debate the meaning of the passage in Luke.

Digression: there are two other translation problems here, though neither of them has an impact on the bit about using salt as a fertiliser. I mention them because they are bugging me. ἐὰν ... τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ is more conventionally translated as ‘if the salt loses its taste’. That translation is driven by the parallel in Mark, which does mean something like that: ἐὰν δὲ τὸ ἅλας ἄναλον γένηται, ‘if the salt becomes unsalty’. But Matthew and Luke use the verb μωραίνω, in the passive, which elsewhere always means ‘become μῶρος, become foolish, be stupefied’. There are no parallels to suggest it can ever mean anything like ‘lose its taste’. (μωραίνω is a moderately common word; just within the NT cf. Romans 1:22, 1 Corinthians 1:20.) ἐν τίνι ἀρτυθήσεται is obscure. The verb ἀρτύω means ‘to prepare, season, salt’, so literally the phrase means ‘With what will (the salt) be seasoned?’ My translation above, which takes ἀρτύω as ‘to use as a seasoning’, strains the syntax a bit. However, the conventional translation ‘how can its saltiness be restored?’ (NRSV) is much more of a stretch: interpreting ἀρτύω as ‘to restore the taste of’ is a strain on meaning, not just syntax.

The salt-as-fertiliser reading does however expose another allusion in the parallel in Matthew 5:13 ‘You are the salt of the earth’ (ὑμεῖς ἐστε τὸ ἅλας τῆς γῆς). The idea there isn’t just that people are flavoursome, and good for preserving foods — they’re also good for growing things!

So no, Carthage wasn’t ploughed and salted, but some other places throughout history have been. It was indeed ecological warfare: the idea was indeed to eradicate a city forever. But not by eradicating all life. Rather, the idea was to turn a once-bustling city into a green space, covered in weeds. And for that purpose, you don’t need an outrageous amount of salt at all.

References

• Dörfler, W; Herking, C.; Neef, R.; Pasternak, R.; von den Driesch, A. 2011. ‘Environment and economy in Hittite Anatolia.’ In: Genz, H.; Mielke, D. P. (eds.) Insights into Hittite history and archaeology. Leuven: Peeters. 99-124.
• Ridley, R. T. 1986. ‘To be taken with a pinch of salt: the destruction of Carthage.’ Classical Philology 81: 140-6. [JSTOR]
• Stevens, S. T. 1988. ‘A legend of the destruction of Carthage.’ Classical Philology 83: 39-41. [JSTOR]
• Visonà, P. 1988. ‘Passing the salt: on the destruction of Carthage again.’ Classical Philology 83: 41-2. [JSTOR]
• Warmington, B. H. 1988. ‘The destruction of Carthage: a retractatio.’ Classical Philology 83: 308-10. [JSTOR]

Colours in Homer #1: the bronze sky

Today's myth owes much of its popularity to the British comedy quiz series QI. Here's the relevant bit, from series 2 episode 1 'Blue' (first broadcast October 2004):

Stephen Fry: What colour was the sky in ancient Greece?
Jo Brand: Blue, if that picture's any good.
[KLAXON]
Stephen: Oooooh no! It wasn't, I'm afraid, blue. Um, I should have, aheheh, I should have told you that it was ancient Greece. And I did.
Jo: Yeh you did.
Stephen: Yah, yah, and, and they didn't, they didn't take photographs in ancient Greece, so that might have been a hint that the photograph was of modern Greece.
Jo: Well when I know -
Stephen: Yah, no, you fell into our beautifully -
Sean Lock: It could be a very very good carving.
Stephen: It could be, I suppose. Um -
Bill Bailey: Could it perhaps have been darker blue, 'cause it's sort of faded a little bit, over time?
Stephen: Well, yes, in point of fact -
Alan Davies: What we call blue they called something else?
Stephen: Well no the ancient Greeks don't - didn't call anything blue.
Alan: They didn't look up ever?
Stephen: No they didn't call anything blue.
Alan: They didn't ha - have colours?
Bill: No word for blue?
Stephen: They had colours, but they didn't have a word for blue.
Bill: Aaaaah.
Alan: They didn't have a word for blue? Well what did they say? 'The sky.'
Stephen: 'Bronze'.
Alan: Bronze?
Stephen: Yes, they called it 'the bronze'. Homer called it 'bronze-coloured'.
Alan: I've got no time for these Greeks.
[A couple of minutes' dialogue omitted]
Stephen: Now in a similar spirit, ahh, Homer regarded wine, the sea, and sheep as all being the same colour, which is 'red'. To us colours are so obvious that this seems peculiar, but colour is just one way of describing tones.

Predictable answer alert!

This idea was revived in March 2015 when a spate of news articles eagerly reported a study claiming that humans two thousand years ago couldn't perceive the colour blue. The popularity of this story was in turn driven by a kafuffle over The Dress that hit internet social forums a couple of weeks earlier. (For reference, news media interpreted the study as supporting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that cognition is strictly constrained by language; strong Sapir-Whorf is however broadly discredited. Weak Sapir-Whorf is the subject of ongoing research.)

Homeric epic does indeed refer to 'bronze sky' three times: at Iliad 5.504, Iliad 17.425, and Odyssey 3.2. It's just that there isn't the slightest reason to interpret it as a colour term. This becomes a bit more obvious if you look at other uses of 'bronze' as an adjective in Homer. Iliad 5.785:

Στέντορι εἰσαμένη μεγαλήτορι χαλκεοφώνῳ

looking like the great-hearted bronze-voiced Stentor

(This is where we get the adjective 'stentorian'.) Iliad 18.222 likewise refers to Achilleus' ὄπα χάλκεον 'bronze voice'. Next, Iliad 11.241-2 describes the death of Iphidamas as follows:

ὣς ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν κοιμήσατο χάλκεον ὕπνον
οἰκτρὸς ἀπὸ μνηστῆς ἀλόχου...

In this way (Iphidamas) toppled and fell into a bronze sleep,
pitiful, away from his wedded wife...

And then there's Iliad 5.704, which refers to the war-god Ares as χάλκεος 'bronze'.

It should be pretty transparent that the meaning is figurative in all of these passages. That being the case, it'd be daft to assume that when it gets used of the sky -- and only in the case of the sky -- it suddenly starts being a colour term.

Exactly what shade of metaphor we're looking at in the 'sky' passages is less obvious. The simplest and most likely interpretation is that it's supposed to mean 'pitiless, terrible', as in the Iphidamas death-scene. In that case 'bronze sky' = 'pitiless sky' is a pathetic fallacy. Another, more literalist, reading is to take it as a reference to the 'bronze-pathed house of Zeus', a phrase that appears elsewhere (on the understanding that Zeus lives in the sky). And one more possibility which is unsupported by any other evidence, but nonetheless entertaining, is that it could be a reference to the sky as an upturned cauldron: one word for 'cauldron' was χαλκίον, derived from the word for bronze.

Most doubts over the 'pitiless, terrible' interpretation can be dispelled by looking at parallels in contemporary ancient Near Eastern sources. Exactly the same trope appears in the succession treaty of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, written in 672 BCE, almost exactly contemporary with the Iliad (known to Biblical scholars as the 'vassal treaty of Esarhaddon' or VTE):

528 qaq-qar-ku-nu ki-i AN.BAR le-pu-šu me-me-ni
529 ina ŠÀ-bi lu la i-par-ru-’a
530 ki-i šá TA* ŠÀ AN-e šá UD.KA.BAR A.AN la i-za-nun-a-ni
531 ki-i ha-an-ni-e zu-un-nu na-al-šû ina ŠÀ A.ŠÀ.MEŠ-ku-nu
532 ta-me-ra-ti-ku-nu lu la [i]l-lak ku-um zu-un-nu
533 pe-e’-na-a-ti ina KUR-ku-nu li-iz-nu-na

May they (the gods) make your ground like iron (so that) nothing can sprout from it. Just as rain does not fall from a brazen sky so may rain and dew not come upon your fields and your meadows; instead of dew may burning coals rain on your land.

Succession treaty of Esarhaddon §§63-4 (ed. and transl. Parpola and Watanabe)

And here it is again in the Hebrew Bible, about half a century later:

וְהָי֥וּ שָׁמֶ֛יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עַל־רֹאשְׁךָ֖ נְחֹ֑שֶׁת וְהָאָ֥רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־תַּחְתֶּ֖יךָ בַּרְזֶֽל׃

יִתֵּ֧ן יְהוָ֛ה אֶת־מְטַ֥ר אַרְצְךָ֖ אָבָ֣ק וְעָפָ֑ר מִן־הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ יֵרֵ֣ד עָלֶ֔יךָ עַ֖ד הִשָּׁמְדָֽךְ׃

The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The LORD will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.

Deuteronomy 28:23-4 (Westminster Leningrad text + NRSV)

(No one has ever tried to interpret this as having anything to do with colours!) The figure of speech in Homer is unlikely to be independent, especially considering how the trope appears in the Iliad 17 passage:

ὣς οἳ μὲν μάρναντο, σιδήρειος δ' ὀρυμαγδός
χάλκεον οὐρανὸν ἷκε δι' αἰθέρος ἀτρυγέτοιο.

So they fought one another, and the iron din
reached as far as the bronze sky through the barren ether.

Iliad 17.424-5 (ed. West)

Terrestrial iron, heavenly bronze: this is no coincidence. The image must have been borrowed from Near Eastern literature relatively recently: (a) the earliest evidence of iron smelting in Greece dates to ca. 900 BCE, and the poetic image wouldn't make much sense if the material wasn't available; (b) all our attestations, Akkadian, Greek, and Hebrew, come from the 600s BCE. The original intent is likely to have been more or less the same as in the Hebrew and Akkadian passages.

And for reference, Homeric Greek did have two words that can mean 'blue': kyaneos and glaukos. Greek colour terms divided up the spectrum differently from how English and most modern western European languages do. Kyaneos covered the area of the spectrum ranging from black towards dark blue, and was also used for what in English would be called 'black' hair. Glaukos included light shades of green and blue with relatively low saturation. Other colours that don't line up with English categories are melas (conventionally translated 'black'), porphyrios ('purple'), and chlōros ('green'): in reality melas covered the range from black to brown to dark orangey-red, porphyrios referred to a range of deep vivid colours; chlōros and glaukos divide up pale colours between them. Erythros ('red') and leukos ('white') are just about the only ancient Greek colour terms that mostly line up with their conventional English translations. There's nothing especially weird or wonderful about this: if you think of English colour terms that revolve around the prototypical 'blue', like cyan, azure, indigo, navy, turquoise, and aquamarine, and try to think of their equivalents in another language, you're not going to come up with a set of one-to-one correspondences.

What of Stephen Fry's comment about Homer regarding wine, the sea, and sheep as 'red'? More on that next time: that will take us into the wacky world of Homeric formulas.