A mystery hovered over the temples of the ancient city of Dūr-Šarrukīn, present-day Khorsabad (Iraq), for more than a century. In several of these buildings, built about 2,700 years ago and spread across different parts of the city, a sequence of “mysterious symbols” appeared that had experts completely baffled.
The images were visible to everyone, but no one knew what they meant. The series, which first became known to the modern world through drawings published by French archaeologists in the late 19th century, was typically composed of five icons: a lion, an eagle, a bull, a tree, and a plow. .
For more than a hundred years there has been an avalanche of ideas about its meaning, but none have convinced academics. At least until Dr. Martin Worthington, an Assyriologist at Trinity College, came to the conclusion that the emblems referred to King Sargon II.
Dūr-Šarrukīn (“Sargon's fortress” in Assyrian), located about 16 kilometers from Nineveh, was inaugurated in 706 BC. when it was not yet completely finished nor had it been completely populated. It was completely walled and its destiny was to become the new capital of the Empire but it was abandoned after the death of the king.
Although he claimed to be the son of Tiglathpileser III, the truth is that most historians believe that Commander Sargon was a usurper who seized power through violence after the death of Shalmaneser V and ruled Assyria from 721 to 704 BC. .
His reign was a departure from the past, since none of his inscriptions make reference to his predecessors. Once in power he became a great conqueror and was the founder of the most powerful dynasty of Assyrian rulers, with whom the Empire achieved its greatest achievements. But back to the “mysterious symbols”.
Several researchers have compared them to Egyptian hieroglyphs, understood to reflect imperial power and were suspected to represent the king's name, but no one knew how. Until Dr. Worthington, a specialist in the languages and civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, proposed a solution in an article published in the journal Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
The expert maintains that the Assyrian words for the five symbols (lion, eagle, bull, tree and plow) contain, in the correct sequence, the sounds with which the Assyrian form of the name “Sargon” (šargīnu) is obtained. Even in the murals where only three images appear (lion, tree, plow) the king is referred to following similar principles.
“The study of ancient languages and cultures is full of riddles of all shapes and sizes, but it is not often in the Ancient Near East that one is faced with such mysterious symbols on the wall of a temple,” the specialist says in a statement. from Trinity College.
It's not just that the icons refer to the monarch. Dr. Worthington also points out that each of them can be understood as a constellation. The lion represents Leo and the eagle represents Aquila (our own constellations are largely inherited from Mesopotamia, through the Greeks, so many of them are the same). The fig tree replaces the constellation “the Jaw”, (which we do not have today), on the basis that iṣu (“tree”) sounds similar to isu (“jaw”).
"The effect of the five symbols was to affirm that Sargon's name was written in the heavens, for all eternity, and also to associate him with Anu (lord of the gods) and Enlil (lord of the heavens and the earth), to to whom the constellations in question were linked. A clever way to make immortal. And, of course, the idea of grandiloquent individuals writing their name on buildings is not unique to ancient Assyria,” he says.
Ancient Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq and neighboring regions, was home to Babylonians, Assyrians, Sumerians and others, and is researched today from cuneiform writings, which survive in abundance. In fact, writing was probably invented there around 3400 BC.
"I can't prove my theory," Worthington acknowledges, "but the fact that it works for both the five-symbol sequence and the three-symbol sequence, and that the images can also be understood as culturally appropriate constellations, seems highly suggestive to me." The odds of this all being no coincidence are (pardon the pun) astronomical.”
