Goat-skins, horses and camels: how did Darius' army cross the Tigris?
Author(s)
Date Issued
2016
Type
bookPart
Start Page
25
End Page
60
ISBN
9782940032211
Abstract
In the great inscription of Bisotun, King Darius, speaking in the first person, relates how he managed to cross the Tigris with his army before defeating the army of the Babylonian Nidintu-Bel, one of the ‘rebel kings’. The short account of this undertaking, however, with its several lexical and syntactic ambiguities, leaves open many questions about how things had actually gone. The author of this paper analyses in detail the three, somehow divergent parallel passages (i.e., Old Persian, Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Babylonian) of this multilingual text and the
relationships among them, focusing on the translation strategies and techniques followed by the authors of the royal inscriptions. Since different possible scenarios may be reconstructed from the three versions, the author concludes that the narrative of the Tigris crossing has to be interpreted taking into account the ideological concerns and rhetoric conventions characterizing the Bisotun narrative of the royal deeds, not so different from the epic-heroic conventions characterizing many ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions.
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Checksum (MD5)
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Conference(s)
Des contres avestiques Mahabad, via Bisotun. Etudes offertes en hommage Pierre Lecoq.