A tale of two cities: Nineveh and Babylon

Abstract

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens' famous opening line of his A Tale of Two Cities is just one of many examples of the author's use of doubles in the book. Throughout the work the author pairs people, cities, and events. A characteristic of doubles is that they can replace one another even if they are opposites: At the end of the Tale, the idle drunk Carton dies in the place of the virtuous Darnay. Similarly Dickens ties the fates of the cities Paris and London essentially together, and one can easily think of other doubles in that respect: New York and Baghdad today or Nineveh and Babylon in the first millennium BC. In all three cases the connection is more imaginary or literary than real. It is important, however, for historians to ask why these connections were made, and how they influenced the record with which they work.This paper will deal with Nineveh and Babylon, and how the fates of these two cities were fundamentally connected — not in reality, but in the ancient discourse regarding them. In her article “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens”, Stephanie Dalley pointed out in detail how classical and Biblical authors were confused with respect to these two cities and had difficulties keeping them apart (Dalley 1994). For example, Ktesias locates Nineveh on the Euphrates instead of the Tigris, and the Biblical Book of Chronicles states that Esarhaddon deported the Judean king Manasseh to Babylon, while he must have meant Nineveh. Other examples abound. We can look at these mistakes one by one and try to explain them. We can find an explanation in the fact that Nineveh at times was called “Old Babylon” in Assyrian sources, or excuse the Biblical authors for being obsessed with the great deportations to Babylonia under Nebuchadnezzar. Those are valid remarks, but do not explain why the confusion was so widespread. I will argue here that the misunderstanding was due to an actual objective in the late cuneiform tradition to tie the fates of Nineveh and Babylon together. At least with respect to their destructions, these cities were each other's mirror images, each other's doubles.