A. KOLDEWEY’S CONUNDRUM: THE SIRRUSH
The picture, or
rather, bas-relief, that was causing the good Professor Koldewey
such grief was this, the middle animal on either side of the Ishtar
Gate of Babylon, the reconstruction of which is shown
below:
The Reconstructed Ishtar Gate of Babylon
And a close-up of the
left side will reveal the problem:
Close-up of the Ishtar Gate Animal
Reliefs
Note the top and
bottom reliefs, like so many other reliefs in Babylonian and
Assyrian artwork, are of fairly conventional-looking cattle or
other very ordinary animals. But these were not Professor
Koldewey’s problem. The problem is the middle relief, appearing as it does between two
very normal-looking bulls.
A closer look at that
middle relief is in order:
The Creature from Babylon: The Sirrush
While the head of
this creature — whatever it is — is obscured somewhat in the photo,
the feet alone should tell us, as they told Koldewey, that “we have
a problem,” for the front “paws” look somewhat like the paws of a
large feline, while the rear “claws” look everything like the claws
of some gigantic bird.
As if that were not
enough, there is a long “spiraling” tail...
Spiraling Tail of “the Creature from
Babylon”
...a long thin body
that appears to be feathered or scaled...
The Long Scaled or Feathered Body of “the Creature from
Babylon”
...and topping it all
off was the head of a dragon or serpent of some sort:
Dragon’s Head of “the Creature from
Babylon”
However, the problem
for Koldewey (and everyone else since, as we shall see shortly) was
not that the Babylonians had given full freedom to their artistic
flights of fancy; the problem was that they apparently had
not, for the creature, known as a
“Sirrush,” appeared right in the middle
of other creatures known as aurochs that were self-evidently real,
and though they are now extinct as well, they were not extinct in
Babylonian times. The problem was the very real context in which the otherwise fantastic and
bizarre “Sirrush” appeared. But that wasn’t the only problem.
Koldewey
wrote:
A creation of another, essentially different type confronts us in the “dragon.” This is the sirrush of legend, or as it is often referred to today, the Mus-rushu, which Delitzsch renders as “splendid serpent.”The slender body, the wavy-lined tail, the similarly steep, solemn slender neck with its small scale-covered head... stands out better in color reproduction. The scaly attire shows itself on the hind legs downward to the middle of the shins. One observes larger diagonal scales on the abdomen. The forelegs resemble those of a long-legged type of cat, perhaps a panther. The hind feet are those of a bird of prey.... On the end of the tail one can observe a curved quill, as in a scorpion. The head is entirely that of a snake with a closed mouth from which a forked tongue protrudes. It also bears a large upright, prominent horn from which an appendage spirals or curls out.... Behind the “whiskers” a tuft of three locks of hair falls, pictured as three long spiraling locks....This strange animal, with the above-enumerated features, as per Jastrow’s picture portfolio of the religion of Babylon and Assyria, was found in the oldest Babylonian art and preserved these features unchanged for millennia. Thus one may not say that it is a fantastic production, a chimerical picture of Babylonian-Assyrian art.8
In other words, one
had a creature with the forelegs of a great cat, the hind legs of a
bird, with a curving tail with what appeared to be a scorpion’s
sting, a long scaly body, a snake’s head, out of which grew a horn!
And this creature appeared in the artwork of the region with
amazing consistency through the
millennia, and in the context of other very real creatures, one of which was the now-extinct
aurochs (about which more in a moment).
It could not be, Koldewey concluded, merely the chimerical
production of a fevered Mesopotamian artistic imagination, for in
cases where such mythological creatures were encountered in
Babylonian art, these showed a great deal of change over time; the
sirrush did not.
Koldewey attempted to
rationalize the creature’s strange appearance by various
comparisons to the features of known dinosaurs, and concluded,
somewhat less than convincingly, that “When one finds a picture
such as our sirrush in nature, one must
reckon it as belonging to the order of dinosaurs and indeed of the
sub-order of ornithopods.”9 However, one would
be hard-pressed to find dinosaurs with the forelegs of a cat, the
hind legs of birds of prey, with spiraling tails and scorpion’s
quills, and snake’s heads growing horns, all in one fantastic
creature. Koldewey proposed one dinosaur, the iguanodon, which did
indeed have hind feet similar to a bird, as being a close match to
the sirrush.10 But that does not
really make the dilemma any more palatable, since that would mean
that long after dinosaurs were supposed
to be extinct according to standard evolutionary theory, the
ancient Babylonians were depicting them in the clear context of
other very real, and very living,
creatures, the aurochs.
To make matters very
much worse, it even appeared to Koldewey that the sirrush might have been the basis behind at least
one biblical story, that recounted in the Greek versions of the
book of Daniel, and known as Bel and the
Dragon:
And in that same place there was a great dragon, which they of Babylon worshipped. And the king said unto Daniel, Wilt thou also say that this is of brass? lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh; thou canst not say that he is no loving god: therefore worship him.11
In the story, Daniel
kills the dragon by poisoning it. But the sirrush and the problems it posed could not be
gotten rid of so easily, for there it was, boldly emblazoned on the
enameled bricks of the Ishtar Gate which Koldewey himself had
unearthed.
The renowned
naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson summed up Koldewey’s conundrum this
way:
(Despite) his solid Teutonic background, Professor Koldewey became more and more convinced that it was not a representation of a mythical creature but an attempt to depict a real animal, an example of which had actually been kept alive in Babylon in very early days by the priests. After much searching in the depths of his scientific soul, he even made so bold as to state in print that this animal was one of the plant-eating, bird-footed dinosaurs, many types of which had by that time been reconstructed from fossil remains. He further pointed out that such remains were not to be found anywhere in or near Mesopotamia and that the “Sirrush” could not be a Babylonian attempt to reconstruct the animal from fossils. Its characters, as shown in Babylonian art from the earliest times, had not changed, and they displayed great detail in scales, horns, wrinkles, the crest and the serpentine tongue, which, taken together, could not all have been just thought up after viewing a fossilized skeleton.12
So there it was, and
the conundrum was extraordinary, any way one sliced
it.
Lest it have been
missed, however, it behooves us to retrace the steps of Koldewey’s
logic in order to exhibit the conundrum with the full force of its
implications:
1. There were no fossil remains near Babylon by which the Babylonians could have artistically reconstructed such a fantastic creature;
2. The closest dinosaur resembling the sirrush was the iguanodon, but again, there were no remains of such a creature near Babylon that would have allowed an artistic reconstruction;
3. The sirrush appeared throughout Mesopotamian art with amazing consistency, whereas other mythological and chimerical creatures depicted in the art of the region varied over time;
4. The sirrush appeared in a context with other really existing animals, namely, the now-extinct aurochs; and thus,
5. Either the Babylonians managed to encounter some sort of dinosaur long after they were supposed to be extinct; or,
6. The sirrush, notwithstanding a generalized resemblance to the iguanodon, was some other sort of bizarre and chimerical creature unknown to modern paleontology, but nevertheless, really existing.
And to top it all
off, the creature may have even been the basis for a famous story
from the biblical Apocrypha.
Robert Koldewey, 1855–1925
Left View of the Sirrush
However, while
Professor Koldewey was busily digging up all sorts of problems for
standard academic fundamentalisms of ancient history and the
evolution of life, yet another German was posing problems of a
different sort, for a very different sort of
fundamentalism.