Gli assyriakà di Ctesia e la documentazione assira

This article is devoted to the study of the image of the Assyrian world presented by the Greek historian Ctesias in the section of his historical work on the Achaemenid empire (Persikà) dedicated to the Assyrians (Assyriakà). The article is first focused on the problem of the preservation and of the survival of the memory of the Assyrian empire after its fall in 612 BCE, especially as regards, on the one hand, the Persians and the Achaemenid kings, on the other hand the Greek world from the VIIth cent. BCE to Ctesias' times. It is suggested that such memory might have been duly preserved in the Assyrian cities not subject to heavy destructions like Arbela sacred to the goddess Ištar and partially, and probably with strong ideological deformations, in the Babylonian and Syrian milieus. The article's basic thesis is that the Achaemenid kings fully adopted the Assyrian ideological claim to imperial expansion and world dominion, and favoured the concept of the translation imperii from the Assyrian to the Medes and to the Persians which found its way in the Greek historiography. Upon these premises, the well-known image of the tyrannical, vicious and effeminate behaviour of the last Assyrian kings propagated by Ctesias and accepted by all Greek and Western historiographers is attributed to an ideological deformation of the special attention given by the last Assyrian kings to the cult of the goddess Ištar. This cult had important sexual peculiarities, requiring emasculation, transvestitism, feminiliaztion, bloody self-punishment etc. It was followed by many members of the Assyrian élite, and openly favoured and enhanced by the Sargonid kings (VIII-VIIth cent. BCE): this phenomenon impressed both the Persians and the Greeks, and was aptly recorded albeit with strong ideological distortions in Ctesias' work.