Alexander the Great Supposedly Set One Of His Servants On Fire

The year was 331 BCE—Alexander the Great had recently delivered a humiliating defeat to the Persian King Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela. As the Persian forces retreated further into the interior of their empire, Alexander the Great seized control of most of Mesopotamia, including the famed city of Babylon.

One of the stranger tales about Alexander’s life occurred while he was marching his forces from the battlefield of Guagamela to the city of Babylon. Apparently, during the journey, Alexander’s forces encountered a town that overflowed with some sort of flammable liquid. Ancient commentators described the petroleum-based substance in different ways. Strabo (c. 64 BCE- 21 CE), in Book XVI of his Geography, wrote that Alexander encountered asphalt or naphtha near the Euphrates River. Plutarch (c. 46-119 CE), in his Alexander (Chapter 35), also identified the flammable material as naphtha. Quintus Curtius (1st century CE), in his History of Alexander (Book V), named the location as the Babylonian city of Mennis and claimed that the liquid was actually bitumen.

Anyway, wherever the location and whatever the flammable substance, the locals were eager to make a spectacle of their oily export. Plutarch (who wrote the most elaborate account of the incident) claimed that the townspeople used their naphtha or bitumen to light a path for Alexander, so that he could easily find his guest quarters for the night. As Alexander followed the flickering flames back to his temporary home, his curiosity about the oily substance only increased. The display left such an impact, that the Macedonian king was still musing about the stuff, even while bathing.

As the story (of Strabo and Plutarch) goes, Alexander’s scientific curiosity got the better of him during his bath, and dangerous ideas began to hatch in his head. Eventually, Alexander and his bath attendants decided to carry out more experiments with the fascinating naphtha or bitumen. According to Plutarch, an unfortunate man named Stephanus was somehow convinced by Alexander and at least one other bath attendant to become a human torch. In Plutarch’s account, Stephanus’ participation in the dangerous experiment was consensual, but in Strabo’s version, the poor man’s willingness to burn was much less certain.

Either way, Stephanus was thoroughly covered with the flammable substance and set alight. From the sources, it seems that Alexander almost immediately regretted his decision—not to mention how Stephanus must have felt. As soon as the bath attendant was engulfed in hungry flames, Alexander tried to douse the inferno with a jar of water, but that did not extinguish the fire. It took several bath attendants splashing water on the burning Stephanus for the petroleum-fueled flames to be finally put out. In the end, Stephanus supposedly survived the ordeal, but he was severely burned.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Top Picture Attribution: (Alexander the Great by Placido Costanzi (1702-1759) setting fire to Jan Hus (painted by Spiezer Chronik (1485)), both [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).

Sources:

• Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011. 
• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plut.+Alex.+35&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0243  
• http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/16A*.html 
• https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008158415;view=1up;seq=373  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plutarch 
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Strabo  
• http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/curtius-rufus-quintus-probably-fl

The Groundbreaking Akkadian Priestess Enheduanna Is Mankind’s Oldest Known Author To Have Signed Her Work

She also may be the mother of hymns, poetry and verse, and likely influenced Homer and the authors of the holy texts of Abrahamic religions

(Calcite disc of Enheduanna discovered by Sir Leonard Wooley in 1927 depicting Enheduanna and her attendants, photographed by Mefman00 and cropped, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Enheduanna was born in Akkad (thought to be within modern Iraq), the capital city of the Akkadian Empire, which may be the world’s first multi-ethnic empire. While dating the lives of people from earth’s most ancient civilizations is often unreliable, the scholars seem to be comfortable placing Enheduanna’s life between 2285 and 2250 BCE. Enheduanna was an incredibly bright princess, was the daughter of the empire’s equally brilliant king, Sargon I of Akkad (2334-2279 BCE), also known as Sargon the Great.

Sargon the Great recognized the competence and wisdom in his daughter, and decided to use Enheduanna to his own advantage. The king promoted her to be the high priestess at the temples of Uruk and Ur. Her position as high priestess of the moon god, Nanna (also known as Sin or Suen), in the city of Ur, was by far the highest religious office of her day. As high priestess, Enheduanna ruled effectively, cultivating support for her father and tying the Akkadian and Sumerian religions and cultures together. She also survived a period of exile, when a rebel forcibly removed her from her priesthood. Her nephew, to the priestess' relief, quickly crushed the rebellion and restored her to power. Enheduanna did not, however, spend her more than forty years as high priestess solely administrating—she managed to find time to write.

From what archeologists have discovered, Enheduanna wrote poems, hymns and prayers. Her writings are the oldest so far discovered to have been signed and claimed by a specific author. Enheduanna, as far as we know, also was the first person in history to use the first-person style of writing, describing her hopes, wishes and emotions from her own point of view in her poems and prayers. Though Enheduanna was a priestess of the moon god, Nanna, most of her works are devoted to Inanna, a Mesopotamian goddess of love that later cultures would compare to Ishtar and Aphrodite. Many of the priestess’ hymns have been recovered and translated including  “The Exhaltation of Inanna” (Nin-me-sara), “Inanna and Ebih” (In-nin me-hus-a) and “Lady of the Great Heart,” also known as Hymn to Inanna.

Enheduanna has much more of a legacy than being the oldest known author to claim her work with a signature. The relationship between herself, and her father, King Sargon the Great, began a precedent of royal princesses being placed as high priestesses in Mesopotamia. More importantly, Enheduanna’s hymns became widely used to train Mesopotamian scribes in proper, and beautiful, writing. Her hymns and poems, however, did not only influence Mesopotamia. Many think that Enheduanna’s work served as a major stylistic and structural inspiration for other literary behemoths such as Homer in Greece and the early biblical writers who wrote the oldest texts at the core of the Abrahamic religions. 

Written by C. Keith Hansley

Sources: 

• http://www.ancient.eu/Enheduanna/ 
• https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Enheduanna 
• http://www.ancient.eu/akkad/