The Sirrush of Babylon
One of the greatest archaeological events of the twentieth century was
the disinterment of ancient Babylon’s magnificent Ishtar Gate.
Excavations began in 1899, and for three years the German archaeologist Professor Robort Koldewey labored to uncover this spectacular edifice dedicated to the sun god Marduk. The gateway was erected during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.) to lead visitors in breathtaking fashion into the religious center of Babylon. But after the city’s fall c.39 B.C., it was buried beneath the Mesopotamian sands and forgotten by the world until its resurrection by Koldewey’s team. Theirs were the first modern eyes to behold its dazzling panoply of highly glazed cobalt-colored bricks and horizontal rows of animals repesented in realistic bas-relief.
Three types of animals were presented: a bull, a lion, and a dragon. The first two were clearly inspired by living animals, but what about the dragon? Even though it was portrayed just as realistically as the bull and the lion, is was surely a wholly mystical, imaginary beast-or was it? The sacred animal of Marduk, Babylon’s dragon was know as the sirrush, or mushussu, and Koldewey was far from convinced that it was nothing more than a fabulous creature of legend. Although Babylonian depicttions of all other fabulous beasts had changed dramatically over the centuries, those of the sirrush had always remained the same, like those of the real animals.
Not long after the Ishtar Gate’s re-emergence, the explorer Hans Schomburgk returned to Europe from Central Africa with a glazed brick that he had found there, a brick exactly like those in the Ishatar Gate. If this was where they had been obtained by the Babylonian builders, the find is particularly intriguing because Schomburgk also brought back amazing reports of mysterious dinosaur-like beasts.
The most famous of the possible living dinosaurs in tropical Africa is an elusive water creature, the mokele-mbembe, which is supposed to inhabit the huge Likouala swamps in the People’s Republic of the Congo.
There is, however, an even more startling sapect to this tantalizing case. The biblical Apocrypha tells a story of a dragon, living in the temple of the Babylonian deity Bel, that was worshipped as a god, and which Daniel chocked to death to demonstrate that is was mortal, like any other beast. There has been much controversy among biblical scholars as to wether this dragon really existed, and, if it did, what it could have been. In view of the thought-provoking link between the sirrush and the Congo’s mysterious water beast, some zoologists have proposed that it could have been a living mokele-mbembe, captured in Central Africa, possibly while still a juvenile, and transported alive back to Babylon.
from Dragons A Natural History by Dr. Karl Shuker, Simon & Schuster 1995
Dragon