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ons, soaked in the blood of countless foes, and sacrificed to his gods. He en-
joyed subduing wild animals as well as felling trees in the forests of Amanus.
He formulaically defines his kingdom as stretching “from the opposite bank
of the Tigris to Mount Lebanon and the Great Sea,” so the prominence of
the Mediterranean in his imagination and propaganda is self- explanatory.^7
Shalmaneser kept his father’s tireless momentum going, and his propaganda
too, with frequent allusions to putting up images of himself by the seaside.
After conquering various Syrian kings, washing his weapons, sacrificing and
ascending Amanus, he even “boarded boats (and) went out upon the sea.”^8
Jumping on almost another millennium and a half, we observe how another
Oriental monarch, the Sasanid Khosrow I, after capturing Antioch in 540,
bathed alone in the Mediterranean at Seleuceia and—in the heart of Justin-
ian’s most Christian empire!—sacrificed to the gods, especially the Sun, in
other words Mithra.^9 Again, when the Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shāh (1072–92)
formally took possession of Antioch in 1086, he rode his horse to the sea to
drink, and rendered thanks to Allāh for granting him a kingdom from the
Eastern Sea to the Western.^10
The ritual repetition of actions such as these on the same stretch of East-
ern Mediterranean coastline during three- and- a- half millennia, starting with
Sargon, suggests the presence of some quite simple motives capable of serv-
ing as common denominators over this immense stretch of time and in such
different cultural and political contexts. Practical considerations like re-
source extraction and control of coastal trade played their part. What is
more, the Mediterranean coast below Lebanon and Amanus, especially by
Seleuceia, had a dual significance. It was where the successful Oriental in-
vader of Syria ended up willy- nilly once he secured the glittering prize of
Antioch. İskenderun (Alexandretta) in particular enjoys rare, diachronic
strategic and economic sensitivity as the passageway from the Mediterranean
to Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf, a role comparable to that of
7 A. K. Grayson, The royal inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian periods 2. Assyrian rulers of the early
first millennium BC 1 (1114–859 BC) (Toronto 1991) 218–19, 226, 298, etc.
8 A. K. Grayson, The royal inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian periods 3. Assyrian rulers of the early
first millennium BC 2 (858–745 BC) (Toronto 1996) 17, 25, 34, 45, 51, 64, 74, 103. Exhaustive analysis
in S. yamada, The construction of the Assyrian Empire (Leiden 2000). Cf. R. Da Riva, “Desde la muralla de
Media a los cedros del Líbano,” Geographia antiqua 18 (2009) 217–26, on Nebuchadnezzar II of
Babylon.
9 Procopius, Wa r s [ed. J. Haury; revised reprint ed. G. Wirth (Leipzig 1962–63); tr. H. B. Dewing
(London 1914–28)] 2.11.1. On Mithra as the Sun, and the specifically Sasanian background, see H.- P.
Schmidt, “Mithra I,” E. Ir., http://www.iranicaonline.org ; Pourshariati, Decline and fall [1:22], Index s.v. “Mithra,
as the sun.”
10 C. Cahen, Turcobyzantina et Oriens Christianus (London 1974) I.48–49 and n. 1; cf. Gibbon
57:3.542. The reference to an “Eastern Sea” is no doubt rhetorical: cf., e.g., S. S. Blair, The monumental
inscriptions from early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana (Leiden 1992) 158–59, for Malik-Shāh, “[King of
the] East and the West,” in an inscription from Ani.