The Neo-Assyrian Birth Legend of Sargon of Akkad, known since the mid-19th century, was loosely interpreted for popular audiences in an early serial publication, The Story of the Greatest Nations (1913). The authors elaborated on the famous legend with a rather fanciful description of Sargon’s encounter with the goddess:
“A legend grew around him, telling that he was a prince, who was exposed to death as an infant but was found and brought up by a gardener. While he worked one day in the garden a lady came to him surrounded by a cloud of doves. She was really Ishtar or Astarte, the love goddess of the Babylonians, to whom doves were sacred. Sargon did not know her, but received her in such princely fashion that she fell in love with him. Under Ishtar’s guidance the gardener’s boy rose to be the king of his own little city. Then he conquered other cities, and at length held all the land of Babylonia under his rule, being the first man to unite all the little warring cities into a single state.”
Image: The Legend of Sargon (The Goddess Ishtar Appears to Sargon, the Gardener’s Lad), Illustration by Edwin J. Prittie for The Story of the Greatest Nations with One Thousand of the World’s Famous Events Portrayed in Word and Picture, by Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Horne, New York: F.R. Niglutsch, 1913. Part 1, I-6. Public Domain.
CLAIRE SULOS 