Sardanapalus

In this account, Sardanapalus, supposed to have lived in the 7th century BC, is portrayed as a decadent figure who spends his life in self-indulgence and dies in an orgy of destruction.

He managed to withstand a long siege, but eventually heavy rains caused the Tigris to overflow, leading to the collapse of one of the defensive walls.

To avoid falling into the hands of his enemies, Sardanapalus had a huge funeral pyre created for himself on which were piled "all his gold, silver and royal apparel".

Both appear to have been strong, disciplined, serious and ambitious rulers, and Ashurbanipal was known to be a literate and scholarly king with an interest in mathematics, astronomy, astrology, history, zoology and botany.

[7] The actual Fall of Nineveh occurred in 612 BC after Assyria had been greatly weakened by a bitter series of internal civil wars between rival claimants to the throne.

Assyria survived as an occupied province and geo-political entity until it was dissolved after the Arab Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia in the 7th century AD.

On the eve of the battle of Issus (333 BC), Alexander's biographers say, Alexander the Great was shown what purported to be the tomb of Sardanapalus at Anchialus in Cilicia, with a relief carving of the king clapping his hands and a cuneiform inscription that the locals translated for him as "Sardanapalus, son of Anakyndaraxes, built Anchialus and Tarsus in a single day; stranger, eat, drink and make love, as other human things are not worth this" (signifying the clap of the hands).

The character which Ctesias depicted or invented, an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide, cannot be identified".

Written during the July Revolution of 1830, it was his fourth and finally successful attempt in the Prix de Rome competition, run by the Paris Conservatoire.

[16] Franz Liszt began an (incomplete) opera on the subject in 1850, Sardanapalo, Act 1 of which had its world premiere only in 2018, almost a century and a half after the composer's death.

The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated.

[21] The legend of Sardanapulus was very loosely adapted as the basis of the 1962 Italian peplum film Le sette folgori di Assur (English title: War Gods of Babylon).