Babylonia and historical fiction with Times bestselling author Costanza Casati

First things first: which Mesopotamian god would you swear allegiance to? 

Easy! I'm gonna go with the goddess Ishtar, simply because she inspired the main character of Babylonia, Semiramis, the goddess of love and war. Her animal is the lion and lions play a big part in the novel.

Your first novel Clytemnestra was rooted in a love of Greek classics - what took you back to Babylonia next?

Well, I found out about Semiramis a few years ago - I was reading the Italian author Giovanni Boccacio, a contemporary of Chaucer who wrote the first collection of women's biographies in Western literature. Boccacio calls Semiramis ‘spirited and skilled’ - but there was one wicked sin that stained all her accomplishments - the fact that she burned with desire and ambition. 

This ancient Greek historian called Diodorus of Sicily compared her to Alexander the Great - I was intrigued. And then I found out about this tragic love triangle that eventually made her queen. That was the moment when I knew - I need that emotional hook. This was three or four years ago, but then I had to spend months and months doing more research!

So are you the sort of person that’s surrounded by post-it-notes?

I focus first on research that allows me to understand the mindset of the people. In this case reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, written a thousand years before The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or reading proverbs and love poems, and trying to understand what that meant for these people, for instance, what their underworld was like…

And then the other kind of research that I do is more practical. It allows me to understand what the palace was, like, how it was structured, the kinds of positions that women could hold politically in the empire, war tactics and studying the bas reliefs on the walls. I’ve read somewhere that when you're writing historical fiction, you know that you've researched enough only when the setting starts to feel like a memory…

Ah! So do you ever find yourself dreaming about Babylonia?

Yeah, maybe not dreaming about the setting. Because that would be quite traumatising [Costanza laughs]. But about the story.

Characters mention ‘the land of dust’ as the afterlife - if Semiramis comes from dust as you say, is it a bit of a cycle?

That was one of the first things that I became obsessed with. The House of Dust, the Land of Dust, the Land of Darkness appears everywhere in ancient Mesopotamia literature. I thought, ‘how interesting that these people in ancient Assyria were incredibly violent and constantly at war, but more than anything else they fear death.’

Much of my first novel Clytemnestra is actually set in ancient Sparta, and Spartans did not fear death. But, there is that sense of a cycle because Semiramis started out as being a nobody, and for her that's literally like being dead.

Do you set out to kind of focus on feminism and themes of class, or does that develop organically as you go?

A great question - the novel was originally two different POVs, Semiramis and King Ninus. But then one day somewhere during my first draft, I suddenly thought of the first line of the slave Ribat’s first chapter: ‘he has learned to read on the scars of his mother's back’. Once I had that line, I had the character. 

Ribat’s similar to Semiramis in a way because both have this obsession with ambition, their trajectory is quite similar. They both come from the dust, and they slowly rise towards the high heavens. Gilgamesh has been called the epic of the fear of death, and in Babylonia the characters fear death more than anything else. Fame is the way to overcome that.

Babylonia by Costanza Casati is out now at all good bookshops.

@costanzacasati