Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Babylon: The Most Important City of Antiquity About this episode The urban cultures of ancient Mesopotamia formed the foundation for so much of our modern world. Nowhere exemplifies this better than the city of Babylon, which was the cultural seedbed for the Greek and Roman civilisations that in turn left such lasting legacies.
On this episode, Dan is joined by Amanda Podany, professor emeritus of history at the California State Polytechnic University. Amanda draws on an astonishing breadth of original documents and objects to explain just how foundational this civilisation was, and how people learnt to live side by side with one another.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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1:35 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. You've heard of Greece, you've heard of Rome. As I understand it, some people think about Rome rather a lot. But do they think about Mesopotamian culture? That bedrock culture on which so much subsequent Greek and Roman science, politics, engineering and warfare was based? For more than 3,000 years, from 3,500 B.C. right up to the year dot, the year zero or one, there were a remarkable series of city-states, empires and civilizations in what we call Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent.
2:15 Dan Snow? It was an explosion of innovation, of achievement, on which so much of our world, our culture, is based. Our calendar, our understanding of the heavens, the wheel, geometry, beer drinking, all of that, we owe to the ancient Mesopotamians. And a city that's come to exemplify that is Babylon. In this episode, I'm going to talk to the very brilliant Amanda Podany. She's a professor of history in California. She's written a wonderful new book about Babylon called Weavers, Scribes and Kings. It's a history of the ancient Near East, and she's going to tell me how in the first
2:55 Dan Snow? cities to emerge on this planet of earth, men and women strove to work out how to live together. Who should pay when a dodgy builder's wall collapsed? How we can thrive and prosper? How we can have a good time? And the best thing that she describes to me is that we know so much about it. We know more about it than nearly any other ancient civilization. We have up to a million documents, not paper, not papyrus, but baked clay with writing on them. It is an astonishing tale about a foundational civilization. Enjoy.
3:32 Speaker 03 T minus ten.
3:33 Speaker 04 The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.
3:43 Speaker 03 And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
3:50 Dan Snow? Amanda, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Do you spend your time raging, shouting at TVs and radios about when you hear people talk about the classical world, the ancient world, and they ignore the start of the whole thing, the key elements of ancient civilization, which are not Greece, Rome, or even Egypt, but further east?
4:08 Speaker 05 No, that's true. I do. I often find myself shouting at the TV. I have to take issue with Egypt. Egypt is pretty much as early as Mesopotamia.
4:17 Dan Snow? Okay, we'll allow them.
4:18 Speaker 05 Yes, but yes, when Greece and Rome are considered the beginnings of civilization, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're latecomers, absolutely.
4:26 Dan Snow? Well, let's use that word civilization in its purest sense. How should we define that? Do we find people working with certain metals or using written alphabets? Or do you think it's the architecture of how we live together in larger and larger groups? What makes civilization?
4:40 Speaker 05 You know, it's such a good question, and it's such a controversial topic, honestly, because who's to say that civilization didn't begin with the hunters and gatherers? I mean, it's very difficult to put a name to exactly at what moment people became civilized. So perhaps I should rephrase what I said and say urban culture, because of course, it's a loaded term, civilization, because it has the sort of corollary uncivilized, which is equally impossible to talk about. I mean, that is just not a term that makes any sense at all. So if we talk about urban culture, though, urban culture begins with cities, of course, and cities, I think, where you have especially monumental architecture.
5:24 Speaker 05 I think we can see that as something marking a city as different from a large group of people living together. And a city tends to have some sort of social stratification. It tends to have some sort of labor force that is building on behalf of the city. They're either constructing monumental buildings, or they're digging canals to help the city thrive. And there's all of these aspects to it that one sees in Mesopotamia really early compared to much of the rest of the world. A city in ancient Mesopotamia, even in 3500 BCE, 5,500 years ago,
6:02 Speaker 05 If you could visit it, if we could have a time machine and go back, I think we would recognise it as a city, people living in the same kinds of ways that they live in cities today. And I think that's a real break in world culture when you get to that. And they did it really well. The earliest city that we know of, which is a place called Uruk, was not, you know, one would expect perhaps of an early city to be sort of violent and disorganised. It was a place where people lived peacefully with one another and a very, very long time ago.
6:35 Dan Snow? What is it about the geography of that place that allowed it? Or was it not the geography? Was it just someone coming up with the idea? And it could have happened in China, it could happen in the Nile, but why did it happen there?
6:47 Speaker 05 I think it does have something to do with geography. The region is very fertile, but only because of the rivers, the Euphrates River especially, that was flowing in that region. And right at the time when the cities began to be established, what is now the Gulf was sort of retreating southwards. And so a region that had been underwater or had been marshy was increasingly becoming dry land. And there's an area there where initially it was possible to farm, just using the river water in the marshlands. And there's some ideas that people began to try and control that river water by just creating basins
7:28 Speaker 05 in which the water would stay, rather than initially with canals, a sort of basin irrigation that made it possible for a lot of people to live in a region because of the productivity of the land as a result of this. So you could have a denser population because the soil was very fertile. That said, it doesn't rain much there. And so it wasn't possible to live far away from the city. If you were not living near the river, you couldn't really make a living. Certainly isn't in agriculture, perhaps in herding you could, but not in agriculture. So it does bring people together. There's a lot of different theories about this, but it really does seem as though that's part of it. But I think another really important part of why people started to live in Uruk is that it was considered to be the home
8:12 Speaker 05 to a god and a goddess who were very important to them. And living near the house of the god or the goddess was probably a good thing, you know, somewhere where you could feel protected, that the gods were watching over you there. And of course, once you have people living in a place and it starts getting bigger. Traders come there. This is where you can go if you're looking for goods from other lands that are valuable or important. And so I think it's not one cause. I think the geography has something to do with it. The religion has something to do with it. The just population growth itself becomes a self-perpetuating mechanism. This is not just at Europe, but a number of cities in the same region in what is now southern Iraq had the same experience.
8:55 Dan Snow? But it's exciting, and I don't want to just impose my sense of the present on it. But it's exciting. You're putting human agency back into this story in a way that I haven't thought about enough. And people want to be in the big city. You want to be, things are going on there. And as you say, population growth brings its own dynamic. And you think of the extraordinary explosion of cities in the 21st century. But a lot of that is, there's opportunity. It's less boring than kind of living by yourself and with your sisters and cousins and brothers and in the middle of nowhere. Like it's, I like the idea that these first cities could have been magnets for all the reasons that cities still are today.
9:26 Speaker 05 Oh, absolutely. And I think we do talk about the past being very different from the present, of course, because it is in many ways. But they're human beings and human beings do like many of the same things, you know, in different cultures, different places. And I think that by realizing our shared humanity, as well as the differences between us and them, it does make you realize that they would have had similar motivations to us, of course. Yes.
9:50 Dan Snow? Want to get together and have a good time. Now, the problem with similar motivations, what about our oft lamented motivation to steal, commit theft and rapine and violence on our fellow man? Like you mentioned that these early cities, one in particular was very peaceful. Some of them are fortified, I understand. Like, what do we know about cities and wealth? And then war and indeed expanding to try and conquer other cities?
10:11 Speaker 05 There's two different things going on there. Within the city, it seems as though there wasn't, and this was true actually through most of Mesopotamian history, there wasn't much random violence. There wasn't much, you know, stealing from your neighbor and that kind of thing. Obviously, it existed, but it wasn't rampant within the community. We know this, apparently, there was a study done that they found that in early Mesopotamian cities, when they look at the skeletons, that people were being bashed on the head much less than one would expect, you know, that the sort of idea that your neighbor was coming over to do you in was very rare. There was a real sense, I think, of community and also of the expectation that even very early on, that you wouldn't get away with it, that you would be taken to court and you would be, you know, they had a judicial system.
10:57 Speaker 05 But there were, of course, wars, yes. And in the early period, the southern part of what is now Iraq, Mesopotamia, had a number of different city-states that periodically did fight against one another. Later, they would form alliances. Very early on, in fact, they formed alliances. They had diplomacy, they had ambassadors going back and forth, making alliances, so that there would be leagues of different city-states that would sometimes then fight against one another. So, yes, they had city walls after a while to protect the people who lived inside. They had an organized military, they had a military draft. When we see images of these very early soldiers from as early as 2500 BCE,
11:41 Speaker 05 they are armed the same way, they're wearing the same helmets, they are clearly being equipped by the state. So they had organized warfare, but they also had organized diplomacy. And so it wasn't a sort of free-for-all, everybody fighting everybody else at all. It was structured.
11:56 Dan Snow? Very close of it. War and politics all advancing side by side. Okay, so we've got specialization, we've got, you've mentioned temples and priests, people are doing different jobs, you've mentioned traders, you've mentioned soldiers. That is an aspect of kind of urban culture. What about writing? Where does writing happen?
12:15 Speaker 05 Well, writing is, the reason we know all of this, is they developed a very, very early writing system. It developed by 3200 BCE. So they had a system for keeping track of things. It wasn't exactly writing in the way that we think of writing, because it wasn't designed to record spoken language. Initially, it was just to keep track of things like-
12:37 Dan Snow? Spreadsheets.
12:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly, yeah. Rations, lists of workmen, who's getting beer from where, which warehouses-
12:44 Dan Snow? The important stuff.
12:45 Speaker 05 Absolutely. It's really, it's a memory aid, right? They're keeping track of things that they couldn't possibly commit to memory. And it isn't for several hundred years after that that they start using it for anything that we would think of as sort of literature at all. Kings began to write inscriptions after about, hmm. Maybe 400 years after kingship developed, they start thinking, oh, I could tell people how great I am using this system that I normally use to record cows and sheep. And so, once you have writing, then you do have all of this information about who was working. And even in those very early texts, the ones that just lists, they have the names of people who are doing certain professions. And so, for example, there's a man named Kushim in the city of Uruk, who was in charge of the beer warehouse.
13:29 Speaker 05 And we can see his records, and we have his name, and we know that he would keep track of the barley that was coming in to make the beer, the pitchers of beer that going out, who was getting them, that kind of thing. So we do actually have very early, early records in Mesopotamia of professions that aren't just kings and priests.
13:48 Dan Snow? And this alphabet is used by these different city-states? Do they share a lingua franca in terms of this way of restoring information, even if they perhaps speak different dialects and different languages between themselves?
14:01 Speaker 05 Oh, that's such a good question. It isn't an alphabet. They didn't develop an alphabet for, oh, gosh, 2,000 years. But it's a writing system that's called a syllabary. Each sign stands for a syllable rather than a vowel or a consonant. And so it has a lot more signs. Well, early on, the very earliest form of writing, they had more than 1,000 of these, what are called cuneiform signs, that they would use. But gradually, they limited the number. They, very early on, in fact, they decided to make it a bit more systematic, and they did share it. Your question is great. They did share it across the different city-states, the same writing system, the same schooling system even. Some of the very early documents are from school, where they're learning lists of nouns. And the same lists of nouns show up right across the region.
14:46 Speaker 05 So they've got a common curriculum, amazingly, quite early on. And they used it for initially, the language of Sumerian, which is the language that was spoken in the south. But they adapted it later for the language of Akkadian, which was spoken further north. And later still, it was used for eight or nine at least different languages. The cuneiform system was able to be adapted for all these different languages. And it continued in use for 3,000 years.
15:12 Dan Snow? Now, I know we're talking about Babylon, and we haven't actually got there yet, but you've mentioned, you've mentioned the Akkadians. And while I've got you, I've got Enheduanna, the priestess, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, I think. Is she the first author, in a sense, as you talk about this form of communication transmogrifying into a way of recording thoughts and prayers and poetry like we do today?
15:33 Speaker 05 Yes, she wasn't the first person to write literature, but she's the first person whose name we know who wrote literature. So people had written hymns before Enheduanna, but they were anonymous. And Enheduanna, you're right, she was the priestess, she was the daughter of the king, King Sargon, and she wrote these beautiful hymns in which she would say, "I Enheduanna", and she named herself. And so she is sometimes called the first known author in history. I think she was important for so many reasons. The hymns that she wrote are beautiful, but she was also someone who, that the role of priestess was so important in Mesopotamia. And I think one of the things that we sometimes lose sight of
16:14 Speaker 05 was that it wasn't just priests, that priestesses were very powerful. In fact, throughout this culture in the third millennium, the 2000s BCE, women played a really powerful role, both in the religion and in politics. And Enheduanna is an example of that. She was chosen by her father to become the high priestess at the city of Ur. So Sargon lives north in what became Babylonia. Ur is in the south in what was Sumer. And so she's moving to a city that speaks a different language. She would have spoken Akkadian. She had to learn Sumerian in the city she moved to. And she was not just there to worship the gods, especially the moon god who was based there, but also to be the head of the whole estate that the moon god owned.
16:59 Speaker 05 And so she was an important person in her own time for reasons quite separate from her modern fame as a literary figure.
17:06 Dan Snow? Yeah, a bit like Samuel Pepys, famous in the modern world for his literary works, but famous at the time for completely different things. So why do we think of Babylon as a sort of an OG, multi-state, regional empire? We've had these cities before. What's happening by the time we get to the rise of Babylon and what data we have?
17:24 Speaker 05 Babylon is funny because it existed before the time of Hammurabi. Hammurabi is the famous king that everyone's heard of from Babylon. But it hadn't been a terribly important place. All the way up through Hammurabi's reign, Babylon was just one of many cities in the region. It had been subject to other territorial states before that. Hammurabi decided quite late in his reign, he had a 43-year reign.
17:48 Speaker 05 And it wasn't until he was well established on the throne for 30 years, I mean, most kings would have been dead by the time they'd been on the throne 30 years, that he got it into his head to build an empire. And he did so, he managed to sort of conquer the neighbors and he wasn't the first person to do that. But because Babylon became such an important place for so long afterwards, we look back to the origins of that empire and we see Hammurabi being perhaps the first person from Babylon to get that kind of notion that Babylon was going to be an important place, that it was the centre of the universe. And he came to power in 1792 BCE. So he was building his empire in the 1760s and then he was dead in 1750s. And his empire didn't last very long.
18:32 Speaker 05 I think that's what's surprising is that it wasn't as though once Babylon had been established by Hammurabi as a conquering power, that it stayed that way. In the reigns of his son, grandson, great grandson, so forth, it shrank back to just the area around Babylon. But it remained in people's minds, an important place. And it became important again under a new dynasty called the Cassites, who ruled all of southern Mesopotamia from the region around Babylon. And that was in the Late Bronze Age, so that was from about 1500 to 1155 or so, something like that. And then again, it sort of went into decline. And then in the first millennium BCE, under Nebuchadnezzar II, who is another king that
19:16 Speaker 05 people tend to recognise the name of, it became a major, major world empire. I think perhaps the memory of Babylon that people had in subsequent eras, all the way to the present, is largely based on Nebuchadnezzar's time. But he was looking back to a time in Hammurabi's reign, he looked back to his history as the sort of origin of the importance of Babylon then too. So it's had rises and falls all the way through this time. But once Hammurabi had kind of made the case for Babylon being an important place, being in somewhere that the gods really favoured, that continued to be in the background, even if it wasn't famous and important at the time, from then on.
19:57 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Senor's History. We're talking about ancient Mesopotamia, where it all begins. More coming up.
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22:53 Dan Snow? And do we like Hammurabi because historians love people that write stuff down and make law codes and leave archives? Why are we more interested in him than another sort of warlord in this fertile crescent?
23:07 Speaker 05 It's so much the accident of archaeology because he was discovered in 1902, our era. And when his stele was found in 1902, it was the first laws anyone had seen from the ancient world. And by then, cuneiform had been deciphered, they could read it. Huge excitement all over the newspapers, the first laws in the world, right? They weren't, we now know, laws had existed long, long, long before Hammurabi. But because he gets this front page news, he becomes the person who gets in the textbooks. And he stayed there. He hasn't been replaced by Ornama, who is probably the person who wrote down the first laws. Because partly, I think the stele is so impressive, it's so beautiful. It's in the Louvre Museum now, and it has this gorgeous image of Hammurabi with the
23:51 Speaker 05 god Shamash at the top, and then 280-some laws engraved in stone. So part of it is just that reason. They discovered him, they loved him, and he stayed. On the other hand, he was important even in the ancient world. So the ancients copied those laws for hundreds of years after they were written. So even though they weren't the first, they were regarded as important in his time and in the generations that followed him. So that even in the Neo Assyrian period, there's a copy of Hammurabi's laws in a library of a great king of Assyria. So it's not completely arbitrary that we remember him. I think that his laws were particularly well preserved even in their own time, perhaps
24:33 Speaker 05 because he'd had them carved on these stone monuments that were around the kingdom. So there were copies of them that survived. And later scribes, not everyone was literate, of course, very few people were literate. So the scribes who went to school, those laws were something that they studied. And so that kept his importance alive, too. I think Hammurabi would have been absolutely amazed that he's as famous as he is, because there are so many other people in Mesopotamian history who at the time would have been seen, I think, as much more powerful. Even a king in his own reign, a king who was on the throne of a neighboring kingdom called Larsa, man named Rim Sin, he ruled for 60 years. He was so important back then, I think Hammurabi would have assumed Rim Sin would be the one
25:17 Speaker 05 we would remember, not him, surprisingly. But Rim Sin didn't carve his laws on a big stone stele, so no.
25:26 Dan Snow? That's right. The archaeologists and the historians, they want to make sure you get remembered, and they love a stone stele, folks. What are some of the laws? Because I like the one about the building regulations, but what are some of the ones that, well, I guess, what are some of the ones that feel very different to our own time, and then some of them that feel very familiar?
25:43 Speaker 05 Oh, yes, the laws, I think one of the things that people tend to assume is that they're all about eye for an eye, because that's what often gets quoted. You know, if you break a man's arm, they'll break your arm. But most of them have nothing to do with that. Most of them are about things like inheritance, land control. If you break the wall of someone's canal and it floods your field, the person who broke the canal or the dam has to pay for the crops in your field and so forth. So there's a lot of really interesting insights into daily life in these laws. And some of the fascinating ones are how the laws controlling soldiers, not on campaign, but in their daily lives. So for example, soldiers were paid by being given a plot of land. And they could use that plot of land when they weren't on campaign and keep their family.
26:28 Speaker 05 And then when they went off on campaign for three months a year, they didn't serve the whole time. That was their, what they did in exchange for getting that use of the land. And we don't just have Hammurabi's laws that tell us about this system. We also have letters that he wrote to his administrators who gave out the land. There's a soldier that I write about called Mashrom. And he was given a plot of land and we have the record of the land being given to him and how big it was. And the man named Shamash Hazir, who was in control of giving out this land. All of this, even though it's so long ago and we don't have that system for paying soldiers today, the sort of bureaucracy of it is so familiar. Hammurabi writes to Shamash Hazir and he says, so and so is complaining to me that
27:11 Speaker 05 you've given their land to someone else. And this is not right. Go back through your records, make sure that you have the right owner and then give the land back to the correct owner. You know, it's so recognizably human. And Shamash Hazir at one point is called by Hammurabi, come to Babylon and bring all your documents with you because I need to look at your records. So behind all those laws, which we can see the sort of glimpse of the life of a soldier and how he worked the land and his wife and his kids and what happens if he's taken hostage and has to be ransomed from the, the enemy soldiers and whatever. There's evidence for it actually being practiced. You know, the, the letters that Hammurabi wrote back up what he says in his laws to some extent.
27:54 Speaker 05 One actually interesting point, and you asked for a particular law. One is that if a soldier hires someone to go in his place, he will be killed, right? Death penalty. That's absolute garbage. That's not true because we have letters and records of soldiers regularly hiring people to go in their place. They weren't killed for it. It was, I think, Hammurabi trying to say, this is what I would like to happen. I would like you all to show up when you're supposed to. But in reality, that didn't happen and they didn't impose the death penalty.
28:22 Dan Snow? Don't send the village vagabond with a rusty old sword. We don't want you. It's so interesting. You're describing, in a way, we shouldn't be surprised because concentrated human living and governing over big groups of people with whom you're not on first-name terms, it requires regulation. With the birth of urban culture, in a way, it is the birth of law and regulation as well. Otherwise, it would just be anarchic.
28:44 Speaker 05 Yes. But interestingly, the laws are not really laws, curiously. We have lots of judicial records and we have court records. And there were judges and there were courts and they were actually very well-run and they've certainly strong attempts not to allow corruption to creep in. But there are no references to the judges consulting Hammurabi's laws. They don't say, because Hammurabi said this, I'm going to rule such and such. So what they seem to have been is a collection of legal precedents rather than actual laws. It's as though Hammurabi went around the courts and said, these are decisions that have been made in the past. This is what I would like you to continue to do. But unlike our legal system, those laws were not imposed. The spirit of them was imposed. But one striking difference
29:26 Speaker 05 is that where there are quite a lot of death penalty crimes, almost never did they impose the death penalty. They tended to impose fines. They tended to, you know, find other ways before killing someone. And I think that makes a lot of sense, honestly, that it was pragmatic.
29:43 Dan Snow? It makes sense to us Brits because that's common law and precedence, what we're all about.
29:46 Speaker 05 Yes, exactly.
29:47 Dan Snow? Not like these Enlightenment French and Americans, you know, it's all a bit more straitjacketed. And also, the way you're talking about it, we've clearly got extraordinary source material for this period. And is that because lots of these things are written onto clay which survives rather than other material?
30:02 Speaker 05 So you've got it exactly. And I think that's what makes this field so unbelievably fascinating, is that where in Greece or Rome or Egypt or Israel, they would have been writing on papyrus. And papyrus, of course, is an organic material, it disintegrates. So vast, vast, vast majority of documents from most of the ancient world in the Mediterranean region. Are gone, they don't exist anymore. The Mesopotamia is routinely wrote on clay, that's the medium they used. And that means that everything survives. If it's in the ground and nobody had tried to erase it, which you could, you could take a clay tablet and you could add water and, you know, turn it back into a blank clay tablet if it was not baked. But anything that's in the ground that they dropped, even if it was just sun dried, it's still there.
30:47 Speaker 05 It means that we have things that they would never have expected to survive. From those very first administrative documents in the very beginning of writing, those weren't written for us, they were written so they could keep track of the sheep and the beer. And the letters that Hammurabi was writing, he wasn't writing thinking posterity is going to read this. He wasn't being Cicero, he's writing because Shamash Hazir needs to be told to give that orchard back to the guy. And yet that survives. And so there is, and this is true as long as they were writing on clay, which was, as I say, 3,000 years. There's more than a half a million documents that survive. There's some estimates, it's as many as a million. Nobody's actually sort of gone in and counted every cuneiform document that's been found, but it's certainly at least a half a million.
31:30 Speaker 05 And they have just hundreds of thousands of lives on them, you know, people who are named, we can find out who they lived next door to and who their children were and what they did as a job. And it's just incredible resource, absolutely incredible.
31:46 Dan Snow? Why are we not as familiar with Mesopotamia? If there's almost more source material than there is for large parts of more recent history? Is it because it was discovered fairly recently? By which time our kind of Mediterranean basin, Greco-Roman fetish had just sort of was baked in over generations? Why do we not all talk about these people rather than speculating about what might be in Tacitus's lost books of his histories?
32:10 Speaker 05 I think you've got it. I think because Greece and Rome was a continuous tradition, it was never forgotten. Nobody ever forgot how to read Greek or Latin. Those have a very, very long history of fascination. Juniper was deciphered in the mid 19th century. It was initially, I think the interest was as a sort of background to the Bible. And that has changed, of course, you know, that now it is recognized as an interesting field in its own right, rather than necessarily only being interesting because it provides a sort of context for the Bible. But honestly, I ask the same question. It is such an important and interesting field. And so many of us who are in it, take that for granted, you know, but yeah, of course we can do a study of the weaving women in the city of Lagash, which we can do.
32:54 Speaker 05 And it hasn't made it to popular awareness. And the book that I keep mentioning, Weaver Scribes and Kings, which came out last year. This is exactly the point why I wrote that book, because I wanted to write about the weavers and the scribes and the barbers and the brewers and the soldiers and the people that we know a great deal about, and they just haven't penetrated the public consciousness. Because they're fascinating. And I hope that gradually people do become more aware, because yes, we're not speculating. These are real people and we can talk about them and about their lives without having to make stuff up.
33:29 Dan Snow? And also, apart from the lives of the fascinating lives of normal people, as it were, sort of bedrock civilizational developments around science and astronomy and all that kind of stuff. So dividing minutes into seconds and hours into minutes and all that sort of thing, that's all Mesopotamian Babylonian, is it?
33:49 Speaker 05 It is, yes. That's why we have the very strange system that we have of 60. They had a base 60 number system, which we have lost entirely, except for when it comes to hours and minutes. But that's a Sumerian invention. And for them, it made sense. 60 is a good base number when you don't have decimals. Because if you're using fractions, if you think about 60, it's divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It makes for good fractions. And it also works quite well when the 360 degree circle, if you think about it, which we also got from the Mesopotamians. Yes, they were mathematicians, they were astronomers, they invented a great deal of aspects of science that would have come down to us. They also had types of science
34:32 Speaker 05 that they thought of as science that, of course, we don't. So, for example, they believed that you could know the will of the gods by looking at the movements of the planets in the sky, which was why they studied astronomy, of course, to try and understand the will of the gods. We don't use it for that reason anymore, but we use the same names they gave to the constellations, just translated. But yeah, there's a lot of our sort of scientific astronomy that comes from them. Only their interest initially was to find out what the gods wanted.
35:01 Dan Snow? When do we talk about the eclipse of this sort of fertile Crescent Mesopotamian culture? Because the Persians end up basing many of their greatest cities there, but they are seen as an external culture, are they?
35:15 Speaker 05 Yes. I don't think one would put the end of Mesopotamian civilization in 539, though. That's when Cyrus conquered Babylon.
35:23 Dan Snow? The Persian king comes down, and his base is more modern day Iran, is it?
35:27 Speaker 05 Exactly, yes.
35:28 Dan Snow? Right. And he conquers all this territory.
35:30 Speaker 05 Right. But if you look at the documents from Babylon at the time, nothing really changes when Cyrus arrives. Certainly, he's coming in as an outside conqueror, and he didn't rule from Babylon, he's ruling from Persia. But people's lives didn't change very much. They kept writing cuneiform, they kept... There are archives of merchants who go from your number of the reign of Nabonidus, who was a local king, to the first year of Cyrus, without a break. Nothing changed. It's just like, life is going on just as it had been. So they wouldn't have said, aha, 539, everything has changed now, at all. It was very gradual, and it was all the way through another 500 years, they were still using cuneiform. Not all the time. The worship of the gods was continued, so
36:14 Speaker 05 the local gods continued to be worshiped, the local languages continued to be spoken initially. But very gradually, they start being replaced. And I think you can sort of say about the year one, you know, by about the year one, we have very little left of Mesopotamian culture as it would have been recognized by the people of, say, Hammurabi's time, 1792 BCE, that it was a slow, slow process. I think the Persians taking over was an important moment, in retrospect, because after that... Mesopotamia wasn't ruled by a local dynasty for hundreds and hundreds of years, but the people living there wouldn't have necessarily thought of it as dramatically different then.
36:52 Dan Snow? Well, Babylon was obviously good at absorbing conquerors because Alexander the Great goes there and all his Greek Macedonian allies are saying, "You've gone native, you terrible man."
37:00 Speaker 05 Exactly.
37:00 Dan Snow? So that's obviously the culture and the civilization exercised enormous pull even on those who conquered it. You say, "Well, it was unrecognizable by the year one." They've done pretty well. I mean, that's the thing.
37:10 Speaker 05 3,000.
37:11 Dan Snow? 3,000 years, so it's an extraordinary run.
37:14 Speaker 05 It's also, if you think about it, that we have had less time since then than the length of their civilizations. So when people talk about, you know, well, Mesopotamia fell, you know, 3,000 years is a long time to survive before falling. That's pretty good.
37:26 Dan Snow? That's extremely good. I always find that with the British Empire. People go, "Well, you know, this empire or that empire didn't last very long." Yeah, well, hang on. The British Empire, this global phenomenon, lasted about 150 years in its kind of more modern form. So the fact that these civilizations have gone that long is astonishing.
37:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, it really is. It was very, very long lasting, very stable. Yeah.
37:48 Dan Snow? Speaking of the civilization, there's a very, very good book that you've written. Tell everyone it's called.
37:53 Speaker 05 It's called Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East.
37:57 Dan Snow? Fantastic. And I'm sure it will contribute to what you aspire to, which is that we will talk about the Ancient Near East with all the excitement and fandom that we do about the later Greek Roman empires, for sure.
38:08 Speaker 05 I love it. Fandom for the Ancient Near East. That's good.
38:11 Dan Snow? Thank you for coming on.
38:12 Speaker 05 Thank you. It's my pleasure.
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Previous THE LEADERS: Mussolini Next THE LEADERS: Stalin Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
