The Rise & Fall of Babylon

Babylon has a PR problem, and it's 2,600 years in the making. The Bible remembers it as the ultimate city of sin, the place that crushed Jerusalem and dragged the Jewish people into exile. But if you look beyond this chapter, you find history's first true megacity. An ancient metropolis so influential that even the empires that conquered it couldn't resist becoming Babylonian themselves. Dan sits down with historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author of 'Babylon: The Mother of All Cities', to hear all about this ancient superpower. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  You're standing in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. You're watching in horror as the unstoppable war machine of King Nebuchadnezzar smashes the city to pieces, reducing the sacred first temple to ash. According to the weeping prophet Jeremiah, this is a catastrophe, divine punishment sent by God for the sins of the Judeans. From this trauma, biblical writers forged an enduring myth, Babylon, home of Nebuchadnezzar,

• 2:22Speaker 00

  as the ultimate city of sin, a cursed place, a caricature of human arrogance, decadence, decay. But beneath that myth lies a far grander reality, the tale of history's first true megacity. It's got a bad press. Babylon was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis of dazzling blue glazed brick, of mighty canals carved through the desert, soaring temples that rivaled the engineering feats of empires that came many centuries after it. This is Babylon, the ancient blueprint for the modern world.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Joining us today is Lloyd Clowell Jones, professor in ancient history at Cardiff University. He's author of Babylon, the mother of all cities, and he's going to help me strip away centuries of myth and tell us about this real, gritty, vibrant, important story of Babylon and its rulers. Enjoy.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Lloyd, thank you for coming on.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  You're very welcome. Good to be here.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  First, I think geography, do we need to get geography sorted out first? Where is this place?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Babylon, right in the centre of modern day Iraq, so it's about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  And is that Mesopotamia? What are some of the terms that we'll have heard?

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you will have heard of Mesopotamia, a Greek term meaning between the rivers.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  So the rivers, of course, are the Euphrates and the Tigris.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Huge rivers.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Enormous, with this huge flood plain in between. And Babylon is actually built on the edge of the Euphrates. In fact, the Euphrates ran through the city centre, so there's kind of like an island of Babylon as well. Yeah. And the whole landscape was littered with canals, so it's like a kind of spaghetti junction of ancient world. The other thing you'll hear is fertile crescent. That's another thing as well. So that talks about this huge swathe of land which went from the coast of Syria and the Levant right the way down through Iraq to the Persian Gulf, which was made fertile because of these great two rivers.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And so wonderful soil, benign climate.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, harsh, harsh desert climate, but as long as you're close to the water, it's manageable.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  The rivers are a bit of a nightmare. They move around a lot, like untamed snakes.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Absolutely, they really do. And that's why I think the Babylonians tried to kind of tame the rivers by seeing them as deities. If you think of like the way the Ganges is for many Hindus today. So the Babylonians thought the same thing about the Tigris and the Euphrates, so they offered to it, they personalised it, they prayed that it will do its job and not harm them, is one of the things you get. But the other thing that the Tigris and Euphrates gave to Babylonia is mud. And mud was essential for everything. The whole of Babylon was built on mud bricks, essentially. And of course, even the writing tablets in which they wrote their cuneiform documents was mud as well. So I think, you know, the kind of the gift, if you think about the gift of the Nile was

• 5:29Speaker 04

  supposed to be grain, the gift of the Euphrates was definitely mud, and the Babylonians utilised it, one of the best things they could do.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  And really nice, so the mud's all the river floods are a bit like mud, the minute you put it in the sun, it bakes hard as rock, so you've got this strange...

• 5:43Speaker 04

  And you know, and the thing is, many times when we find documents like these cuneiform tablets, think of them about the size of a sort of computer mouse that would fit really nicely into the palm of the hand. When they get baked in the sun, they go hard. But if they're double baked in, say, a fire, and let's face it, many of the locations that we found have been set on fire because of invasion and so forth over the centuries, they go rock hard.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  And so, I mean, they're virtually unbreakable, you know? They're going to be around a long time after we're gone, that's for sure.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  A long time after my email inbox is accessible, I'm pretty sure. And isn't it fascinating to think, you know, the great, these early civilizations, Nile, Indus, China, these rivers, big source of fresh water, that's what you need.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  And they've got, in that part, that you've got a useful crops, that there's a good, there's a good suite of things you can grow there.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Oh, there's masses of things.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Indigenous.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Masses. And it's done on kind of like a state scale, but also on a household scale as well, because virtually every peasant is allotted a bit of land, you know? So you must think of the whole of Babylonia as being divided into kind of like allotments all over the place. And it's rich in everything they could possibly want, every kind of vegetable, legume you could think of, every, every sort of herb, and then, of course, the richness of all the fruits as well. So, I mean, they were really pretty much self-dependent, you know? They could produce everything they wanted. And plus, the rivers then also gave them fresh water, shellfish, and freshwater fish, all of that as well. So, I mean, it was incredible for them.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  We hear about cities and civilizations, don't we, in this part of the world? And I'm so glad you're here, because I obviously always get the chronology wrong, but there's the er.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  So er is the, is the kind of first kind of great urban centre. That's way down south nowadays, on, down the south of Iraq in antiquity, so about 4,000 years ago, it was actually on the sea.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  But of course, the land has encroached, you know, silted up over the millennia. So it's far from the sea now, but it was actually a seaport originally. So that was the first kind of great walled city, I suppose. And then from that, we get places like Uruk, and then Sipar, Nipur. And Babylon is something of a latecomer to the kind of urban centres of Mesopotamia. I suppose it really kind of starts coming alive about 1900 BCE, something like that, when we get our first cuneiform reports about this nascent city. But by 200 years later, it was ruling the roost, it dominated the rest of Mesopotamia.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And by ruling the roost, that's interesting. So these cities, I was about to ask, do they, do they all emerge like our Greek city-state system later on? Or does one emerge, conquer everyone else, and build sort of empires?

• 8:32Speaker 04

  It's a little bit of both, actually. So these cities kind of pop up roughly at the same time in the south and a little bit later further north. And then they go through the process of conquest. And what we're finding, rather like kind of, you know, British medieval history, there are dynastic alliances between all of these city-states, marriage alliances, all of this kind of thing. So there's this whole interconnected web of kings and princes and priestesses all around at the same time. But all of them keen, basically, to be top dog in the area, and that's what Babylon does so well.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  And why, so what, is there something that Babylon's doing? Does it have a little competitive advantage or something? What's Babylon doing that sees it rise to prominence?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  It, first of all, acquiesces to other powers around it, and it shows loyalty to like the late kings of Ur, for instance, the last dynasty of Ur. The Babylonians just coming into being, very loyal to them, they pay their taxes. And because of that, the kings of Ur allow the Babylon, Babylonians some kind of laissez-faire, they're allowed to have their own governors, okay? Bad mistake. Because, yeah, of course, once you've got a governor's household, you know, then you've got a little dynasty starting, and so these people start to take power for themselves. And as they see the centre of Ur going into a little bit of decline, and then a sharp decline, so they've already got a system of government set up for themselves. And so that's how it really begins.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  But really, the kind of, it all kicks off when a, when a group of non-Mesopotamians come into the area. These are called the Amorites. They were nomadic tribes. They came from around the Syria area, came into Mesopotamia. In our early kind of cuneiform documents, they're often kind of looked down on, despised as kind of barbarians, sheep farmers and wanderers, you know, who are these rather, you know, unclean and questionable people. But... Over two hundred year period, a lot of these Amorite leaders, these tribal chiefs,

• 10:43Speaker 04

  actually become kind of urbanised, they start moving into the centres. And it's out of this group of Amorites that actually our first kings of Babylon really emerge. So it's really fascinating, as often happens, you know, the outsiders become the insiders. And that's really what you get in Babylon. And of course, the first dynasty of Babylon, what we call the old period or the old Babylonian period, is ruled by a family and the highlight of the whole dynasty is, of course, Hammurabi, I'm sure some people will have heard of, who has gone down in history as being the first lawgiver, a man who was an incredible military strategist, a good soldier, a man

• 11:28Speaker 04

  with a ferocious temper, but a keen, keen eye for politics as well. So we see under Hammurabi Babylon suddenly dominating the political, geographic, social, cultural and religious sphere of the whole of Mesopotamia. And at its height, about seventeen fifty BCE, there was no other state to touch it, really. Virtually every other state had been conquered by Hammurabi and was now in its orbit.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  And why are you able to speak so beautifully, eloquently about his character, his personality? What are our sources here?

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Honestly, the sources for my area of study are so rich because we have all of these cuneiform texts. And these preserve everything from wills, house sales, marriage negotiations and dowry settlements, bills for funerals, laundry lists, love songs, poems, epic literature, you name it, it's all there. And one of the great things we have about old Babylonian documentation like this is we have a lot of personal correspondence.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  So back in the nineteen thirties, in Syria, at a place called Mari, which was a very big political centre at the time, archaeologists discovered a royal archive. And in there were all of these tablets just waiting to be decoded. Incredible. They're all written to a king called Zimri Lim. And we have seen, seems to have correspondents from all over the ancient world coming to him, you know. So we get a really good sense of his character, of course we do. But because a lot of the documentation comes back and forth between Zimri Lim's ambassadors in Babylon and the court in Mari, we learn a lot about Hammurabi as well.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  And what comes over from them, first of all, he's a mover and shaker, so he's a player as well, a double dealer. So he will quite happily make an alliance with somebody, go so far down the path with it and then drop them, you know, which is, you know.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  With the knowledge of the rest of history, I'd love to sell a surprise.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Plus such chance, right? But then the other things we hear is that he has this most terrible temper and this kind of incapacity, really, to be patient for anything. So at one point, we told that a group of diplomats from Mari have asked the king for some new cloaks to wear, because it was kind of a custom in antiquity for when diplomats arrived, they were feasted, they were given gifts, because distances were, you know, quite long. And very often they were given favours by the king of things like personal items, dress, that kind of thing. And anyway, the ambassadors from Mari kind of kick up a bit of a fuss and they say, no, no cloaks here, you know, not what we're used to.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  And rather than just like accepting that, we have this letter written back by one of these diplomats to his master Zimri Lim saying, "The king went absolutely mad at us. He said, 'Who are we to demand anything of Hammurabi? You know, you should go back to your master with no shoes on your feet,' he says, 'You know, that's the kind of people you are.'" So he really was a touchy character.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  When you're describing that so beautifully, when you read those sources from as early in human history as we have that level of detailed sources, it's very rare, isn't it, that far back? We certainly don't. I don't feel we have sources like that about Egypt, for example.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  No, and that's because of the nature of the beast, really, you know. I mean, the source is the tablet, and the tablet is very often the real words of individuals, you know, some scribe has been dashing down. And because they survive, and of course, you know, that doesn't happen to papyrus, or it doesn't happen to leather, and it certainly doesn't happen to paper and so forth, you know. So that's why in Near Eastern studies, we're very lucky with our source materials.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And just from a personal level, when you read all that, do you find yourself thinking, "Goodness me, humans beings have hardly changed over the last three thousand years", or do you think, "Ooh, these people are different to us"?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  It'll go two ways, actually. Sometimes, you know, it's a stark kind of seismic shift that you're looking at, you know, you're looking into this vast chasm between us and them. But other times, that chasm, I mean, just completely falls in, you know, we are one and the same people. There's a beautiful, almost little throwaway line in one of the documents, actually, that a queen writes to Zimri Lim in Mari. He's away on warfare, and while he's been away, his youngest daughter has died. And the queen writes to her scribe, saying, "Look, you need to tell the king about this, but let's wait until he's here because he needs to hear this from me."

• 16:24Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, that's just now, isn't it? That's real, you know, that's how we are, you know.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  So we are lucky enough to know quite a lot about Hammurabi. What else? The law code, you mentioned that, why is that so significant? Is it, one again, to what we'd like to talk about first in your area?

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it really is one of the first, not quite the first, we can go back about a hundred and fifty years to find our first laws. But I suppose Hammurabi's laws have the most, have a longevity about them, I suppose, more than anything. And first of all, he also sets them up in a very kind of impactful way. So if you go to the Louvre Museum in Paris today, you'll see this huge black basalt obelisk. And sitting on the top is a picture of Hammurabi himself in front of his god. And the god is Shamash, who is the sun god. And Hammurabi sort of raises his hand in a gesture of reverence.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  And Shamash is wearing a bull's horn crown and is holding a rope, which is a measuring tape. Because Shamash, as the sun, can go around the world, of course, you know, and he takes his measuring tape around the world. And because of his ability to see all the world, he is the god of justice, because he sees everything, he hears everything instinctively, he knows what is right and wrong. And the Babylonians believed that their kings were appointed by Shamash to do that job for him. So Near Eastern kings had to be warriors, they had to be shepherds of their people, but also, more than anything, I think, they had to be kings of justice. So Hammurabi takes this very seriously.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  So he sets up this basalt stele, and it's huge. And it's covered with over three hundred laws, written in the most exquisite cuneiform script or chiselled in. And it's written in a very kind of archaic language as well, a deliberate kind of like, you know, harking back to older times as well. Even at the time, there was ancient history going on then, you know. So it's the equivalent of kind of like, you know, Saint King James Bible language, even for the Babylonians of Hammurabi's time. And it tells us a lot about, of course, Babylonian society and some of the problems they face, because we always think, well, laws are created to stop certain things happening, okay, and

• 18:46Speaker 04

  if they're happening too regularly, then something needs to be done about it. What we don't get frustratingly is any knowledge of how much these laws really impacted on people's lives. So they might have been more like a wish list, you know, but anyway, they're there. And we recognise something in them straight away. So we would label them as lex talionis, which essentially is the idea of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. So that's the basis of all Babylonian law. And unsurprisingly, we find the same ideas in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, in Leviticus Numbers, Deuteronomy as well.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  And there's very little doubt in my mind that later Hebrews incorporated some of Hammurabi's thinking into their laws as well. So the kind of thing we get would be something like, if a man fights with another man in the street and the opponent loses an eye, then the man who has hurt him will lose an eye also. Okay, so quite literally, quite literally like that. Now, there are little caveats in it. So for instance, if a man beats another man...

• 20:15Speaker 04

  And the man breaks his arm, so the other man will have his arm broken. If a man beats a slave, whose arm gets broken, the man shall play the slave's owner some money. Okay, so the slave gets nothing out of it at all. But there's monetary compensation because that slave can't do the work that he's intended to do for a certain amount of time. So it goes like that. There's one set of laws which are about builders, which I really like. So it says, if a builder builds a wall and after two months that wall falls down, the builder is responsible for the rebuilding of that wall at his cost as well, which is nice. You know, that's liberating. So we have lots of, lots of that kind of thing.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  But you know, the, these laws drill down to everything. And sometimes, sometimes we can see them at work. So some of the laws talk about women's rights and women's properties. And as you can imagine, Babylon was a very patriarchal society and women didn't have many rights, but a widow could have rights. And there are a group of women who are quite remarkable. They are called Nadi Tu priestesses. And they kind of work like nuns really in the temple of Marduk in Babylon. So they cannot have children, obviously, they have to be chaste. But these women are allowed to adopt other women, you know, younger novices as their

• 21:43Speaker 04

  daughters and pass on property to them. And we get one of these cases, in fact, coming up in a series of documents where a nun has passed on her wealth and her house to a novice who is, claims to be her adopted daughter. But the nun's two brothers contest this in court. And we see how the system works. So witnesses are brought in who can say, yes, yes, the nun did adopt this girl. And also the girl is able to show the document, of course, the cuneiform document where her adopted mother had given her this property as well. So the two men have their case dismissed and they're thrown out of court, you know?

• 22:28Speaker 04

  So we do see occasionally a bit of functioning of it. But it, but it's fascinating stuff and all, all aspects of life are covered there.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

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• 24:38Speaker 00

  Is there a sense, I mean, I'm just, we're not going to go all Magna Carta, but I'm guessing Hamirabi doesn't put any limits on his own power, but is he, is he sort of, is it, is it pretty weighted towards the aristocracy, the elites or the protection?

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Essentially, yes. So we have kind of like three classes that come out in this, in the text, and they're very difficult to translate actually. But one of them I, I've translated as kind of if a lord or if a seigneur, you know, does something such, or if the wife of a seigneur. And then there's if a Babylonian, which I reckon means if a freed man, and then there's a slave. Okay, so that's the way it works. And the, and the way in which the law works in favor of them will vary according to their social status. As for the king himself, I mean, he, he doesn't, you know, he doesn't come over with any particular rights or privileges in it, you know, he doesn't claim anything for himself. And that I think says quite a lot about how the Babylonians thought about their, their

• 25:37Speaker 04

  kings. So unlike, you know, the Egyptian pharaohs, Hammurabi and his lot were never considered to be living gods. They were at best, I would say, viceroy's of the gods that are pointed there. But there's no guarantee even that their elder son would be favored by a god, for instance, you know? Of course, the Babylonians can put everything down to the favor or non-favor of the gods, you know, diseases, successes, you know, invasions or, or, or triumphs all go down to the Babylonian gods. There are some interesting things, however, in this concept of what constitutes a god king for the Mesopotamians, because we have quite a lot of what we call theophoric names in Babylonia.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  So theophoric name means where, where the name of a, a king or a god is, is placed in front of your own name. So Christopher is a, you know, good example for that, for, for us in the West. So we have names that translate as Hammurabi is my god, which suggests at least for that man who took on that name, decided to keep that name at least, he must have thought higher of Hammurabi than maybe somebody else, you know? So I think there's actually a quite a fluid idea of what constitutes a living god in Babylon, completely unlike Egypt, when, you know, where things are just set theologically. So, and I think that says quite a lot about the Babylonian mindset anyway.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  They're quite, quite an expansive thinking people, you know, they think well beyond their borders. So, so to give a good example of that, you know, their greatest piece of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh. And that whole kind of boy's own adventure story is all about going beyond the city walls into the world that's out there, you know, what bizarre and terrifying things are around us. And then even more, the quest to find immortality takes Gilgamesh to the underworld and, and, you know, to, to meet the heroes of the dead and all that kind of thing. So you can, I think you see in the Babylonian mind, this real inquisitiveness that wants to think about the world of its, in its broader ways.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  And I suppose that they don't have a joke, they are at the crossroads of the world. There are north, south, east, west. There are trade routes, there are peoples, there are invaders. It's a busy old neighborhood.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Everyone came through them. And I think if you walk down the streets of Babylon of a night, you would just hear as you would in, in the center of any great metropolis today, multiple languages being spoken all around you. It must have been terribly exciting.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  In a way that Egypt feels a little bit more geographically.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Precisely removed.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  And indeed defended, and there may be advantages and disadvantages to that, but.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  But also the Egyptians had no real desire to explore either. You know, they thought the Nile Valley was everything.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  That's all you need.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  The Babylonians don't think like that at all, you know, they, they see, I think it is because they see the world coming through them, then they're, they're a lot more sort of open to it.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Now militarily, what's that mean? Are we, are we fighting our neighbors a lot if we don't launch preemptive attacks? Are we likely to be invaded? What, what does that, what's it mean to be a king?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  So it means that you're always on the lookout for opportunists elsewhere, because you yourself were an opportunist once and you've managed to get to the top and now it's dog eat dog. So I think Hammurabi and his successors were constantly looking out for rival kings more locally. So places like Isin and Kish, quite big cities nearby in Mesopotamia, but also more problematically, major rivals like the kings of Elam, the Elamite kings, which were based in southwestern Iran today, at the foothills of the, of the Zagros Mountains. And they would come in on these major campaigns into Babylon, you know, and, and swipe through the place.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  In fact, that wonderful stele of Hammurabi I described in the Louvre was actually found in Susa in Elam. It was stolen and then put up there, absolutely. And then later on, past Hammurabi's time, as we get into about 1000 through to 800 BCE, the threat comes increasingly from the north. And that's with the Assyrians, of course, as the, as the Assyrian empire grows in strength, takes over where the Hittites and the Mitannians had once been. So we see there's this incredible rivalry that goes on between Babylon and Assyria. And the rivalry, I think, is, is based on, on culture, first of all.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  The Assyrians never got over the effect, the fact that the, the Babylonians did it first, you know? The Babylonians created the first literature, the Babylonians did the first arithmetic, the first stargazing, everything originates in Babylon. And so the Assyrians, so close to them really, we're talking about the area around northern Iraq, around Mosul, that's the kind of area of Ashur and so forth. They always saw themselves as kind of second rate. It was that kind of game that went on between England and France in the Middle Ages.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, it sounds to me exactly like Britain and France.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Precisely like that.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Always a bit jealous.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Always this jealousy there, you know? And so what did they do? Well, when the Assyrians managed, you know, they, they really are at their height in the 800s, 700s BCE, they storm into Babylonia and take Babylon. And first of all, they kind of settle themselves into it and they think, you know, oh, we, we will be Babylonian kings, we will, we will act as a Babylonian king. But then when the Babylonians don't accept the Assyrian king, then rebel against it, that's when they turn all of that kind of built up tension on the Babylonian peoples. So King Sanaa Karib of Assyria. He's quite remarkable. He completely tears down the city, the great ziggurat temples,

• 31:33Speaker 04

  the walls, and the most incredible thing, he breaks all the canals open. So the whole city centre is flooded. And what's he doing with that? Well, it's very symbolic. He takes Babylon back to before creation, when there were just the waters of chaos, you know? And then after that, after he dies, his son comes to the throne, Esa-Harden. And he's an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Bablophile. And so he restores the temples again, you know, lovingly puts them back. And in fact, for the rest of Assyrian history, the kings of Assyria suffer this terrible guilt complex about what they did to Babylon, you know? How could we ever do that? You know, who are we to do that?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Because that could have answered someone's question, which is, why is Babylon just another one of these waypoints, these political entities on this great big, this great journey from the ancient past to present? But no, Babylon meant something different. The Assyrians are not celebrating Ur and these others. So something is going on in Babylon. You mentioned the Enlightenment, you mentioned this sort of scientific and literary.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's the Babylonians who give us the first conception of proper astronomy and astrology.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  So can I ask, why? What's going on there? Something, just something in the water?

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, something there, something inquisitive. I mean, you know, divination and looking for signs are always there. But the Babylonians just refine it more than an art. It becomes a proper science for them, you know? So one of the things that we're blessed with in Near Eastern studies, and it cuts into classical studies in things like, you know, histories of Alexander the Great, for instance, is that we have all of these astronomical diaries.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Wild.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Where we can pinpoint, because they are so accurate, the times of eclipses, the times of new moons, and if we have a document with a historical event attached to it, to an eclipse, we can be absolutely specific. So we know exactly the date of the Battle of Gaugamela, the date of the Battle of Kunaxa, because the Babylonian scribes are recording it.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  So you go into your university common room with your fellow profs, and you can be more certain about events thousands of years ago than your Anglo-Saxon colleagues are

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Oh, by far.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  About the year 500.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  By far, by far, by far, yeah. It's incredible, isn't it? It really can. We could be that specific about it, yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so and where we now all think of, in a very stupid way, I blinkeredly think of ancient Greece being the wellspring of all this science. Babylon is.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Way ahead of the game. Way ahead of the game. And I think the more, the more we look at the ancient world in a global context, the more we are understanding, of course, this kind of Eurocentric thing, you know, is a fallacy. It cannot hold for much longer, surely, you know? That's not to take away what the Greeks and the Romans and other European civilizations did, but let's also acknowledge, you know, that there was a hub of culture that was going on in the Middle East, you know, long before there was Rome or Athens or Alexandria, there was Babylon doing everything.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  And I'm just thinking, I mean, in some ways, like the Greeks, like the Egyptians, Babylon does that rarest of things, and like some Chinese civilizations, it creates a brand, a civilization that's so enduring that after it's been military defeat and conquered, its conquerors are more likely to want to conform.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Exactly. They become Babylonian, right? So Alexander wanted to make his empire, the centre of his empire, Babylon. His generals, Seleucus and his family, they still do the rites and rituals to the old Babylonian gods, you know, thousands of years after they were first done. So there's always something, I think, you know, I always think of culture as being like a kind of like a gas that comes up from the earth. You know, if there's a fissure, then this gas will come up thick and strong and smelling, you know, densely. But there's going to be another gas elsewhere coming up through the earth, and somewhere else and somewhere else. And these gases will all eventually merge. And it's, I always find those points

• 35:46Speaker 04

  where the gases converge to be the most fascinating ones, you know, because hybrid cultures will emerge. And that's what you see with Babylon. The strongest gas comes out this way, and it goes in all directions. And anybody who comes in contact with that particular thick gas is going to be influenced by Babylon. So that's why you'll see the Akkermanid Persians are besotted with Babylon, the Seleucids still are, the peoples of the Levant are completely Babylonianised. Egypt is different, as we said before, they repel, they, you know, they kind of push against that kind of thing, but they can't do without it much. And then the north, of course, we've got Assyria. And all of that gas, it also spreads over to that gnarled outpost of empire

• 36:31Speaker 04

  that we call ancient Greece as well, you know? And there, it also took its hold as well. So if you just look at Greek art and Greek mythology, just think of the crossovers we have with Mesopotamian art and Mesopotamian mythology in the pre-Homeric and Homeric periods, you know? Sphinxes, sirens, bull-headed men or men-headed bulls. All of this is a world that's exchanging a kind of common currency, really. And we need to just be open to that, as they were.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  What are we talking, so in the straightforward Babylon period before this Assyrian invasion, how big would the city have been? What's your guess? How many people do you think would have been?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Okay, so probably about, so in the old Babylonian period, probably about 20,000 people, something like that, which is a good size. But in the imperial period, so here we're talking like 700 to 600 B.C.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  So the Assyrians are.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  They're gone now, okay? And Babylon has returned in all its glory.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  And has, in effect, inherited what the Assyrians left behind. So now they've got an empire in the Levant and Syria in the north, because of course they've got all of Assyria now also. So in this period, we call the Neo-Babylonian period, we have two great conqueror kings, Nabopalassa, who was born in southern Iraq, and then his son, who is trained up to be a military man and crown prince, Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar the Second. And between them, really, they raise Babylon to the height of its greatness. So the city walls under Nebuchadnezzar the Second measure 12 miles in circumference, for instance.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  So we're now talking of a population probably about 50,000 people. In fact, it's huge. It was the only metropolis in the world at that time, you know? Thebes in Egypt kind of came a rough second, but nowhere like, nowhere like the size of Babylon. So it was the city to end all cities, really.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  And quite planned? How would it have felt if I was there?

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Not really, no, because, you know, just like our, you know, our old cities in Britain, I was in New York last week, you know, and a higgledy-piggledy maze of streets, isn't it, you know? London is exactly the same, of course, you know? So Babylon's essential structure hadn't changed over many, many centuries, in spite of the defeats and the floods and all of this kind of thing. So, you know, the roads were, sometimes they were very, very wide and roads, but they would end at somebody's front door, you know, with no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. And other roads would just, you find, doubling back on yourself. So there was kind of no urban planning. But when Nebuchadnezzar comes to the throne, he wants to create something very special in Babylon.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  And so he builds a monumental processional way, which crosses over a bridge in the, over the Euphrates and into the city centre. And he surrounds it with gates. The most famous one, I suppose, is called the Ishtar Gate, which is now in Berlin, of course. And it's all made out of blue glazed brick, like lapis lazuli colour, and covered with these raised relief bricks of bulls and machushu dragons and lions. And they're staggering. And there was gate after gate after gate going into the centre of Babylon.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  In fact, Babylon itself, Babil in Babylonian, means city of gates. So Nebuchadnezzar makes this real happen, you know? So he, this monumental processional way, these huge gates, and they all go to the centre of Babylon, to this enormous temple called the Esagila, which was the ziggurat of the god Marduk. So why do all of this? It's because Nebuchadnezzar was really keen to activate a sense of Babylonian pride again, after all the Assyrian occupations and so forth. And one of the things he really wanted to bring back to his people was the dominance of the New Year festival. This had been the most important religious festival of Babylonian calendar.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  It disappeared under the Assyrians, and now he brings it back. So in March every year, the kings would celebrate the primacy of their god Marduk, who they saw as the absolute creator god. They built this huge ziggurat for him, and at the top of the ziggurat, in his holy of holies, the statue of the god resided. And every year at New Year, the king would process down this huge ceremonial avenue, covered on either side with images of lions, the representation of the goddess Ishtar. And he'd get into the holy of holies, and there, in front of the high priest, he would have to remove his crown, remove his ceremonial garments, kneel in front of the statue,

• 41:34Speaker 04

  while the priest whacked him around the head, gave him a good blow. And the idea was, this was supposed to bring tears to the eyes of the king, to show his humility in front of the gods and remind everybody, he is not a god. He is just the avatar of God, if you like. And then when that was done, processions of gods being carried on palanquins from all over Babylon and Babylonia would enter into that processional avenue, and then there would be seven days of rejoicing. This was the one time when the ordinary Babylonian got to see their gods being carried through the streets, and even maybe got a glimpse of their king as well.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  So Babylon, the architecture of Neo-Babylonia responds to the needs of the ceremonial, the religious and ritual life of the state.

• 42:24Speaker 00

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• 43:43Speaker 00

  Why is that? Why does Babylon not exist later on? What happens?

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it continues to exist for another 400 years after Nebuchadnezzar's death.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  As you say, Alexander the Great goes there.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The Persians are there, Alexander's there, the Seleucids are there. The Seleucids are there up until the middle of the second century B.C. And it's still a cultural hub, you know, it's still a center. But of course, the Seleucids, being a Greek-speaking dynasty, they are being pulled back constantly towards the Mediterranean. And when they begin to create their new capitals, Seleucia, Antioch, on the coast of the Levant, well, you know, the intelligentsia, the priests, they follow the court. And really Babylon becomes a shell of its former self. And then I suppose, once the Hellenistic kingdoms die and the Parthians come in and

• 44:40Speaker 04

  have no real affinity with the Babylonian tradition at all, so it's left to kind of be abandoned. And the last time we really hear of it in ancient history, I mean, there are two occasions. We know that in 132 C.E. is the last dateable piece of cuneiform.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. And once that's gone, that's it. You know, the language is forgotten until we relearn it in the middle or the end of the 19th century, it's lost. Okay? And then the other thing we have is the Emperor Trajan goes on his Mesopotamian campaign.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Briefly conquers all that bit.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  All of that bit. Goes down the Euphrates and says to some of his men, isn't there a place called Babylon around here? And they say, yeah, we've heard of that, we've heard of that, let's go and have a look. And they are so disappointed, they just see this pile of bricks and kind of, he, you know, sort of moves a couple of shirts of pottery around and says, you know, so much for Babylon. And that's it. It kind of disappears. The only thing keeping it alive then is the reputation it's garnered in the Bible, of course. And that's a very difficult reputation because it presents Babylon, you know, as the mother of all cities, yes, but also the mother of harlots, you know, the place of the apocalypse, all of this. And that, of course, arises from two things.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  First of all, it's the Jewish memory of Babylon. So the Jews were exiled into Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar II.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  He conquers Jerusalem.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Completely destroys it, destroys the Temple of Yahweh, takes even the gold and silver of the temple back to Babylon with him. With him go all the elite of the Jewish royal family, the priests, the scribes, also lots of workers. And they are set up in Babylon and they are encouraged by both the king, but also by some Jewish intellectuals, like the prophet Jeremiah, to put down roots, you know, prosper in Babylon. Now, we know, of course, from the Hebrew Bible, that it was a time of trauma for the Jews, you know, famously Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept," you

• 46:55Speaker 04

  know, "how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" So we have this idea of torment. But also, the Babylonian captivity was a moment of renaissance for the Jews as well because it's in Babylonian captivity that the Hebrew Bible actually really gets written. You know, so the stories of Genesis, the patriarchal stories, the stories of Exodus, Moses and the Exodus, because they were living in Exodus themselves, you know, they were writing their kind of myths and legends and folk stories from the north of Israel, from Judah in the south. All of this was being pulled together for the first time. And you can really see the footprint of Babylon in all of that.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  So first of all, you know, in Genesis, we have stories like the Tower of Babel, which of course is the great ziggurat of Marduk, that's what they're talking about there. And then you get stories of Adam and Eve, paradise. Well, of course, paradise gardens were a Babylonian Persian invention, you know, of these kind of things. So you can see the Babylonian stamp going on to the Bible. What we didn't realize though, until comparatively recently, is that many of the Jews who came as prisoners to Babylon, settled there and lived there for centuries. Now, we knew that in the Middle Ages, there was the writing of the Babylonian Talmud.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  So this is kind of like the commentary on the Hebrew Bible by Jewish rabbis. So we knew there'd always been a big group of Jews who stayed in Babylon, they never went back to the Holy Land. But now we've got documentation from the time of Nebuchadnezzar stating that there was a large group of Jewish exiles living in a place just outside of the city center called Al Yehuda, which means something like Jewish town, something like that. And they're all carrying Jewish names, Yahoo, something or other. We even get the name Netanyahu in this Babylonian documents. Again, more clay documents. And these documents are showing us that a lot of these Jews settled down in Babylon,

• 49:07Speaker 04

  they had families there, they opened very successful businesses, they married Babylonian women, which means that their children were bilingual, all of this, and they stayed there, they never went home. So, you know, there's one version of the Babylonian exile, which is all about trauma and wretchedness and what comes out of that. And then there's another success story in the Babylonian exile as well. And that's the one we often, we don't often think about, but it's all there.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  So that's why the reputation of, the sort of legacy of Babylon's been colored by that, some of that biblical, well, perhaps not the stories, but some of the interpretation.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  It sounds like actually the legacy of Babylon is far more important, it's the legacy for all mankind.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  Well, this is the thing, isn't it? And I think that's why I've included it in my new book, for instance, because it is part of the story. The mythos is as great as the history, you know, we have to recognize it. And I think the biggest leap we have to take is actually what happened in early Christianity with Babylon. Because in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, which most people think they know, but people don't really, you know, and everybody thinks of the omen and stuff like that. And, you know, it has got all those kind of end of time things within it. But there Babylon is used by the Christian writer, he's called John the Divine, whoever he was, as a stand-in for Rome, of course.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  So all the sins of the Romans, you know, and this kind of, the persecution that the Christians are under are attributed to the sins of Babylon because Rome has become the new Babylon. And therefore, you know, the whore of Babylon, who sits on the beast with the seven heads, that's the seven hills of Rome and so forth. You know, the Antichrist could be Nero, could be Domitian. But certainly Revelation is written in that era, in that sphere of Roman imperialism, but it's Babylon that they go back to, you know, as the ultimate mother of harlots kind of thing.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  It's a great example of how winners don't write the history books.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  That's exactly it.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Still, you're doing good work, but most of us think about Babylon through the lens of that.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, if you think about it, you know, it's a very, very persuasive image. So, I mean, Dickens talks about London as a new Babylon in the 19th century, you know, with its poverty and its, you know, child labor. In Jamaica in the 1930s, in the Rastafarian movement, of course, the British Empire is the new Babylon, of course, you know, whereas, you know, Ethiopia, Africa is seen as the new Zion. This is a, you know, an image which gets reutilized all the time. Very recently, Lady Gaga has, you know, produced a song called Babylon, which is all about the sins, the iniquities of living today, and, you know, trying to make a living,

• 52:01Speaker 04

  trying to be true to yourself, when we're all living in a new Babylon now. It's an age-old thing.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Whereas in fact, you're rebranding Babylon and we should be thinking of it in the way that we think about those, that Greek Enlightenment.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  It's a place of, it sounds like it gives us a vast amount of what we now count of as sort of civilization.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Enormously, enormously, absolutely. And I think the Enlightenment is exactly what it was, you know, we just don't think of it in that terms, but that's what I would say Babylon is all about. It's all about free thinking, about being as open as you possibly can be to the world you live in and to engage with the world around you. They weren't afraid of the world around them, you know, they had no real hostilities to other people. They squabbled enough amongst themselves, but they were not terrified of strangers. And they really do have a truly international, multicultural society, which is surely something to aspire to.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Well, fantastic. Look, I'm Jon, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  You're very welcome.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Fantastic. I'm now a Babylon fan.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Good.

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