Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel story is iconic. Featured in the Book of Genesis, it explains how different languages came to be across the world. But what are its origins? Join Tristan Hughes and Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in this special episode of The Ancients - recorded live at the London Podcast Festival - as they delve into the biblical roots of the myth and uncover the real archeological remains that inspired the fable. They explore how ancient ziggurats influenced depictions of the tower, discuss the intersection between history and faith and discover how age-old texts and modern archaeology combine to unravel the mysteries behind the story of the Tower of Babel. Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight, audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. 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 take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK. Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

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• 1:46Tristan Hughes?

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• 3:06Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're exploring the captivating story of the Tower of Babel. Famous from the Bible, the Tower of Babel features in the Book of Genesis, with its story explaining how different languages came to be across the world. But, as with so many famous myths from ancient times, there usually is a historical basis to them, at least some sort of historical influence, and that is the case with the Tower of Babel, because archaeology has revealed a real-life influence for this tower and its story: another great structure that dominated the skyline of ancient Babylon, a ziggurat.

• 3:49Tristan Hughes?

  The Tower of Babel is a great story, where archaeology and the Bible have combined with thrilling effect. Now, to explain the story of the Tower of Babel and the real influences behind this story, well, I was delighted to welcome back Professor Lloyds Llewellyn-Jones to the show, one of our favourite ancients guests of all the time, a fantastic speaker. Now, this was a very special episode because it's the first one we have ever done in front of a live audience. That's right, we had a sell-out crowd at the London Podcast Festival a few months ago for this event, and hopefully we'll be doing more like it in the future, both across the UK and further abroad too: the US, Canada, Australia, let's see. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

• 4:33Tristan Hughes?

  For now, enjoy this special episode of The Ancients in front of a live audience, as we explore the captivating story of the Tower of Babel.

• 4:51Tristan Hughes?

  Lloyd, good to see you. How are you doing?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Very good, thank you very much. It's great to be here.

• 4:55Tristan Hughes?

  You've probably all heard the name Tower of Babel. It's one that, of course, is linked closely to the Bible, but it's also one that has an archaeological tale to it too.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's all too easy to kind of skirt over the relationship between the text of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of ancient Iraq. But I think with the Tower of Babel, the two do begin to align themselves. And in fact, when archaeologists first started to go to the Middle East, to Iraq, part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, they kind of went with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, you know? And they were determined that whatever they dug up was going to map on to the Bible. And so when early archaeologists in the mid 1840s, 1850s to the 70s, were wandering around Iraq,

• 5:47Speaker 02

  obviously, they could see these remains of these enormous mud brick structures that were still surviving. So almost immediately, archaeologists began to say, "Ah, we have discovered the Tower of Babel." And there were many contenders, in fact, in the first sort of hundred years of archaeology in that part of the world for the actual tower. I don't think it's ever really... We know what it was, but I don't think... It doesn't exist any longer. So what we've got now, of course, is just the text really to go with. And I've luckily have it here by my side.

• 6:24Tristan Hughes?

  So we're going to start with, you know, kind of going through what the story is in the Old Testament of the Tower of Babel. And then we'll go into the archaeology and then the later history. So let's start. What is the story of the Tower of Babel?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  So it's a very brief account. It's only nine verses in the 10th chapter of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. I'll read it to you. If you know it, please join in.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And said one to the other, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." But the Lord came down, that's an interesting one, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people and they have one language.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore, it was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of the earth. And from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. There ends the first lesson.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  So it's essentially, it's a text which recounts a kind of divide between God and humans. God and "let us come down," God and the others who are in heaven, are afraid that these mortals are going to gain power over him. So he's very scared that these human beings have got the nonsense to build cities, to communicate ideas to one another. So will he be redundant in the long run? That's essentially the story. So he confuses them with multiple languages, so that they can no longer communicate and therefore they will, none of these plans will ever come to fruition.

• 8:55Tristan Hughes?

  And this is a story that also, just to set the context and the background there, right from the beginning, this also happens, it's very early on in the story of the Bible, at least the Bible that we have today, isn't it?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  We're just ten chapters in.

• 9:06Tristan Hughes?

  Ten chapters.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Two of those chapters are on the Adam and Eve story. We've got the chapters about the flood just before this, and then we're into the Tower of Babel. So this is very early on in the, in the structure of the Hebrew Bible.

• 9:20Tristan Hughes?

  The next question is, it has to be, was it real?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  So, couple of contenders then, as I say. I think it is real. I think whatever the tower was, there's no doubt that the Jewish Hebrew scribes were recording the presence of ziggurats, okay? And they are dotted all across.

• 9:48Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, so what is, what is a ziggurat?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  So a ziggurat is essentially, it's a step pyramid, okay? So a very broad base, then another broad base on tops, like the smaller, up, up, up, up, to about maybe six or seven levels. The internal structure of the, of a, of a ziggurat is, is not like a pyramid, it's, it's dense, it's, it's just packed with rubble. So it's just an outside kind of staircase, really. And the whole purpose was to have a shrine at the very top, at the apex. This is where the God was thought to reside. And essentially what the Mesopotamians, whether the Assyrians, Samarians, Babylonians, they all believed the same thing, that these artificial mountains, because Iraq is flat.

• 10:32Tristan Hughes?

  And it's Iraq that we're largely talking about.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  By and large, and also southwestern Iran as well. By and large, it's flat. And so these are artificial mountains. Mountains always have played important roles in mythology, of course, and if you haven't got mountains around you, then you're going to build. So it's just something in human nature, isn't it, to build up, you know, to get closer to, to the heavens. So the, Babylonians believed that the ziggurat was the place where heaven and earth meets. And in fact, it was the point where a god could step out of the heavens and down onto earth. So it was a divine staircase, essentially, for the gods to come down. And this is exactly what Yahweh, the Hebrew god, does in this reading as well. But woe betide anybody, any mortal, who tried to reach up to heaven that way.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  You know, so it's one-way traffic only, decidedly so. But these were the great cult centres of the gods throughout the Mesopotamian world. Every, every city, every town almost, had its own ziggurat, which was usually dedicated to one or sometimes more gods. In Babylon, for instance, in the great city of Babylon itself, the biggest metropolis on earth, by the 7th century BCE, there were two enormous temples, great ziggurats there. One was the place where the god Marduk, who was the supreme god of the Babylonians,

• 12:03Speaker 02

  he took his rest and his comfort. It was like his own house, if you like. But the other one, which was built opposite that, was his state temple. It's just like his office, if you like. And it was, without a doubt, one of the biggest structures that the world had ever seen.

• 12:23Tristan Hughes?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not, let's not get too far too quickly. Let's not spoil the party too much, because there's a few other contenders we got for ziggurats at the same time. Because it's, it's quite interesting with the whole term ziggurat. I mean, and first, we're a little bit of a tangent, but I, I felt I had to say it. Recently, I was in Petra. Of course, you have to go to Petra. And one of the places we visited was this place, and it's the high place. I put sacrifice, it's called. And it's one of the biggest mountains above Petra, where they have an altar. And you see it again and again with all these different ancient cultures. They build up high because they, their gods are above them. So, you know, kind of, in words of the scholar Jody Magnus, they're kind of cooking up a barbecue. So like, they'd be offering meat or whatever, the smell wafts up to heaven. The god sees, smells that, mm, barbecue, and goes down and, you know, you get.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  In fact, there's a, there's a wonderful Babylonian text, which says that, you know, when they offer, sacrifice that, like that, the, the gods buzz around like flies. It's, they're really like, you know.

• 13:16Tristan Hughes?

  That's what they believe.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  But that's exactly it, yes. So, so it's this stairway to God. And you have to build on, on the high place. And if you think about the Hebrew Bible itself, where does God get seen or spoken to? You know, Moses goes up to Mount Horeb, or up to Mount Sinai, or whatever. So if you're in an environment which doesn't have that natural rock formation, then you've got to build that.

• 13:36Tristan Hughes?

  Now, let's talk about these ziggurats, because it's more than just Babylon. As you've mentioned, they're all across Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, and a bit, bit of, bit of Iran too. Let's go back to at that time when archaeologists were going out there with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other. And they were seeing these big ziggurats and they were thinking in the back of their minds, they just can't get it out of their mind, Tower of Babel, Tower of Babel, got to find it, where is it? Were there any early contenders when they were looking at these ziggurats that they think, oh, this could potentially be that?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, the one that caught their eye was at a place called Dour Kaligalzu, the fortress of King Kaligalzu, which was built in the Cassite period, so about the 12th century BCE. And it's located about 50 miles north of Babylon. Dour Kaligalzu was a Babylonian new build. It was like a Milton Keynes of its day. They built it from scratch as a kind of like, you know, an offshoot of the capital. Some people had just decided it's like, you know, the way in which Paris and Versailles operated. So it was a getaway for the king. And there, there was a huge ziggurat built.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  And by the end of the 19th century, much of its inner core still remained. And it towers about, even in the 19th century, about 30 metres high, out of what was possibly 60 metres high, I think. So it was a biggie. In the 1980s, under Saddam Hussein, Saddam rebuilt the first platform of it, in fact, with two staircases that go up. And now it's a must-have venue for local weddings. So lots of brides and grooms have their pictures there. So that for a long, long time was a contender. The other one was in Iran, Choghazanbiu, which is still the best preserved ziggurat in the world today. I mean, you can, you can still, I mean, if they'd allow you, climb up right to the top

• 15:30Speaker 02

  of it, it's incredible. But as archaeologists went deeper into Iraq and also as the archaeology itself got more sophisticated, they realized that Babylon itself has, has more than enough evidence for these ziggurats. And don't forget, you know, the Bible is very succinct and very precise in saying, this is the tower in Babel. So Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon, Babel, okay? So Hebrew word for Babylon. And Babylon itself, Bilbil or Bilbol, in Akkadian, means the gate of the gods. So there's a, there's a, you know, an etymological...

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Precision in that. It's not a Hebrew scribe just thinking, oh, this could be anywhere. It is the Tower of Babylon that he's actually talking about.

• 16:23Tristan Hughes?

  Surely they should have realised this earlier, those early archaeologists going out there.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Well, no, because, don't forget, the work on language was only slowly developing. So we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon. So we have to wait for certain generations until all the pieces get put together. There's an interesting thing as well, isn't there? Because for us, you know, it's such a, you know, the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledegook that comes out of it. You know, we're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other. For us in English, you know, babble, babel, works really well, doesn't it? Because you're babbling on about something, okay? It means we're incoherent, you know, we don't know.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  But actually, that has nothing to do with the naming at all. But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble, in fact. So it's all built into the Hebrew already. So they were playing with Babylon and babbling as well, which luckily in English we've inherited.

• 17:29Tristan Hughes?

  Lloyd, you're dishing out facts here, Darren. This is why we get you on. Well, let's then focus our chat on Babylon. And you mentioned the ziggurats and you've got another passage out. You reaching out for that forces me now to ask you, what have you reached out for?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I've reached out here for an inscription from the reign of King Nabupalassa.

• 17:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so who is Nabupalassa?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Nabupalassa is the king who restores power to Babylon at the beginning of the 7th century B.C. Babylon was razed to the ground by the Assyrians. Nasty, wicked Assyrians. You know, the Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  In a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the 17th century, Nabal Palasa, Babylonian born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty and he begins a revitalization campaign for the city of Babylon and he begins to glorify it. You'll probably know his son better, his son was Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar the second, and between them Nabal Palasa and Nebuchadnezzar beautify this city on a scale that had never been seen before.

• 18:49Tristan Hughes?

  Because Babylon at that time, this is the most populated or seems the richest, the wealthiest to their kings, it's the centre of the world. This is the golden age of Babylon.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and one of the reasons why the Assyrians hated it so much, because culturally it was the centre of the world. Everything came out of Babylon, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, literature, music, mythology, you name it. Babylon was the kind of, the great epicentre, the great almost factory of all of these great cultural movements. And it suffered so much under the Assyrians that this new dynasty, who we call ruling over the neo-Babylonian world, an empire which stretched to Iran and out into north of Egypt and also the whole of the Levant, they started to beautify it. They had no worries about money because it was flooding in from the conquered territories

• 19:43Speaker 02

  and also from the spoils of war.

• 19:44Tristan Hughes?

  And the conquered territories, how far are we talking?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Well, we're talking right the way up to the top of Syria, right the way down to the north of Egypt and across all of the Middle East to Iran as well. Perhaps the most significant series of conquests, where the conquests that took place in the Levant in what is now Israel Palestine. So the destruction of Jerusalem, for instance, the plundering of the temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, the goods that poured into Babylon from that alone, you know, helped pay for these huge, huge building works, not only ziggurats but also new royal palaces, new gates, the famous Ishtar gate is created at this period, all in this very distinctive blue. Glazed brick.

• 20:28Tristan Hughes?

  It's part they called walls of Babylon.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. The walls themselves were about eleven miles around, for instance. You could drive two sets of chariots at the top of the walls. I mean, this was, this was huge. It was a metropolis, a true, true great city. Long before Rome, before Alexandria, there was Babylon. Um, and right in the heart of this is, is the religious, you know, the religious pulse of the whole thing. Sits in the city centre with these two temples belonging to the god Marduk. Marduk was the Babylonian god par excellence. There had been other gods who'd come and for, come and gone, but Marduk, he was considered to be the great wind god. He defeated um the demons at the, at the dawn of time, Tiamat and her evil band.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  He was wise, he was considered to have um emptying eyes and many ears, so he saw everything, he heard everything. Uh, and he was believed to reside uh in the, his temples there. So he has two temples. Um, one of which is called the uh Entem Anuki, biggest temple in Babylon. The name means the foundations of the heaven and the earth. So that really gives us a good example of Babylonian thinking on this, this ziggurat. It was the, the connecting point between our mortal existence and the existence of the gods up there. And this is where the cult of Marduk was continued every day.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  A myriad of priests would be going in there um to placate the god. And ancient Babylonian religion worked in that kind of way. You, you kind of almost made sacrifice. You made your prayers, you incensed and, and clothed the statues, you fed the statues with food, almost as a preemptive strike. Don't do anything bad to us because we do all these really good things for you, you know. So it was a very important role um that the priests of Babylon had to, to maintain this. So what we know of this great ziggurat, um.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, we can see it in the ground. We can still see the outline of the ziggurat today. So if you go on Google Maps, you zoom in, you can still see very clearly the outline of the ziggurat. And when archaeologists discovered this, essentially now, of course, it's all gone apart from the kind of bit of brickwork at the bottom, but we can measure it. And it measures ninety-six by ninety-six metres around, huge. And it's said to have built up ninety-six metres as well.

• 23:02Tristan Hughes?

  So do you think this is the biggest ziggurat of all?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  The biggest ziggurat of all. This is the mother load, it really is. And it's one thing that both Nebuchadnezzar and his father were building on top of a pile of rubble that had been left by the Assyrians. So there'd always been a site for worship of Marduk there, but they decided to renew their efforts with it. And the Babylonians were known throughout antiquity as the master brick bakers. And they used two forms of brick. They used simple baked brick in the sun to do the foundation work, most of the stuff. But then they had a skill at doing glazed brickwork as well. So beautiful. And of course, they opted for this beautiful sort of lapis lazuli blue

• 23:49Speaker 02

  as an outer coating. So this ziggurat must have just shone. You must have seen it for miles and miles and miles around. It was their greatest glory, their greatest triumph.

• 24:01Tristan Hughes?

  In the Middle East and in Egypt and places like that, when they were in their full glory, it's not just the size of them, it's the brightness, in a way, just how they just shone in the landscape.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And coming down from this ziggurat, there was a processional way, again, of blue brickwork with other raised brickwork of lions lining the whole thing up. And then that went to the Ishtar Gate. So this was a monumental processional way, which led to this huge ziggurat. One seen, never forgotten, without any doubt.

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• 27:08Tristan Hughes?

  At the archaeology, this is where we kind of get, piece our story together, the beginning of it. Do people now believe that this is the inspiration, at least, for the Tower of Was this the Tower of

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Not everybody thinks that, but I am one of those who does think that. And I think it because we've got to stretch our time, our timeline, a little bit, to understand.

• 27:32Tristan Hughes?

  Because the one thing there which is interesting, so if you say 600 B.C., 700 B.C.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so 700 B.C. and by 600 B.C., it's complete, it's finished, it's there.

• 27:42Tristan Hughes?

  And the Book of Genesis supposedly set 3000 B.C., which begs the question, yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  How do these, you know, so how can it possibly be the ziggurat when, you know, we're talking a book set in 3000 B.C., but now we're at 700 B.C.? Well, the truth of the matter is this, of course. The Book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible. The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible is not the order in which they were written. The books of Genesis, the Book of Genesis and the others, the Exodus story of Moses and so forth, these were all written by Jews in exile in Babylon.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  In the middle of the sixth century, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonians were taken en masse into captivity. Certainly, when I say en masse, all of the elites, the elite Jews, so the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual were suddenly taken to this new city. And in fact, we know more now about the Jewish settlement in Babylon than we ever did. So back in the 1990s, we discovered a big hoard of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian, and they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one particular

• 29:16Speaker 02

  area just outside Babylon, which is called Al Yehud, Jew town, Jewish town. It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while many of them seem to have, you know, maintained something of the Hebrew faith, whatever that was at the time, many of them became completely Babylonianized. You know, they just, they marry Babylonian women, they take Babylonian names, or at least they take Babylonian and Hebrew names and so forth. So we see a lot of assimilation going on. So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon, because otherwise, what we're dealing with is things like, you know, the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian

• 30:00Speaker 02

  exile of the Jews, and how traumatic it was. And indeed, it was traumatic for them, ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God. But they actually, it seems now, that some people coped a lot better than others. You know, so some people assimilated, some people couldn't quite assimilate very easily. So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the Book of Psalms, okay, very famously, Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept, and our tormentors, the Babylonians, said to us, sing us some songs of Zion." How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land?

• 30:36Tristan Hughes?

  So this particular psalm?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  It's a Babylonian period psalm, okay? It was written during the exile. It's all about how can we talk about God when we are no longer in his presence? Because... When the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, as far as the Jews believed, God had disappeared. God was absent from their lives. So they were in this foreign place without their God anymore. So if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma. But also now we've got the Jewish texts from Babylonia saying, oh, well, actually, some of them were all right. But it comes down to this, doesn't it?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  When we are, when we're far away from home and we want to remember who we are as a people, we need to start thinking about our histories. And there wasn't a written history of the Jews at this period at all. So the scribes of that period start writing a national history for themselves. So they write the story of Moses and the Exodus, in the hope, of course, that they'll go home one day from Babylon and have a second Exodus from captivity as well. They start writing the stories of Jacob, of Isaac, of Joseph, even of, of course, the Garden of Eden, Paradisos. That's a Persian word.

• 31:58Tristan Hughes?

  And the flood, of course, as well, isn't it?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely, a huge, huge thing. Atahasis, the story of the flood in Babylon. So essentially, this kind of formative, what we might call prehistory of the Israelites, is formulated and set down in now what we would think of as the Holy Scriptures in the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon. So all around them, the Jewish scribes who are writing this world is also incorporating, of course, their current experiences too. So for instance, this is why God, in this section of Genesis, comes down from the ziggurat, because that's what Babylonian gods did. So they're picking up on these things.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  The idea of God's omnipotence and omniscience is something which is inherited from the god Marduk, for instance. The Hebrew god had never had those attributes before. This is all something that's been put together by these scribes who are trying to deal with both their exile, but also what's around them. And certainly, the story of the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Babylon, gets written into that narrative importantly there. Because what the Jews want, of course, is for the time to come when they will be freed from this place. And the whole essence of that text, DeGenetist 10, is that there will be a time when they will be scattered.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Again, people will go back to their original homes. There will be a time. And this is written, though, as a proto-history, as a myth, essentially, which is written into a canonical history of the Jews at that period. So I think it's important that whenever we try to read the Bible, and, you know, I'm a man of faith, I'm a priest, so I have to, I have had to train myself over the years to read this as a religious text with meaning and substance for me, but also as a historian, I have to look at it in also a cold kind of way and come to terms with it in those ways. Actually, when I do that, my faith is only increased. In fact, it's turned out that way, I'm glad to say.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  But, yeah, so we have to, we have to remember that the Hebrew Bible in itself is a construction. And the Bible as we have it now, the Old Testament as we have it now, doesn't really get fixed. It doesn't stop moving around until about the first century B.C. It's a very new text when it comes to antiquity.

• 34:29Tristan Hughes?

  But they're thinking about, as I said, they're creating these stories at the time that they're in exile in Babylon, and some of them are yearning to return to that area of the world, to Jerusalem, to where they've come from, and they don't want to forget that as well. Because this is over two generations, isn't it? It's a long time. And then they're looking around at one of these stories, they're looking for, you know, kind of inspiration, not just from other mythical stories of Mesopotamia, like the flood story, which has its origins in Mesopotamia. They must also, they're looking around at the great monuments of Babylon, beautiful Babylon, the most incredible city in the world at this time. And then, lo and behold, right at the center is this huge tower, probably unlike anything else they'd ever seen in their lives before. When you think of it that way, it's a strong possibility that that definitely then can

• 35:14Tristan Hughes?

  influence them when they're, they talk about a certain tower in, in the beginning of their, of their, well, of the Hebrew Bible.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely, I think you've hit the nail on the head, and it's certainly my belief, that's what's going on there. They are trying to deal, you know, they're dealing with the real life, what's around them. And I think that there's hostilities between the two groups of Jews who are living there, those who have assimilated well into Babylon, and those who are yearning for home and don't want anything to do with Babylon. And I think part of the reaction that we have in the story of the Tower of Babel is against those who are too content to be here as well, you should be ashamed of yourselves. So it's interesting, because we have two big prophetic books written at this time as well. One of them in Israel, still remains in Israel, people who are still there, and the other in Babylon itself.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  The Book of Jeremiah is written in Jerusalem, the Book of Ezekiel is written in Babylon. And in the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet says all the time, relax, enjoy it, enjoy it, marry a Babylonian woman, you know, do well, make wealth for yourself. And he actually prophesies and said, God says, make businesses, settle down here, enjoy. Back in Jerusalem, at the same period, Jeremiah is saying, woe to Babylon, may she burn, may she fall. And I think what the Hebrew scribes are doing, basically, these are Jeremiah followers, that they are anticipating the fall of this wicked city, after all. Whereas the reality now, we know, is a lot more laissez faire than that.

• 36:42Tristan Hughes?

  I just love how with this story, it's that we're not just looking at the biblical text, it is exploring this amazing archaeology, because Mesopotamia is such a rich part of the world for ancient history today. I mean, it's no surprise that, of ancients episodes, many on Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, the Persians, Sumerians, all of that proved amongst the most popular, because there is just something that is so attractive about it, because we're learning more about it, not just about the everyday people, but with all those Canaanian form tabloids, like we're learning more about the everyday people, whether it's people in exile, as in our chat today, or just a person who owns a brewery in or Babylon from 3,000 years ago.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  And I think that's that's the real joy of dealing with Cuneiform evidence in particular. Because we, all right, we're not necessarily getting, you know, literary masterworks all the time. But what we do get are personal letters from, you know, dad to the eldest son, or we get um um tax returns. As dull as it sounds, they are actually fabulous.

• 37:40Tristan Hughes?

  Tax is very good. Tax and sewers, okay? They're the overrated things.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Um, the the study of Mesopotamia is is alive and vital and adding to our knowledge of antiquity and how to be human um all the time as well. Um, but what's fascinating about Babylon in, you know, in in the biblical tradition? Because I suppose that's how most of us then have inherited Babylon, okay? Uh, and as I said, you know, the first archaeologists went out there with their spades and bibles. I suppose that the the story of Babylon doesn't just stop when the Jews go home from exile. Um, first of all, it's important to say that many thousands of Jewish families stayed in Babylon.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  And the great um, the great uh Babylonian scholarship that developed in the late antique period um all comes from Babylon as well. So Babylon always was a huge Jewish centre and remained so until the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. In fact, when, you know, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when many of the Jews of Babylon left. But the the Jewish presence in Babylon has always been enormous. Um, and so, you know, all of the the great um rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible was written in Babylon over the centuries after, you know, it's it's it's demise as a great centre.

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• 40:23Tristan Hughes?

  I know they're eating their bread, but they're also drinking their beer, aren't they? I just want to talk about beer, but beer's big in Babylon.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Huge in Babylon.

• 40:28Tristan Hughes?

  Massive.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Got a goddess for beer. You've also got a goddess for hangovers as well, which is great.

• 40:35Tristan Hughes?

  Love that. I had to get that in there. Anything about beer in Mesopotamia is fantastic.

• 40:40Tristan Hughes?

  So it seems like this great monument, the Ettemenanki, this great zigrat in Babylon, may well have influenced them when the story of the Tower of Babel. But of course, that's almost just, I mean, that's the structure itself. The whole story is about the multiple languages, isn't it? And how they kind of explain going from one language to all these different languages being created and people not being able to understand each other.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  And that must be the Jewish experience in Babylon.

• 41:04Tristan Hughes?

  So do you think that's, is Babylon cosmopolitan?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  So cosmopolitan. So, you know, the Jews who came there, you know, only had their their bit of Hebrew to go with. Suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian, bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek, Persian, all of this mix was going on in Babylon as multicultural as London is today, essentially. That's what we try, need to try to get into our minds. And I think that was kind of unnerving, the Jewish elite, the scribes and so forth as well. They didn't feel comfortable with any of that. And I think that gets filtered into this story as well.

• 41:41Tristan Hughes?

  So that altogether leads ultimately to the creation of this story. But it must have taken a bit of time to create at the same time. It's so often with so many things in ancient history, we think, okay, here's one part, here's one influence, here's another influence, and bam, it must have happened straight away. But I'm guessing to then create that story, it takes a bit of time in its own right to develop.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  I guess so. I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes, you know, created the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. But certainly, the story of the Tower of Babylon is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE, certainly.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  But it has a life well beyond even that because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New Testament as well. And this is where it begins to perhaps have more relevance to the modern world, you know, because this is how we kind of know it more. So, you know, the Book of Revelation, the Revelation.

• 42:46Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, let's do this now because this is, I don't even know how to describe this. It's, yes, confusing, confusing and mind blowing, the Book of Revelation.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  So sometime, imagine Ephesus, 1900 CE. So about 1900 CE, first, the end of the first century in Ephesus, there's a man called John, probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on an island of Patmos, he's been exiled there, it's a Greek island today. But he lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus.

• 43:25Tristan Hughes?

  Big, big.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  City in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are, like many of the churches of Asia Minor, are surreptitiously pushing against the Roman Empire and its domination. Because essentially what the Book of Revelation is about, you know, Revelation, written literally, it means the unveiling. So it's the unveiling of a truth. And the truth is, for John, is that there is only room for one empire. And that's the empire of Jesus Christ, not the empire of the Romans.

• 44:02Tristan Hughes?

  Because this is, yeah, this is deep in Roman Empire.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  And certainly not, exactly, certainly not the Roman empire, emperor, who at this point was Domitian, who was pretty mad on self-aggrandizement and being called a god and so forth, okay? So very subtly, in the New Testament, we find a pushback against Roman imperialism, essentially. They have to do it subtly because, of course, there's every chance of persecution. And we've already seen under Nero what, you know, persecution of Christians can do. So what John and other writers like him do at the time is that they use the image of Babylon. It's reutilized from the Old Testament now, and it's used as a metaphor for Rome. So in the Book of Revelation, when we learn about the whore of Babylon, for instance,

• 44:48Speaker 02

  riding upon the back of the great beast, what we're dealing with there, of course, is the emperor of Rome riding the empire, the Roman empire itself. So Babylon becomes the shorthand for Rome all the way through the Book of Revelation. If you read it with that code in mind constantly, so the, so the beast itself, Rome, has seven heads, so the seven hills of Rome and so forth. And the more you read Revelation with this anti-Roman imperialist thought, the more apparent it becomes. So Babylon is kind of reactivated in the, in the Christian mind.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  That old Jewish paradigm of, of the wickedness of Babylon and everything that the tower represented is brought back into play again with Rome. And of course, Rome is therefore cast as a second Babylon. And what happens to Babylon? Well, it falls eventually, you know, it, it, it disappears to dust. And this is what the Christians are saying in this unveiling of a new truth. This is what is going to happen to Rome in turn. It's going to follow the way of, of Babylon too.

• 46:01Tristan Hughes?

  But they don't, they don't den, they don't say that directly. They have to use Babylon as a cloak almost with that resistance.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  They use it constantly, absolutely. Then, of course, there's another afterlife to this too. Because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century.

• 46:19Tristan Hughes?

  Renaissance time.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and especially during the European Reformation.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  The image of Babylon is once more reactivated by the Protestant reformers. So now, the second Rome, Papal Rome, is also cast as another Babylon as well. So the Papal Throne is the Throne of Satan, for instance. The Great Whore is now the Pope, and so forth. And this all comes to a head in two particular ways. This kind of utilization of Babylon in this way, in Christian understanding. In the Sermon of Martin Luther, but also in Northern European art of this period. Because from about the 1540s up until the 1580s,

• 47:09Speaker 02

  there is a plethora of images, paintings and also prints of what else but the Tower of Babel. It becomes one of the most important art subjects in Northern European painting. And many of you will probably know that Bruegel the Elder, Peter Bruegel the Elder in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Babel. The best known to day is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

• 47:43Tristan Hughes?

  If you Wikipedia the Tower of Babel, that's normally the image which also comes up.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because Bruegel himself trained as an artist in Rome. So when he returns home and he wants to paint this antique scene of the Tower of Babel, he has Rome in his mind straight away. So his Tower of Babel is round. It's not a square ziggurat, it's round, but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really. And it's kind of unfinished, it's got a big split in it, it's full of arches that go around. And of course, what's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum. So he sees the ruins of the Colosseum and he thinks, okay, this must be the Roman Babel. And this is what he paints.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  And it's really fascinating the way he does it as well, because, first of all, just as in Genesis, it's a work of hubris by humans, because the scale of it is enormous. When you look at the painting, you know, the city of Babylon around, which is his Antwerp, it's tiny, tiny diminutive little figures, you know, vast, and it's unfinished.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  And even the bits that have been finished, have been finished so long ago that they've started to crumble and they're being patched up while they haven't even started the beginning of the end of the top of the of the tower yet. So it's this constant work in progress as it way, man labouring away with his own vanities to build this project. And in the in the front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on, the king of Babylon, the king of Rome, the pope. So all of this comes together perfectly in this visualisation of what, you know, a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a a defunct religion, and a wicked urban centre is all about. So

• 49:34Speaker 02

  that that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going, keeps on going.

• 49:41Tristan Hughes?

  Let's talk about keeping on going just before we completely wrap up. Shall we talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy two?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:49Tristan Hughes?

  Feels a bit different, doesn't it? But there is a link here.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Well, you know, yeah, so Adam Douglas, you know, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that, you know, how do we, how can we communicate together, you know, because we're all living in a Babel world, okay, that, you know, unless you, you know, do the, put the hours in and learn another language. But he came up with the idea of the Babel fish. So it's a little silver fish which you can just insert in your ear and that will give you the power to understand anybody. So it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel effect and he calls it the Babel fish, of course. And it's no coincidence, is it? You know, that, you know, language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us.

• 50:32Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Lloyd, this has been fantastic. We've gone from, it's a book of Genesis, then Babylon, exploring the archaeology, and then the later legacy of the whole story of the Tower of Babel. But it is interesting, I want to do this topic, one, because it's a name that we've all probably heard of and but we don't know too much about. But two, because it is a story also of archaeology as well. And with so many things of the Bible, it's it's fascinating, whether it's King Herod, how archaeology and non biblical sources are revealing more about the real King Herod. Or Pontius Pilate, or the story, of course, of Noah and the flood and the influences from Mesopotamia. There are so many parts, you know, well-known stories from the biblical accounts that you can,

• 51:13Tristan Hughes?

  you can align or you can look to alongside archaeology to make, in my opinion, make it more available to more and more people.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Most definitely. And I think it's a real sad fact that we've created this very artificial divide between ancient history and biblical studies because the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, it is another source. It's an ancient historical source. I teach it as easily and as readily as I teach Gilgamesh or as I teach Homer. You know, it's just part of the package that I teach to my students because it's important to see this as a holistic one. And the Hebrew Bible doesn't come out of a vacuum. It is part of a Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian, and later on Greco-Roman world. All of it is being influenced by that.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  And all of the books of the Bible, of Old and New Testaments, have their agendas which draw on current situations of the author's course.

• 52:11Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Lloyd, I think this has been absolutely fantastic. I think we'll draw the interview to a close here. I think, Lassie, though, I mean, tell us a few, you've written countless books on this area of the world, Persians and Babylon. Tell us a couple of those relevant to today's chat.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  So the most relevant, I suppose, is one that's forthcoming. So it's one I've just finished writing and it's called Babylon, the Great City. And that's a history of Babylon from the year dot until the fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a long duvet history. More generally, in the area, I've written on Persians, the Age of the Great Kings. Persia, of course, was part of, dominated Babylon for 300 years. And then more generally, lots of stuff from Asian areas.

• 52:56Tristan Hughes?

  Just once again from me, thank you so much for your time this evening and taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to come here for our first ever Ancients Live show and hopefully the first of many. And Lloyd, once again, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 53:24Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 53:26Tristan Hughes?

  And I'll go home, man.

• 53:32Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was our special episode on the Tower of Babel in front of a live audience at the London Podcast Festival with Professor Lloyds Llewellyn-Jones. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to it. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

• 54:18Speaker 04

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• 54:21Speaker 05

  Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get? And Sandy? And the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.

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