Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise & Fall of Babylon

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

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/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign 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 [e-mail] 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 for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. 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, 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 mega-city. 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. Joining us today is Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. 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.

Lloyd, thank you very much coming on. You're very welcome. Good to be here. First, I think geography, do we need to get geography sorted out first? Where is this place? Babylon, right in the centre of modern-day Iraq. So it's about 50 miles north of Baghdad, essentially. Is that Mesopotam... What are some of the terms that will have heard? Yeah, so you will have heard of Mesopotamia, a Greek term, meaning between the rivers. Right.

So the rivers, of course, are the Euphrates and the Tigris. Huge rivers. Enormous, with this huge floodplain 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. And the whole landscape was littered with canals. So it's like a kind of spaghetti-jerk.

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 swath 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. And so wonderful soil, benign climate. Yeah, harsh, harsh desert climate.

But as long as you're close to the water, it's manageable. The rivers are a bit of a nightmare. They move around. They do move around. Untaim snakes. Absolutely. They really do. And that's why I think the Babylonians try 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 Euphrates. So they offered to it. They personalized 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 we think about the gift of the Nile was supposed to be grain, the gift of the Euphrates was definitely mud. And the Babylonians utilized it, one of the best things they could do. And really nice. So the mud's all, the river floods a bit. The minute you put it in the sun, it bakes hard as rocks. Absolutely, absolutely.

So you've got this sort of strange. And you know, and the thing is, many times when we find documents like these kinaeform 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 century. They go rock hard. Okay. And so, I mean, they're virtually unbreakable, you know.

They're going to be around a long time after we're going, that's for sure. Once I'm after my email inbox. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And isn't it what a fascinating thing? See, you know, the great, these early civilizations, Nile, Indus, China, these rivers, big source of fresh water. That's what you need. Absolutely. And they've got, in that part, you've got a useful crops, there's a good, there's a good

sweet of things you can grow there. Oh, there's masses of things. Indigenous. Masses. And it's done a 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 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. We hear about cities and civilisation, 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 early... The Ur is the early one. So Ur is the kind of first kind of great urban centre. that's ray down south nowadays down the south of Iraq in antiquity, so about 4,000 years ago

was actually on the sea. But of course, the land is 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 Oruk 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. And by ruling the roost, that's interesting. So these cities, I was about to ask, do they all emerge like our Greek city-state system later on?

Or does one emerge, conquer everyone else and build sort of empires? 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 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. And why, so is there something that Babylon's doing, does it have a little competitive advantage? What's Babylon doing that sees it rise to prominence? 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 Orr. the Babylonians just coming into being very loyal to them, they pay their taxes, and because of that, the kings of ore allow the 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 ore going into a little bit of decline and then a sharp decline, so they've already got a system of government set up for them. And so that's how it really begins. But really the kind of, it all kicks off when a group of non-Messopotamians come into the area. These are called the Amarites. They were nomadic tribes. They came from around the Syria area, came into Mesopotamia.

In our early kind of Cuneoform documents, they're often kind of looked down on despised as kind of barbarians, sheep farmers and wanders. who are these these rather, you know, and clean and questionable people. But over 200-year period, a lot of these Amarite leaders, these tribal chiefs, actually become kind of urbanized. They start moving into the centres. And it's out of this group of Amarites that actually our first kings of Babylon really emerge. So it's really fascinating. As often happens, you know, the outsiders become the inside. 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, Hamurabi, 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, man with a pharaoh. pious temper, but a keen, keen eye for politics as well. So we see under Hamarabi, Babylon suddenly dominating the political, geographic, social, cultural and religious sphere of the whole of

Mesopotamia. And at its height, about 1750 BC, there was no other state to touch it, really. Virtually every other state had been conquered by Hamarabia and was now in its orbit. And why are you able to speak so beautifully eloquently about his character, his personality? What are our sources here? 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, 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. So back in the 1930s 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 seem 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. And what comes over from them. First of all, he's a mover and shaker. 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. With the knowledge of the rest of history, I love to say I'll surprise. Plus Lechartre, 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 Marry,

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, you know, no cloaks here, you know, is not what we're used to. 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 Hamurabi? 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. When you're describing that so beautifully, when you read those sources from as early in human history as we have, have that level of detail source. It's very rare, isn't it, that far back? We certainly don't. I don't feel we have a source like that about Egypt, for example. No, and that's because of the nature

of the beast, really. 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, very lucky with our source materials. And just from a personal level, when you read all that, do you find yourself thinking, goodness me, humans being, has hardly changed over the last 300,000 years? Or do you think, ooh, these people are different to us? It'll go two ways, actually.

Sometimes, you know, it's a star 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. I mean, you know, that's just now, isn't it? That's real. That's how we are, you know. 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're like to talk about first in your areas? Yeah. So it really is one of the first. Not quite the first. We can go back about 150 years to find our first laws. But I suppose Hamirabi'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,

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 Hamurabi himself in front of his god. And the god is Shamash, who is the sun god. And Hamurabi sort of raises his hand in a gesture of reverence. And Shamash is wearing a bull's crown, bull's horn crown. And he's holding a rope. And he's holding a rope, which is a measuring tape, because Shamash as the sun can go around the world. Of course, you know, when 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. So he sets up this, this basalt steely, and it's huge. And it's covered with over 300 laws, written in the most exquisite cuneiform script or chiseled 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. So Even at the time, there was ancient history going on then, you know. So it's the equivalent of kind of like, you know, St. King James Bible language, even for the Babylonians of Hamirabi'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 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.

And there's very little doubt in my mind that later Hebrews incorporated some of Hamarabi'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. Right. Okay, so quite literally. Quite literally like that. Now, there are little caveats in it.

So, for instance, if, a man beats another man 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. That's not liberating. So we have lots of that kind of thing. But, you know, 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 two 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 chased. but these women are allowed to adopt other women, you know, younger novices as their 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 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 Keneaform 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. So we do see occasionally a bit of functioning of it. But it's fascinating stuff. and all aspects of life are covered there.

You're listening to Down Snow's History. We'll be back after this break. Is there a sense, I mean, we're not going to go all Magna Carta, but I'm guessing Hamir Rabbi doesn't put any limits on his own power, but is he sort of, is it pretty weighted towards the aristocracy, the elites? Yes, or the protections for normal. Essentially, yes. So we have kind of like three classes that come out in the text,

and they're very difficult to translate, actually. but one of them I've translated as kind of if a lord or if a signor 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 way in which the law works in favour 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 kings. So unlike, you know, the Egyptian pharaohs, Hamurabi and His lot were never considered to be living gods. They were, at best, I would say, viceroys of the gods. They're appointed there. But there's no guarantee even that their elder son would be favoured by a god, for instance, you know. Of course, the Babylonians can put everything down to the favour

or non-favour of the gods. you know, diseases, successes, you know, invasions 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. So theophoric name means where the name of a king or a god is placed in front of your own name. So Christopher is a good example for that for us in the West. So we have names that translate as Hamurabi is my God, which suggests at least for that man who took on that name

and decided to keep that name at least, he must have thought higher of Hambarabi than maybe somebody else, you know. So I think there's actually 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. They're quite an expansive thinking people, you know, they think well beyond their borders. 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 to meet the heroes of the dead and all that kind of thing. So I think you see in the Babylonian mind this real inquisitiveness that wants to think about the world in its broader ways. And I suppose that they don't have a trick because they are at the crossroads of the world.

They are. There are north-south-east west. There are trade routes. There are peoples. There are invaders. Everyone. It's a busy old neighbourhoods. Everyone came through them.

And I think if you walk down the streets of Babylon of a night, you would just here, as you would in the centre of any great metropolis today, multiple languages being spoken all around you. It must have been terribly exciting. In a way that Egypt feels a little bit more geographically removed. Precisely, removed. And indeed defended, and there may be advantages and disfranchised that. But also the Egyptians had no real desire to explore either.

You know, they thought the Nile Valley was everything. That's all you need. The Babylonians don't think like that at all. I think it is because they see the world coming through them, then they're a lot more sort of open to it. Now, militarily, what's that mean? Are we fighting our neighbours a lot? If we don't launch preemptive attacks, are we like to be invaded?

What does that? What does it mean to be a king? 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. constantly looking out for rival kings more locally. So places like Issin 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 Zagros Mountains. And they would come in on these major campaigns into Babylonia and swipes. and swipe through the place. In fact, that wonderful steely of Hammurabi, I described in the Louvre, was actually found in Sousa in Ilam. It was stolen and put up there, absolutely. And then later on, past Hamurabi's time,

as we get into about 1,000 through to 800 BCE, the threat comes increasingly from the north, and that's where the Assyrians, of course, as the Assyrian Empire grows in strength, takes over where the Hittites and the Mitanian, at once been, so we see there's this incredible rivalry that goes on between Babylon and Assyria. And the rivalry, I think, is based on culture, first of all. The Assyrians never got over the fact that 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 Atchua 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. I was going to say, unfortunately sounds to me exactly like Britain and France. Always a bit jealous. Always this jealousy there, you know. And so what do they do? Well, when the Assyrians managed, you know, they really are at their height in the 800, 700 BCE, they storm into Babylonia and take Babylon.

And first of all, they kind of settle themselves into it and they think, you know, we will be Babylonian kings. We will act as a Babylonian king. But then when the Babylonians don't accept the Assyrian king there and rebel against it, that's when they turn all of that kind of built up tension on the Babylonian peoples. So King Sanakarib of Assyria, he's quite remarkable. He completely tears down the city, the great Zygarat temples, 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. Esah Harden and he's an absolute, died in the world, 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? Who are we to do that? Because that could have answered, someone's question, which is, why is Babylon just another one of these way-pillar? These political entities on this great big, this great journey from the ancient past the present. But no, Babylon meant something different. Completely.

These Assyrians, they're not celebrating Err and these other cities. So something is going on in Babylon. You mentioned the Enlightenment. You mentioned this sort of scientific and literary. Yeah, absolutely. So it's the Babylonians who give us the first conception of proper astronomy and astrology. So can I ask why? What's going on there?

Something, just something in the water? Yeah, something that. 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 wild. Well, 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 Gau Gamala, the date of the battle of Kunaksa,

because the Babylonian scribes are recording it. So you go into your university common room with your fellow profs, and you can be more certain about events thousands years ago then your Anglo-Saxon colleagues are about the year 500. By far, by far, by far. Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it? It really can. We could be that specific about it, yeah.

Okay, so and where we now all think of, in a very stupid way, I blinkedly think of ancient Greece being the wellspring of all this science. Babylon is way ahead of the game. Way ahead. Way ahead of the game. And I think 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. I'm just thinking, I mean, in some ways, like the Greeks, like the Egyptians, Babylon does that, rarest of things, and like Chinese civilizations, it creates a brand of a civilization that's so enduring that after it's been military defeat and conquered, its conquerors are more likely to want to conform. Exactly. That's quite rare.

They become Babylonian, right? So Alexander wanted to make his empire, the center of his empire, Babylon. His general, Sir Lucas and his family, they still do the rights 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 I always find those points 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 Achaemenid Persians are besotted with Babylon. The Seleucids still are. The peoples of the Levant are completely Babylonianized. Egypt is different, as we said before, they really. They repel, 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 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 period. You know, sphinxes, sirens, bullheaded 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. 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? 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 BC. So the Assyrians are in, they're gone now, okay, and Babylon has returned in all its glory. Okay. And has, in effect, inherited what the Assyrians left behind. So now they've got an empire in the Levant in Syria in the north,

because of course they've got all of Assyria now also. So in this period we call the Neo-Babolonian period. We have two great conqueror kings, Nabopalasa, who was born in southern Iraq, and then his son, who is trained up to be a military man and crown prince, Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar II. 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. 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, Thieves 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. And quite planned? How would it have felt if I was there? No, not really. No, because, 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 widened roads, but they would end at somebody's front door, you know, were no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. And other roads were 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. And so he builds a monumental processional way, which crosses over a bridge in the Thai, 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 musho-shu dragons and lions and they're staggering and there was gate

after gate after gate going into the centre of Babylon in fact Babylon itself Babil in Babylonian means city of gates So Nebuchadnezzar makes this real happen, you know. So this monumental processional way, these huge gates, and they all go to the centre of Babylon, to this enormous temple called the Eshagila,

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.

It had disappeared under the Syrians 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, while the priest whacked him around the head, give 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 to 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.

So Babylon, the architecture of Neo-Babolonia, responds to the needs of the ceremonial, the religious and ritual life of the state. You're listening to Down Snow's history. We'll be back after this break. Why does Babylon not exist later on? What happens? Well, you know, it continues to exist for another four. 400 years after Nebuchadnezzar's death.

So as you said, Alexander the Great goes there. Absolutely. The Persians are there, Alexander's there, the Seleucids are there. Yes. The Seleucids are there up until the middle of the second century BC. And it's still a cultural hub, you know, it's still a centre. 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, Salucia, Antioch, on the coast of, 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 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, in ancient history I mean there are two occasions we know that in 132 CE is the last datable piece of cuneiform

and once that's gone that's it you know the language is forgotten until we re-learn 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 briefly conquers all that bit 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. Let's go and have a look.

And they are so disappointed, they just see this pile of bricks. And he sort of moves a couple of shards 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. First of all, it's the Jewish memory of Babylon. So the Jews were exiled into Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar the second. He conquers Jerusalem. Completely destroys it, destroys the temple of Yahweh, takes even the gold and silver of the temple back to Babylon with them. 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 for the Jews, you know, famously Psalm 137 by the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept, you 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. 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. So first of all, 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. 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 centre called Al-Jahuda,

which means something like Jewish town or 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. They had families there. They opened very successful businesses. They married Babylonian women, which means that they're not.

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 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. So that's why the reputation of the sort of legacy of Babylon has been colored by that, Some of the biblical, well, perhaps not the stories, but some of the interpretation. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like actually the legacy of Babylon is far more important.

It's a legacy for all mankind. 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 of the 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 standing for Rome, of course. 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 demission. But certainly, Revelation is written in that era, in that sphere of Roman imperialism. but it's Babylon that they go back to it, you know, as the ultimate mother of harlots kind of thing. It's a great example of how winners don't write the history books on this occasion. That's exactly it. Still, you're doing good work, but most of us think about Babylon through the lens of that.

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 labour. in Jamaica in the 1930s, in the Rastafarian movement, of course, the British Empire is the new Babylon, of course, whereas Ethiopia, Africa is seen as the new Zion. This is an image which gets reutilized all the time. Very recently, Lady Gaga has produced a song called Babylon, which is all about the sins, the iniquities of living today.

and trying to make a living, trying to be true to yourself when we're all living in a new Babylon now. It's an age old thing. Whereas in fact, you're rebranding Babylon and we should be thinking of it in the way that we think about those, that sort of Greek enlightenment. Absolutely. It sounds like it gives us a vast amount of what we now count of

as sort of civilisation. Enormously, enormously. Absolutely. And I think an enlightenment is exactly what it was. 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. 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. Well, fantastic, Lloyd Lewand Jones. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

You're very welcome. Fantastic. I'm now a Babylon fan. Good. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era. And you can even hear the voice of Richard the 3rd.

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