In Our Time - Babylon

Episode Date: June 3, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the truth about Babylon. Six thousand years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built. The great empire to spring from the region was Babylon, which held sway for over a thousand years and in that time managed to garner an extraordinarily bad press: it’s associated with the Tower of Babel, with Nineveh where Jonah is sent to preach repentance and, perhaps most famously, with “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” - the whore of Babylon, who in Revelation is taken to personify the city itself. It’s not just the Bible; Herodotus described the Babylonians as effeminate, lascivious and decadent as well.But what is the true story? Classics in this country has meant a study of Greece and Rome, but there is an increasingly vocal contingent that claims that Babylonian culture has been hugely undervalued, and that there is a great wealth of extraordinary literature waiting to be translated.With Eleanor Robson, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University; Irving Finkel, Curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum; Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, 6,000 years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built. The great empire to spring from the region was Babylon,

which held sway for over 1,000 years, and in that time managed to garner an extraordinary bad press. It's associated with the Tower of Babel, with Nineveh, where Jonah was sent to preach repentance, and perhaps most famously with mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, the whore of Babylon, who in revelation is taken to personify the city itself. It's not just the Old Testament. Herodotus described the Babylonians as effeminate, lascivious, and decadent as well. But what's the true story? Classics in this country is meant a study of Greece and Rome, but there's an increasingly vocal contingent

that claims that Babylonian culture has been hugely undervalued and that there's a great wealth of extraordinary literature waiting to be translated. With me to discuss the culture of Babylon is Eleanor Robson, lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University

and a fellow of all souls Oxford. Irving Finkel, curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum, and Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London. Eleanor Robson, let's really begin near the beginning. Can you give us a broad outline of the history of the region we're talking about, Mesopotamia, more or less nowadays Iraq,

and the very first civilisations which developed there? Okay, well, farming developed in the Middle East from around 10,000 BC, but that was up in the north of the area in the mountainous regions. At that time, the south of Iraq was very marshy. The people gradually began to move down into that area, perhaps because the northern areas were overpopulated and couldn't sustain farming for such a large number of people. Exactly why people began to settle there, it's difficult to know, but they certainly started to live not just in small villages the way they had before,

but in larger groups of people. Why that is? Well, perhaps because they needed to organise together for food production in a rather more hostile environment with all the marshes, perhaps simply because they needed to group together to find areas of land that were dry enough to live in, may be to protect themselves from other people or wild animals living in the area, but it also may be to do with the development of religion, which appears at that time as well.

And we certainly know that the first towns and cities had temples at their very hearts, and that they were not only the physical centre, but also the cultural and economic powerhouses of the first cities as well. We're talking about this mysterious move about 10,000 years ago, 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, from the nomadic to the agricultural one, farming settles in and the city's bringing it. And you've given several reason for it. There's obviously bound to be still speculation

as to why these beginnings of concentration occurred. But once they began to occur, what's remarkable is how soon, as it were, we had what we would recognise, and what you call in your work the three of you, cities, places, civilisations. Can you discuss the very first cities that we know about there? Well, there are cities in the sense

that there are many tens of thousands, and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of people living in them. But they're also cities in the sense that they're very complex social organisms, that there are not just people who are producing food and the basics of life, but people who are managing that as well and who have control of law and order, as well as people just simply manufacturing things to live. And there's trade and also the beginnings of writing

where people working for the temples, the bureaucrats need to manage and predict and control their assets. That's the land and the people working for. them and to make sure the people working for them are fed. And it's all too complicated to organise simply by memory and word of mouth. So the first writing which starts to appear just before 5,000 years ago, about 3,000 BC, is simply an economic management tool by the Temple bureaucrats and just records numbers and the things that they are counting and accounting for.

This is the Err city, the city of Err itself. The city of Ur and the city of Uruk. the area around Nasseria in modern Iraq, right in the south of Iraq. And so we have that there. Irving Crinkle, when did Babylon begin to emerge as a powerful city? Well, you have to reckon in the history of Mesopotamia that there are groups of people. And the first group of whom we know a lot,

and we know their name, are the Sumerians. And they came before the Babylonians and Babylon itself. So from about 3,000 BC onwards, we have to reckon with an illiterate Sumerian culture and Babylon itself came to prominence in the second millennium. There's a famous king Hamarabi, for example, who's always going to be associated with Babylon and other people who came afterwards.

But when we're looking at the history in this sort of, from a helicopter point of view, you've got the Samerians first with their own language, of course, which is separate. And then the Babylonians and the Syrians who spoke the Acadian language or the Babylonian language. Well, in this little dance of helicopter dance, let's just accept back.

The Samarians, by that time, the wheel had been invented there. writing had been developed. We're beginning to see the development of the basis of geometry. A great deal of the foundations of civilised life were already being uncovered and discovered then. That's certainly true. I mean, I think Erin is right, the motive for the creation of writing was, as it were, economic and administrative.

But once writing developed as a proper tool, can you just say a little bit more about that? Because that's really interesting. I mean, we had it with the alphabet, too, that trade brought in the alphabet. To a certain extent, we had it with numbers. We're talking about zero, that trade facilitated numbers, and actual writing, you're saying, again, we're talking trade.

I think trade is secondary. I think it's the primary concern with the administration of these great urban conglomerations which were in existence in Mesopotamia. I mean, trade was something which probably preceded writing, and it always continued anyway. So I don't think the, as it were, the appearance of writing is contingent upon trade as such. more the complexity of the life that was already

prevailing in Mesopotamia. So they're trying to sort of just log it really and these specialisms? I think so but it's not just an economic matter because the kind of cuneiform resource is written on play that we look at, even from their earliest manifestations are not only concerned with

day-to-day life and rations and predictions of the flow of existence, but there's an intellectual input very early on and this is something which is little known and very remarkable. Hamarabi was the first charismatic ruler king, whatever one called him, of Babylon.

Can you tell us something about him in his period and what he contributed? Well, Hamarabi spoke the Babylonian language. He was a descendant of a group of people that came into Mesopotamia speaking kind of West Semitic dialect. And he has got into the history books and everybody knows him, really because of the law code that he was responsible for. The most famous example is in the Louvre. It's a huge big stone that everybody sees if they get into the Louvre galleries. And in a way, like all these things in history,

he's got credit for something which he didn't really invent because it wasn't the first law code. It's the one that's in all the school books, if they ever talk about. This is the eye from the eye, a tooth for a tooth. That kind of thing, exactly. But there were... It makes sense when you read it at school, didn't you? It did, yes, especially when it was written on the blackboard.

But he had a sort of empire. He was a good military ruler. he was a powerful person. There was a flourishing of literature in the court. I mean, he was a good near-eastern king. But I think his fame is contingent upon this law code, really. And this is about 1700 BC. Yeah.

Andrew George, where do we get most of our history of this period from? And why is there appears now to be so much of it? Where do we get it from? Well, we get it from cuneiform tablets. That's clay tablets that have been left behind by this civilization. and where there are tablets there is documentation of life and some of that life is political and military history. Clay tablets writing was used by the state,

the succession of states in ancient Mesopotamia, and these states recorded the great deeds of kings for their own glory, but also there was a tradition which became particularly developed later on of a recording of history for its own sake. There does seem to be enormous amount of material a lot of it in the British Museum are still to be approached, still to be looked at.

Can you tell us something of the weight of it, why they were so interested in writing so much down? There is an vast and unmanageable amount, and partly that's not simply to do with the fact that a lot was recorded, it's also to do with the fact that most of it has survived, as far as we know. Unlike other ancient civilizations, for instance, Egypt, which wrote on perishable papyrus,

clay tablets are virtually indestructible within the archaeology of Iraq. It was the biggest resource in Mesopotamia, wasn't it? Everything came. They did everything. Almost everything. For the later periods that we'll be talking about later, there were also written records on perishable materials

such as leather and papyrus that don't survive. But fortunately for us, clay continued to be the main medium of writing. Andrew, George, can you just tell listeners what a cuneiform tablet looks like? What size is it? What do they... Does it like runes?

Does it look like Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on? So there you go. Well, first of all, in terms of size, there's an enormous variety of tablets that are... There's small pieces of clay,

often pillow-shaped, but from the point of view of size, there can be anything from less than an inch square to 20 inches square and sometimes longer than they are wide and vice versa.

The method of writing on these clay tablets was to impress wedges on the soft clay with a reed stylus, the impression of the stylus gave a wedge, and the different combinations of wedges form what we call cuneiform signs, and each sign has a value in phonetic system, but also a word value.

So you have a very complicated system of writing, similar to the modern method of writing Japanese, a combination of phonetic and word signs, but written in this technology, the three-dimensional technology, of impressing a dent, as it were, in soft clay. Hello, Robinson, can you tell us about Nebuchadnezzar? There's a huge leap. I think we're just talking about 1,300 years, 15 years from Haramarabi.

But we know about Nebuchadnezzar, and why was he important to Babylon? Well, Nebuchadnezzar was one of the first kings of Babylon in the early 6th century BC, after Babylon had regained its independence from the Assyrian Empire in the north of Iraq. And he, like Hamarabi, was a great charismatic military leader who ruled a large empire stretching right across to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and attempted to conquer Egypt too. But he also spent a lot of the resources available and rebuilding Babylon itself.

He was portrayed himself not only as a great military man, but also a very pious ruler who worshipped margar, the city god of Babylon and rebuilt the temples and palaces and the main processional street in Babylon in honour of the gods and as a patron again of Babylonian literature. We also know him from biblical sources because one of the many conquered peoples of Babylonia were the Israelites. And so this is one of the reasons that we have a very negative picture of Babylon, is that we have traditionally seen Babylonia through the eyes of the deported Israelites into Babylon, though, of course, the cuneiform sources, the natures sources, tell us, show us a rather different, more positive picture.

So from the Israelites, the old tessent, we get by the waters of Babylon, I sat down and went. And you think that is a distorted... Well, it's only one, it's certainly the Israelite picture, and it's the political story of this deported people. but that's only one small part of the empire in the city. Okay, we've got a few staging posts now, a few platforms. That's where cities developed, which is remarkable. They were remarkably big. You're getting over 100,000 people altogether,

bigger than medieval cities. Absolutely. Much later on. You've got warrior like Hammurabi. You've got law codes, even though he didn't be right. We can have that discussion at the time. But anyway, it follows his name. And they've got Nebuchadnezzar, building temples and so on.

And we've got this cuneiform tablets of development of writing. we haven't talked about science yet. Let's try to talk a bit more detail about Babylonian culture and come to the nub. Why is it characterized Irving Finkel by a whore in the Bible, and Herodotus also described it as they have markets selling wives

and temples selling sex. What's all this about? Well, I never myself quite understood why Babylon has bad press. There's a dispute among scholars whether Herodotus actually went to Babylon or not. So, for example, if you rewit, he says about doctors. He says there weren't any.

And he said, when people are ill, they go and sit in a public place and hope that someone goes by who once suffers from the fame problem will tell them what they did to allow them to recover. Well, if you juxtapose that with what we know of Babylonian medicine, you will see that Herodotus was not always very reliable. So this is something to be born... But Babylonian medicine was quite well advanced. It was. It goes right back into the third millennium already.

The Samirians had a kind of early... version of medicine and we have nearly two and a half thousand years of documents in which we can see a huge amount and they understood a lot about the use of plants as drugs and they knew how to deal with great range of normal domestic ailments and so forth.

So you regard Herodotus, the great Greek historian, as someone who's unreliable in that. I think you have to take him with a pinch of salt. What do you think? No, just a second because I want to nail this because people who know Babylon's got a bad name and the name is the whole, the text and so on. Herodotus, he talks about it, he talks about women offering themselves in the temple, wives offering themselves in the temple.

And you don't think he didn't know what he was talking about. So what about the other bad reputation? Where is that coming from? The bit about the wives in the temple, I think, is an echo of something which was probably real. Because in classical Mesopotamian sources, we know that there were festivals when there were fertility rituals in which a priestess might spend time with a ruler and so forth at certain times. of the year and I suspect that that story in Herodotus is a kind of reflex of something which he did

encounter which was described to him from old times in Mesopotamia. But then we have the Old Testament description and in other parts of the Bible description of Babylon in sort of dismissive sexual whore terms, don't we? We do. I see

this question from a slightly different light. I think it's always there's always been a tendency in human civilization for people living on the fringes provincial people to look at the centre, look at the great city at the heart of civilisation and consider it to be somehow iniquitous. Like people in Cumberland looking at London,

exactly so. And so that you find that travellers' tales, for example, those fed to Herodotus and the biblical stories, the way that the prophets describe Babylon as the archetype of iniquity and vice, these things reflect that point of view. Yes, I think that's very important.

And coming back to Herodotus, and also had to remember why he was writing a history of the Babylonians. He was primarily interested in the Persians to explain the origins of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians in the early 5th century. And so he saw the Persians as the enemy, the other, the not Greeks, and was therefore, I think, predisposed to look at Middle Eastern civilizations,

whether Persian or Babylonian, as rather strange and weird and very much not Greek. similarly, the Jews and the Old Testament prophets are writing about Babylon as very much not the Israelites and something that they want to be very dissociated from because they're in exile when they're in Babylonia and want to return back to their homeland. We've mentioned religion in the temples

and as a building the temples. What can you say, and about the religions of Babylon? What can you describe it in... religions we would understand, are there similarities? Goodness, there's an awful lot to say about the religion of ancient Mesopotamia and its history because, of course, we've got enormous numbers of sources for it, not only texts that relate to the administration of the great temples in each city, but also hymns, prayers to individual deities,

and ritual texts which describe what goes on in those temples. This is a society in which, ideologically speaking, each of the great cities belonged to a great deity, and the deity ran the city for his own benefit. The city provided him with his support. The god of Babylon. The god of Babylon was a god called Marduk. Ideologically speaking, each city is a kind of temple estate. It's not quite like that in practice,

but the ideology tells us then that the cities of Mesopotamia were divided up among the great gods, and we thus learned that there is a huge pantheon of deities. rather like the Greek pantheon, where gods and goddesses exist with different functions in the universe. There is a god of storm, there is a god of writing, there is a god of barley, and so forth. I want to move in, after Gilgamesh in a moment, to the way that this fed into Greece and then Rome. But before we do that, we haven't talked about astronomy and science on it,

which is a very important point here. Can you just tell us what the Babylonians brought to that, with those massive systems and systematic systems of observation, for instance. Okay, well, we really owe astronomy to the Babylonians. It's very difficult to separate out science from religion and other sorts of intellectual thought in Babylonia. They were seen as very much part of the same system. Systematic observations began sometime in the 8th century BC

by astronomer priests working for the temples, recording monthly the appearance of the five visible planets and more frequently the movements of the moon and the sun because they were looking for patterns in the way these moved because the way they understood the way the world worked, the heavenly bodies were signals from the gods. And if everything was moving according to plan, according to how the predictions,

according to the model that the Babylonians had for the way the heavens ought to work, then the gods were pleased and everything was well with the world. But if something was observed in the sky that didn't fit expectations, then that was a signal that something was deeply wrong. So initially perhaps lunar and solar eclipses

were conceived to be terribly portentous. And moving over into other areas adjacent, they gave us 60 minutes and 360 degrees, and so a lot was laid down there. And Gilgamesh, Andrew George, the first great work of literature is when did that emerge as a written piece and as a piece that was known? Well, may I just answer that in a minute, but I think it's important for people to know that the, how senior the Babylonian sciences are when one thinks of the rest of the ancient world.

We have fully developed Babylonian mathematical texts dealing with mathematical and geometrical problems from early in the second millennium BC that's nearly 4,000 years ago and they anticipate by well over a thousand years the findings of Pythagoras. This is hugely important from the point of view of the profile

of Babylonian science that we put across how antique, how very ancient it is and how ancestral it is to what came later with the Greeks. With Gilgamesh, we're talking about the masterpiece of ancient Mesopotamian literature

Mesopotamian literature was already old by the time that we find the first stories about Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language at the end of the 3rd millennium BC again this is 4,000 years ago but the poem of Gilgamesh is best known from an integrated epic poem relating the story of Gilgamesh which we can observe evolving

from the old Babylonian period about 1800 BC right down to almost at the time of Christ at the end of the tradition of writing enclave in cuneiform script. The story of Gilgamesh is that Gilgamesh is a mighty king, a great hero, who is king of the city of Uruk, in some Babylonian traditions, the first city, the greatest city of culture where writing was invented. He is a king, but he is also a tyrant.

He abuses his people. The people complain to the gods. The gods send his counterpart. who is Enkidu, born in the wild, a wild man. Enkidu and Gilgamesh meet, they fight, they become great friends. They go on an adventure together to the far cedar forest where they succeed in killing the ogre who guards the cedar forest, who was placed there by the gods to protect the cedar,

and bring back cedar to Uruk in Sumer, in Babylonia. This is a reflection, of course, of the necessity of, of life in Mesopotamia that kings, if they needed a monumental timber for great buildings, and they had to go abroad to find it and bring it back, so there were timber expeditions to the east and the west. When Gilgamesh gets back to Uruk with his timber, he insults the goddess of sex, who wishes to bed him, he has nothing to do with her. She sends down to wreak revenge the bull of heaven, the constellation Taurus, from the sky, and this fiery bull comes down to Uruk

and its breath opens up great pits in the earth, it dries up the riverbed and withers all the vegetation. Gilgamesh and Enkidu find a way, however, to kill the bull of heaven, but then the gods decide that they've had enough. These two have committed two offences against the divine order, and one of them must die, and it is Enkidu that must die. And thereafter then Gilgamesh experiences at first hand the death of someone closed him, and thereafter he goes on a great quest to the end of the world

in search of immortality he doesn't want to die. Fine, I have to stop that story there because what he finds at the end in one version is the man who survived the flood. And so we have the flood story in Gilgamesh, Owing Finkel. What do you make of that, that there we have the flood story,

which everybody lives in this programme, will think the flood story of the Old Testament, Noah? Well, that's a wonderful question, because the flood story is one of our most famous tablets. I have to tell you, when it was deciphered, that focused attention on Mesopotamia in Britain for the first time, I think, because the text runs in close parallel with the Genesis narrative. And people who knew the Bible by heart, who knew the story of the flood so familiarly from the Old Testament, were astonished when George Smith, who was the scholar in the museum who first cracked it, translated it.

And it produced a serious problem because clergymen all over the country were... bewildered how it could be that one of these crumbling, mouldy-looking biscuits had on it a text which ran in parallel with Holy Rit. And for many generations afterwards, there's been discussion with this very issue. What conclusions do you draw? Putting it very bluntly, did the writers of the Old Testament take the story from the... Yes, I think there can be no question. They drew on a heritage which they learned in Babylon, this old traditional story about the flood and worked it into their own. for their own purposes. So we have

things coming in from the Babylonian culture through the Israelites who Nebuchadnezzar sent to Babylon into their books, the Old Testament books, kings particularly and so on. Can we just divert the flow and try to see what the Babylonians, Andrew, was very

firm about their contributions to mathematics, for instance, prefiguring Pythagoras. And yet people reading about Rome and Greece sort of tend to most people stop at Greece. This program has done many a time back to the Greeks, as if that's as far back as we can go. Can you tell us about the feed-in from Babylonian intellectual life to the Greeks?

Well, it happened on many levels, not only mathematics and astronomy, but also literature. Irvings mentioned the flood story into the biblical tradition, but for instance, stories of goddesses going to the underworld, for instance, such as Persephone, we know from the the Greek tradition that we have in the Babylonian tradition going well back to 4,000 years ago again. Exactly how these transmissions occurred is very difficult to pinpoint. But certainly from the time of the 5th century, at least, there were many Greeks in the Middle East, partly because of the Persian wars that we mentioned earlier.

There were people working for the temples in the Middle East, Babylon who were translating traditional Babylonian knowledge into Greek. We know of a man called Barossus in the Greek tradition called Bail Raushunu. It was his Babylonian name. He was the chief administrator of the temple of Babylon in the early 3rd century who wrote an ancient history of Babylonia, which we can check from the cuneiform tablets, in Greek for a Greek audience. So we also have cuneiform tablets that have traditional Babylonian intellectual works on them

translated into Greek on the tablets. Andrew. There are three real periods to be crude in which you get a Greek response to the East. There's the archaic period when the Greeks are interested to learn. They're just coming to a political maturity. They're interested to learn about these ancient civilizations and great states in the near East. and they're very receptive to eastern ideas. So, for example, Hesiod in his theologna repeats

Mesopotamian ideas that have been passed down through Anatolia and the Hittites about the succession of deities that controlled the universe from the beginning of time. And then we have the classical period when as a reaction to the invasions of the Persian emperors who, of course, ruled Babylon at that time after Nebuchadnezzar, there is a kind of anti-eastern feeling

and a rejection of the east as something from which one can learn. And Herodotus is part of this. And then after that, after the Persian Empire fell and Alexander himself conquers the East, there was a period of Hellenism when once again the Greeks were extremely receptive to Eastern ideas and sought to set out to learn of the East, of what the East could tell Greece about technology, about science, about medicine and about philosophy. Thank you very much, Alan Robesman, Irving Kvinkl.

Andrew George, thank you next week. It's empiricism. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.