The Ancients - Babylon

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

One of the most famous cities in history - Babylon is shrouded in mystery and myth. Located in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern Iraq, it was one of the epicentres of ancient culture, architecture, and the home of famous figures such as Hammurabi. But what do we actually know about Babylon - and what can we learn from ancient sources and modern archaeology?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Oxford scholar Stephanie Dalley who helps us separate fact from fiction. Looking at famous sites such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Ziggurat of Ur - what can we learn about Babylon, and what legacy has it left behind?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, it's a big one. We're talking all about one of the most well-known cities from ancient history, the prestigious, wealthy, beautiful city that was Babylon. Situated in ancient Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, it has an amazing yet quite enigmatic ancient story.

It has so much history attached to it. There's legends from the Tower of Babel to, of course, the mysterious Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It's got remarkable figures from Hammurabi to Nebuchadnezzar II. It has got thousands of years of history attached to it. And in today's podcast episode, we're only going to be scratching the surface of Babylon's history because, as mentioned, there's so much. And yet, we're going to give you, at the same time, a deep dive, a wonderful deep dive into the latest research, into what we know right now about ancient Babylon and how we're certainly going to be learning more about this city and its people in antiquity over the following years and decades. To explain all about this I was delighted to head up to Oxford

a month or so ago to interview a leading light, a brilliant expert on ancient Babylon, on the ancient Near East, the wonderful Dr. Stephanie Daly. Stephanie, she's an author, she has presented TV documentaries, she's a retired teaching fellow from the Oriental Institute at Oxford. She is brilliant. She's a fountain of knowledge when it comes to all things ancient Babylon and I've got no doubt that that will come across in today's episode. It was great fun to record. It was an absolute privilege to meet Stephanie and to interview her all about this so I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado to talk all about Babylon, here's Stephanie. Dr. Dalley, it is an honour to have you on the podcast today. Thank you, it's an honour to

be invited. And it is a pleasure to be talking about this topic. Babylon, we've done a few episodes on Mesopotamia recently, including with your good friend, Dr. Paul Collins, very recently, Stephanie. But of all the places in Mesopotamia, Babylon, this seems to be the city-state, the city that stands out amongst the rest. There's this fame attached to this city in particular, isn't there? One of the problems with Babylon is that everybody thinks of it in terms of Hebrew or later accounts and how it was a den of iniquity, you know, hated people and destroyed them more than anybody else did. And of course, it's not true from contemporary sources. So my idea was to write a book about Babylon that didn't just go in for that rhetoric, but told you what it was famous for, why it was so famous from its own records. Because that's what I do. I read this cuneiform script. And what sorts of records, you mentioned cuneiform script there, but what sorts

of records, Babylonian records, are available for scholars like you trying to tell the story of Babylon in ancient history? In the 19th century, people had, they already knew where Babylon was, and it was a focus for some archaeology, but mainly for looters who found that they could sell cuneiform tablets in Baghdad, mainly, I expect. And there were very well-known people who were selling them. The locals at that time weren't interested in them. The records, most of them from Babylon, are of unbaked clay. So they're not that attractive. They're sort of mud balls, really. But the museums started to get competitive in the West, so that the British Museum was

anxious to get some. And people were sent out, in fact, by the museum to buy on the open market. That happened a lot in the early to mid 19th century. And then the Germans got, as part of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, they got the concession to dig there. And they dug there very well. They had a really good man. By the standards of the time, he was excellent in his archaeology. And he dug from 1899 to 1917, when the British took over Iraq or what became Iraq. So that was the beginning, really, of the story. And in regards to these inscriptions that were then found, so we've got these tablets, unbaked clay that you mentioned there. Are there also in the archaeological site of Babylon, did they find? I'm just imagining from Mesopotamian ancient history, big royal

inscriptions as well, astronomical diary entries. Is this the sorts of inscriptional evidence that we have surviving to learn more about Babylon? One of the things that we expected to find and didn't find was the kinds of things we had from Assyria further to the north, where there are wonderful stone sculptures in the palaces, and they wrote very fine inscriptions about their deeds, the kings, and that was their buildings they wrote about and their expeditions to trade and to take control of an empire. We didn't find anything like that in Babylon, so we were stuck really with a lot of, Babylon. So we were stuck really with a lot of huge number, thousands and thousands of cuneiform tablets that had arrived in the British Museum without any real provenance in Babylon and mostly needing reassembling from

fragments when there was no kiln to bake them in and nobody who knew how to read them. We're only just getting on top of it really now because it's been a huge job and for example some of the catalogues that have been produced by the British Museum have taken more than two generations to assemble. Of course, when the Germans started to excavate, they found more tablets, and those mostly went to the museum in Berlin, where you know probably that the Ishtar Gate, with its wonderful glazed brickwork with lions and dragons all over it is exhibited in a slightly smaller version, I think, than the real thing. But that's why the British Museum is one of the main places to have things. But I think for the archaeologists, in some ways, it was disappointing because the famous Steeler of Hammurabi, of course, was found by the French at Susa in Iran because it was such an important item that it was taken as loot from Mesopotamia

in ancient times. And so the French were digging at Susa and they dug it up in Iran. So it went to the Louvre. So the Louvre's got that and some other things that were found before the excavators got going. So some of the best things weren't found by archaeologists at all. Well, Stephanie, I find that absolutely fascinating, the fact that knowing more about Babylon today, Babylon's importance, what happened at Babylon in ancient history, the discovery of all of these tablets, which you say we've only just recently, well scholars, people who studied these tablets, we've only just recently got on top of, for instance, in archives such as the British Museum. It feels like we're therefore now beginning to learn more almost about the Babylonian version of Babylon, not just the version of Babylon that survives in, let's say, the Bible or Greco-Roman

sources from antiquity. Exactly. I think that my book on the city of Babylon is just the beginning of something that one is going to be able to do much better in 20 years time. But you have to start this sort of thing going on and I was so horrified to read books by some of my colleagues with a title Babylon but not actually telling you anything about Babylon. Now that's not just because we hadn't got on top of the tablet situation, it's also because the buildings in Babylon were subject to flooding. The situation at Babylon is that they were building on a mound of older buildings and then they'd knock those down or they'd fall down and they'd build right on top of those again and again and again and they'd also build right next to their temples and palaces

they would build a huge ziggurat, a huge temple tower of solid mud brick. Now if you have quite a high water table and you put such a lump of stuff on top of it, it will raise the water table nearby. So all those palaces and temples got flooded all the time. And then they got rebuilt higher up and they got rebuilt higher up. And the result was the excavators couldn't get at the early levels. So in that regard, therefore, Stephanie, as we delve into Babylon's ancient history, there's so much, and you are such an expert, we'll probably jump from one topic to another to another, but I feel from what you were hinting at there, the earliest layers of Babylon, when someone's talking about the origins of Babylon or its

earliest history, this seems like something that we don't know much, if anything, about because of what you just mentioned there. We only know from later sources anything about early Babylon. There are a few cuneiform tablets which have been found perhaps because they were shoveled out and came into a higher level later on. But it's been, you know, if you expect to be able to walk into Hammurabi's throne room, not a chance. That's just not something anybody will, I think, ever be able to do. The Germans dug a famously deep trench. And of course, by the time they got down to where they had to stop because of the water table, it was a tiny trench. So they got a bit of information out of it.

But compared with, for instance, the Assyrian palaces, which were there quite deep under later stuff, but they weren't flooded in the same way. They weren't rebuilt so often. They tended to go on to a new site for a new palace, whereas in Babylon they cherished their old stuff by putting on top of it and reusing the material that came from it. As a more general ancient historian, I'm now picturing Babylon as an archaeological site, almost as like a site such as Vindolanda in Northern England, or even Troy with the many different layers and these things that are built on top of each other as you get further and further on in ancient history. And I'm presuming the amount of layers that we know of,

of rebuilding and remodelling of older buildings in Babylon. This once again stresses the incredible, the rich ancient history that this city had, you know, that they could keep constructing monumental buildings in several different periods of kings, regal periods of Babylon's ancient history. Yes. And so there's a concentration on Nebuchadnezzar II, the one who took Jerusalem, and that, of course, makes him famous immediately because he's come into Bible tradition. But it's really him that we know most about, him and a couple of his successors, because his buildings seemed to survive, though actually some of what has been

assigned to him is now being assigned to later periods when the Seleucid kings followed the same kind of idea about using the buildings that were there rebuilding on top of them. So some of the levels at Babylon have been quite drastically reassigned to later kings. Well before we go on to later kings, and maybe we'll talk a bit about Alexander the Great a bit later too, Stephanie, but keeping on the earlier history first, what do we know about the first kings of Babylon that we hear about? And at that time, when roughly are we talking,

is Babylon a prominent city-state at that time, or is it in the shadows of other city-states in the region? Babylon is really in the shadow of earlier cities like Uruk and Ur and Lagash and Kish. They're the big cities of the fourth and third millennia. When you get into the second millennium, you get Babylon starting to rise up. And it's hard to know why. It doesn't have a particular advantage in its position, for example. All of the cities are on rivers. They all have canals giving them the communications between each other. But the interesting thing, I think, with Babylon is that it's got two contemporary kings to start off with.

And this, I think, must mean that two different tribes started working together. You know, tribes do tend to push each other out. They all value their own grazing lands and so on. But to find two kings is very interesting, I think. And why they had the advantage even then is something I think we don't really know yet. Certainly, they had good administration at that point. They wrote letters, they had business with a good development of finance, for instance. And of course, the temples played a major part. So the economy and the religion are very closely linked. It's so interesting when you look at that earlier time in Babylon and trying to figure out how much we know.

I mean, do we know, therefore, from the archaeology what sorts of temples were present at that time, let's say in the early second millennium BC? Yes, we do know a little bit from a very restricted source. At that time, they dated each year by a great thing that the king had done. Usually he'd finished it by the time they dated the year. So, you know, it's the year before that he finished it. But it'll tell you about the temple that he built or about a throne for the god that he made of gold and whatnot and put into a temple.

Or he would tell you about an expedition that he made for probably a military and commercial basis. So that's a great source of information year by year. Of course, we have to put them in order. That's not always so easy. And it's quite a long time, well down in the second millennium BC, that they start saying the first year, the second year, the third year of this king or that. And they stop giving us that lovely information that we get out of order in the earlier year names. And I guess also one other thing that you mentioned that I'd like to pick up on, you mentioned tribes with the first kings, you mentioned two kings. there that I'd like to pick up on. You mentioned tribes with the first kings, you mentioned two kings. Would that potentially tell us that in this early stages of Babylon before, I guess, urbanisation, maybe it becomes more of an urban centre, the people surrounding

what became Babylon, do we think they had livelihoods based on pastoral farming, on livestock and lived in that sort of way before coming together potentially to form this great ancient metropolis that it would soon or one day become? Well, when we talk about a huge metropolis these days, we assume that everybody's got a house. But I don't think that's the case then. I think there was a tremendous symbiosis between the people of the religion, of the religious order, and the palace with its administration as well, and then a few people who live on the citadel who are involved in those elite functions. What happens outside there has hardly been touched at all by archaeologists.

But in any case, it's for certain that a lot of them lived in temporary accommodation, which might mean tents. And if you try to find a tent, archaeologically, you're in for a tough time. So I don't know quite what we're looking for there. We do know that at night, rather as with early travellers say in the Gobi Desert, when you come to an oasis you may find that it's walled because they drive the animals in overnight. You know, cattle rustling is a great way of making a living. And you have to protect yourself against that. We think they shut the city at night with a lot of valuable animals inside it.

Outside it, of course, there are fields and they're growing very well their own food. And one of the king's duties is to extend the land under cultivation but that requires intermittent labor doesn't it you've got to sow and that's quite hard work and you've got to plow and you've got to harvest so those are three things that will require a large labor force are three things that will require a large labour force and you will get these semi-nomadic herdsmen people to come and do some of that when needed. They're not there all the time and that must affect the type of accommodation that they have. Do we hear anything therefore about this from texts, for instance, from the British Museum Archive or elsewhere? Perhaps let's, at the time of Hammurabi and his reign, we seem to know a lot about

his administration, his expansion. Do we hear anything, therefore, about in regards to the significance of his particular reign in the rise of Babylon in, let's say, the early to mid-second millennium BC? Do we hear from the surviving sources about the

accommodation of the people living in Hammurabi's Babylon I guess and to what you inferred just now about you know how they work together almost it's very difficult to be sure of the right interpretation but what we do have from other cities not from Babylon itself is lots and lots of letters of his administration. And a tremendous amount of it is about taxes. Something to have a change. And about the control of water, because they've got to irrigate. We're not in a rainfall zone. It does rain sometimes very hard, but it's not a reliable source of watering for the crops.

So you've got networks of canals which can be changed at the drop of a hat for military or for agricultural reasons. And those are mostly what the letters are about. Keeping law and order, keeping the crops properly looked after, keeping the land in use, so that if somebody's working the land and he falls ill and he hasn't got a member of his family to take over from him, and the women played their part as well as the children, of course, if there was nobody to continue looking after the land, it would be given to somebody else. So we can infer information like that about Babylonian life, even almost 4,000 years ago from the surviving tablets, which to me, Stephanie, is absolutely fascinating. Do we learn more

also from these tablets? And let's say, during the second millennium BC, about religion at Babylon. Do we know which particular gods and goddesses these people worship? planet Venus and so on. But others have particular attributes. For instance, there's one called Gula, who is a goddess, and the dog is her thing. So, you know, if you want the maggots in your wounds dealt with, I am sure the dog comes to your aid. Anyway, as time goes on, you have a city god who starts off with a very particular attribute, so that for Marduk, the city god of Babylon, his great tool is the hoe. It's an agricultural implement. And then as time goes by, he attracts to himself the attributes of other deities and there's a very academic scheme really for understanding the powers of the God as time goes on. So he does end up as the Lord and his city ends up with quarters of the city or districts of the

city which are given the names of other earlier cities. So that for example it has an area called Eridu which is really a very early city, way before Babylon became anything, that helps to attract the powers of Eridu, the power of Eridu's city gods, to Babylon, the center. So the kings are sort of collecting up into Babylon the power from all over the land. And I think that one of the ways they do that is through literature and through the curriculum of training scribes. Yes, well, let's go on to literature now, because there are so many of these incredible epic stories, aren't there, from Babylon about Babylon creation myths and so on and so forth. We can potentially talk about a couple of them, but one I've got in my notes right here that I'd love to talk about, because this one seems one of the big ones from this

time, is the Epic of Creation. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was to look at the Epic of Creation and the sources that were used to compose it earlier, and to try and put together the way that the elite, the king and his entourage perhaps, made use of literature to show the importance of Babylon, which it hadn't had to start with in very early times. So there was also a feeling that scholars started off studying it with the idea that there were authors and they composed things and it's, you know, nobody can take it over. It's that author's work and there's one manuscript and everything dribbles down from that. Now it's not at all like that with

Mesopotamian writing and especially not if it's being used for the political and religious purposes that Babylon uses it for. So that you find sort of precursors of the epic of creation, themes and lines and words that come from earlier compositions and to trace that coming through as far as you can because you're always finding bits from here and bits from there. You put them together and you're not quite sure if they really fit together. And you end up with the most appalling mess of text

where if you want to do a sort of musical score of what the text was like at a certain episode, you might have to have eight different lines, where there were different words used or different writings used for the same word. It's a big job to get anything out that's at all coherent. It's a big job to get anything out that's at all coherent. When you look at the epic of creation, you've talked about floods already, but then once again, there seems to be this idea of a great flood in the epic of creation. It's quite interesting that you get a flood as... No, the flood doesn't come into the epic of creation.

It's the epic of Gilgamesh that it comes into and the epic of Atrahasis. Gilgamesh that it comes into, and the epic of Atrahasis. And those come from the south of the country, and they don't seem to be taken over for raising the profile of the great city in the same way. In fact, with the Gilgamesh epic, we now know that Gilgamesh was not only the king of Uruk for most of the versions we know, but there is a version, a different version, where he's the king of Ur. So it looks very much as if in the earliest times, each city would have its very own version, which would promote its importance using Gilgamesh. So when the epic of creation comes along into Babylon's own curriculum, as you might say, it's a different matter really as to how it develops and is used

by the elite. Well, there you go. There you go. Thank you for correcting me on that. Definitely, indeed. And moving on from that, but kind of keeping on that mythical gods and goddesses theme of Babylon, you mentioned the patron deity Belmarduk, and you hinted at it earlier, this ziggurat. What is this great temple in Babylon in which Belmarduk was honoured, was worshipped? We think that because there are mountains around Mesopotamia, especially on the Iranian or eastern side, that gods were thought to inhabit mountains. And of course, the tops of mountains are the nearest to heaven. That's as far as you can get if you're walking. So they wanted to imitate a mountain in the flat alluvium that is Mesopotamia, which makes Mesopotamia so different from, say, Palestine, where you've got a lot of independent sort of ecologies. We've got a connected ecology the whole way up most of the Tigris and Euphrates. So they built their ziggurats, which we think represented where the gods lived on top of mountains. And by the use of words, you can make them

into mountains conceptually. However, they were obviously very impressive, but they fell down, or bits of them fell down, very frequently because they were solid brick. They weren't like pyramids with a grave in the middle, although early travelers thought they must have been. They thought they were like the pyramids in Egypt. They must have had a hollow center, but they didn as well as we know and the one at babylon fell down quite dramatically by the time alexander came and in fact they decided to do without it all together after a while it was too big a job and they with the present of some elephants from bactria they shoveled all that mass of rubble over and made a new mound in Babylon. They must have had a huge workforce as well as the elephants.

But it was just beyond trying. And as I've mentioned, the water table in that area was sometimes really quite high and undermining the foundations. Seems to be quite an ancient building by Alexander's day, if as you say it's a bit in ruin by then, but still more than a thousand years earlier, is that when we believe it was initially constructed? Oh yes, yes. We're into long-term building in Babylon. Well, I've got in my notes the Tower of Babel, and I hope you can sort that from fiction. What is the actual potential link between the Tower of Babel,

mentioned in the Bible, and this ziggurat, this temple of Bel-Marduk in Babylon? It's difficult to give real hard evidence for this. We think that the word Babel, just like in English, Babel, Babel, Babel, is, you know, the lots of foreigners all trying to make themselves heard in different languages, because it was a very cosmopolitan city. And the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible comes with the mass of people all talking and not understanding each other, needing a single voice. I think that's a part of it. But I think they also wanted to make fun of it. And there is actually a Hittite and Hurrian text that rather laughs at the Mesopotamians for building mud brick temples that fell down all the time. And they had very important rituals in Mesopotamia for what you did when you repaired a temple.

Because as we all know, when you have to repair your house, there's a lot of noise and dust. And the god might not like that very much. so you've got to keep him on side, him or her, got to keep them on side while you're doing the work and this requires a lot of pacifying rituals and I think that's one of the reasons for the wealth of texts that we have about how to keep the gods on side. All of the literature will make it clear that if the god is displeased with you, you lose out. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions

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is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. If we move a bit further on in time with the story of Babylon and Stephanie, potential links to the Tower of Babel there, as you say, it's very hard to talk about anything like that with certainty. As we get to the end of the second millennium BC and the beginning of the first millennium BC, how prominent a city has Babylon become?

You mentioned those connections, very cosmopolitan places. Can we imagine Babylon at the start, at the Iron Age at that time, with far-flung connections, great trade routes, a very colourful city full of monumental architecture and lovely art? Well, Babylon was thought for a long time to have had a real downer in its fortunes in the middle of the second millennium. and we've just had some new discoveries which show that that was probably not true and it's because we suddenly get a lack of cuneiform tablets and no foundation inscriptions and the reason for that almost certainly is that they have gone over to organic material for writing.

That is something that happens much later as well when Aramaic takes over and more or less replaces the clay tablets, which of course are inorganic. So we think that must be part of what happened, but in any case, we found the places still flourishing in the Amarna period, the time of Tutankhamun and so on. Babylon is one of the top dogs still in the whole world. And it's quite clear that people send him the richest presents, and he gives out the richest presents. And that wouldn't have happened if Babylon had been really down in the dumps for several centuries, which we are now being able to correct. And that's one of the good reasons for writing my book, because I wanted to show how that

was the case. But in the middle of the second millennium, you do have the Kassite dynasty coming in, which lasts for a very long time. And they're not even Semites. They're not Arameans. They're not Amorites. They're not Sumerians. They are from we don't know where. And Stephanie, so what exactly, forgive my ignorance, but what exactly are Amorites? Well, the idea is that intermittently, the Arabian Peninsula has dried out. And that has meant that the population that couldn't no longer be sustained had to move. And each time they came out, they spoke a slightly different Semitic language, which of course had changed as languages do. So the Amorites were one lot who happened to move out

late in the third millennium and during the second, early second. They assimilated very quickly. at an early second. They assimilated very quickly. The Amorites often took Babylonian names when they were in certain circles, and in other circles they'd go back to their Amorite name, which was a sort of translation of it. So if you think of a modern example of Mary and Marie, a modern example of Mary and Marie or Johannes and Jonathan. That's not quite right, but you can see what I mean, I think. But with the Kassites, they came from we don't know where. They spoke a language that we don't know what it was. They took to Babylonian, they worshipped Babylonian gods, they continued to build and rebuild Babylonian buildings, and they lasted for a very long time. was very useful to society as guards. They ran the forts. They were good horsemen. And, you know, people settle in cities and then they don't really want to work. They want to be going to the coffee house and they want to be going to the pub. And along come these other people who are desperate for work and take it. And their dynasty, the Kassite dynasty, it lasts for several centuries,

doesn't it? It certainly does. Late second millennium. And they're terrific. I mean, they take over the art. They make wonderful cylinder seals out of hard stones, very difficult to make. They're probably using the skills that were already in the country, but they're adopting them and making the most of them. And they're writing literature. They're writing medical texts

and astronomical texts. They're doing all the things that were happening before and they're doing it in Babylonian language. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I think sometimes the Joblogs, I know I do, when you think of Babylon, you think of big architectural wonders. You think of essentially the Hanging Garden, you think of the Ishtar Gate. But when we're talking about the Kassites and actually the art and architecture of Babylon at that time, this is several centuries before buildings

that I've just mentioned are constructed in Babylon, isn't it? So this is, I guess it once again shows that great longevity of Babylon as a city in ancient history. And I'm presuming that there was still beautiful art and architecture in the city at the time of the Kassites. We think there was, and we have some record of it from other cities during their time, which don't have the particular difficulties that Babylon had of the rising water table. that Babylon had of the rising water table.

So there's some wonderful Kassite temple at Uruk, for example, which is absolutely marvellous from an artistic point of view. And some of their cylinder seals are brilliant. But there's not all that much, again, that we can really point to in the way of art because so much has been destroyed, people, by time, by having architecture built on mud brick. We do see across the Eastern Mediterranean, as we get to the turn of the first millennium BC, the late Bronze Age collapse, the Mycenaeans and so on and so forth in the Near East.

Do you get any sense that in Babylon at that time, could there have been a potential downfall in there as well? Or does Babylon seem to escape this Late Bronze Age collapse that seems to see several other civilizations at that time? Well, the idea of that collapse is yielding to finding it didn't altogether collapse, is yielding to finding it didn't altogether collapse, especially along the Mediterranean. There's a lot of continuity. And it's partly because scholars are always wanting to draw a line under something. You know, chapter five ends with the end of something and chapter six is a beginning of something. But when it comes to Babylon, I think it's quite far away from the particular problems that they had, we think, with drought and possibly with the disease that

comes with a weakened population. There does seem to be a difference between the lands where you could irrigate your crops and the lands in Anatolia, for instance, where you were reliant on rainfall. And, you know, as we've seen here in recent summers, we're on the edge of losing our food supply. So we can't just dig canals everywhere, but they could in Mesopotamia. So I think you don't they could in Mesopotamia. So I think you don't want to join Mesopotamia or Lower Mesopotamia to that idea of a collapse. It may have happened in some

places, and even in the Hittite capital, they're finding a much more nuanced idea of how kingship ended there, what happens to the city when the king moves out, of course that's important. That has a huge effect on the city and its economy. Doesn't mean everybody moves away, certainly doesn't. So I think that's the way that I like to look at things. The problem is, in the bad times, you don't get so many records. The joys but also the frustrations of archaeology and ancient prehistory well no ancient history isn't it stephanie i mean okay a few big questions we're going to jump around a little bit just before we completely wrap up but there are

some big names and topics i'd like to at least talk about if we're talking about babylon let's go to the hanging gardens or hanginganging Garden of Babylon first of all. This is worthy of a podcast episode in its own right, but just give us a teaser at the moment, Stephanie. What do you think, your research, your incredible research on this wonder of the ancient world, what do you think is the fact and what is the fiction surrounding the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? First of all I would say that Caldwell, the excavator, the excellent excavator of Babylon, looked very hard to find them. Of course he wanted to find them. Every visitor must have said, have you found the Hanging Gardens yet? He said, well actually no we haven't. And he found a place that was within a palace

where there was a lot of baked brick used, which would withstand water. And there was some kind of a lifting device, something like a chain and bucket sort of thing. And he said, well, you know, maybe upstairs there was a hanging garden on top of the building. But I don't think he believed that himself from my reading of his report on it. I think he was so desperate to shut people up when they came that he took them there.

And of course, ever since then, there's been notice in Arabic and English saying, you know, this way is a hanging garden because people wanted it. And you look at that place and as he said, there's no room for it. And it wasn't in the palace according to the later descriptions of it. It was beside the palace.

So what's beside the palace here is not room for such a garden. So that was a number one, really. He couldn't find it. It should have been there if it was next to the palace. It's not there. And so if it's not there, where might it potentially actually have been? Where do you think? There was a great confusion later between Babylon and Nineveh, and that's the Assyrian capital in the time of the great Sennacherib. Sennacherib actually sacked or looted and caused it to close down because he took the statues of its gods away.

They were repaired and eventually they were given back by his successor. But he then, I think he renamed some of his city gates because Babylon means the gate of the gods or the gate of God. And we know from a couple of quite important things, including the book of Judas in the Bible, that Nineveh was called a Babylon. There was actually another Babylon in Egypt, which is well known, quite near Cairo. But you know, there's Oxford in America, there's Cambridge in America, there's London in Canada. Yes, good. So, you know, big names go from here to there. And I think that's one of the reasons for a confusion. And we certainly know from later literature that there was confusion between Nebuchadnezzar II and Sennacherib, because both of them had dealings with Jerusalem.

Sennacherib besieged it, the king gave in so he didn't have to do more than take a lot of wealth out of it. Nebuchadnezzar did actually sack Jerusalem but you know the two kings had some comparable dealings with Jerusalem so that was a reason for a confusion between them. But then also there was this very detailed description of the garden in some Greek authors that said that the water, it was a world wonder, you've got to think of it, you know, it's not just a piddly little roof garden, is it? It's got a lot of competition in the stakes of world wonders. It was watered with an Archimedean type screw to bring water up on an aqueduct to a higher level. And then, well, there's more detail about

it, but I found in Sennacherib's own inscription about his garden, set beside the palace, raised up beside the palace, and watered with this amazing new way of casting bronze and making a spiral out of it to raise the water. You can see occasionally here, especially in the sewage works, they're still using Archimedes screws to raise water. It's a very efficient way of raising water compared with a chadouf, for instance, a bucket in a pole on a thing at the top. It's a very good way of doing it. So there is evidence from that. And recently, I had a most interesting email from actually a Canadian of Turkish origin. And she went to a place in her homeland in Turkey and went on a visit to a

mine. It was a cave really, where they'd had, I think, a linseed press. And this was done with a screw, the press was, which is, you know, to be expected. And the older people called it a palm, a date palm. So I'm trying to find out more about this now, but there's certainly a screw pine, which is known from, I think, the Caribbean, a screw pine which is known from I think the Caribbean where you it's called a screw pine because of the way the pattern of fronds comes off it. So Sennacherib had to use a metaphor for something that he had invented or was using. There wasn't a word for it just as on your computer you might still have a mouse, but it's not a real mouse, it's a metaphorical mouse. So Sennacherib had the same idea, he would

have a word for it that came from his own environment. And this I think I have matched up very nicely on the whole with what the classical sources say and although we used to think that there was a terrible long gap between those late Greek writers we now know from finding the traditions of cuneiform writing and, for instance, a bit of Gilgamesh, medical texts, astronomical texts, they go right into the Parthian period. So there isn't the gap that we thought there used to be. A lot of the histories of Babylon will end with Cyrus or Alexander. They won't talk about the next several hundred years when it's still going strong. With all of this evidence and the fact they haven't found the garden in Babylon, do you think therefore that it's more credible that it was actually the hanging garden of Nineveh, of Sennacherib?

We certainly know that at Nineveh, Sennacherib built gardens. They're in the place that the authors said, beside a palace, not inside or on top of a palace. And it was as much a matter of architecture and water supply that made it a world wonder, because the water was brought in from a long way away on an aqueduct and then was lifted up to the top of the garden, which was built like an amphitheater. And it had a walkway at the top, which was roofed specially, it's very carefully described by Greek authors,

so that you could plant forest trees on top of the pillared walkway at the top of the garden. And that meant the king could come out of his French doors, maybe from his upstairs room, and walk along, and had forest trees growing above his head, and the water trickling up or flowing up with an Archimedean type screw alongside steps to water those trees on the top so that their roots couldn't get down to the water table. It is a fantastic thing. And that is certainly qualifies it to be a world wonder. And it's hard to think why the Greeks should have been so interested in

it if it was still just a sort of a hill with a few trees built on it. It was very much more than that. So what you can also show is that Nineveh was confused with Babylon or was named a Babylon in for for instance, in the book of Judas, but elsewhere as well, and that there was a lot of confusion between Nebuchadnezzar II, who had sacked Jerusalem, and Sennacherib, who had attacked Jerusalem, but King Hezekiah gave in of course, and his family was deported, but he was left on the throne. So it wasn't a sack of Babylon by Sennacherib, but the two incidents were sufficiently similar to get telescoped over time. And a confusion arose between those two kings.

Well, there you go. Thank you for explaining that with that teaser there, Stephanie. A couple of other figures I'd love to ask quickly about, very quickly, very quickly. Nebuchadnezzar, he always seems to be one of the great villains of the Bible alongside Herod and Judas and the like. Do you think he really was that big a villain, King Nebuchadnezzar II? Or is there a bit of very much emphasising of his evil in the Bible? I think there's a tremendous emphasis on his evil in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar actually, he was a soldier for much of the time when he was crown prince, and very successful as his father grew older. And when he took over, he had trouble with, I mean, he had sons, but they didn't seem to be very good ones.

I mean, he had sons, but they didn't seem to be very good ones. And it was a problem to sustain the dynasty. Same problem, really, as the Seleucids had after Alexander, I would say. It's probably very difficult to bring a boy up well if you're the most powerful and richest man in the world. So that may have something to do with it. So why they picked on Nebuchadnezzar, I think, is just because of Jerusalem in the Bible, because of sacking Jerusalem. We do have records from Nebuchadnezzar's palace saying how the royal family was treated when they got to Babylon, and they're given very good rations. They're not treated as almost dependents of the royal family and that was a tradition there. So you know he wasn't put in a

cage and people spat at him or anything like that. It wasn't that kind of situation and people are very amazed to find that. And we've got a new archive that has been found accidentally in Iraq, which is of people who are deported from Jerusalem and put in farms in the area of Babylon. And the great thing about that is they're dated documents. And when they were allowed to go back, they didn't. They'd settled. Their children had friends there.

They were at school there. They were being looked after. They were paying their taxes. And there was plenty to eat and drink. One last quick fire question from me. Alexander the Great conquered Babylon, defeated the Persian great King Darius III, 331-ish BC, dies eight years later, 323 BC. His reign and what happens after him, lots of turmoil. But what do we think,

what have the records shown about what the Babylonians thought of Alexander the Great? Well, first of all, Alexander got a seer to give him, as it were, a forecast for how to approach Babylon when he wanted to capture it. And he was told, well don't go this way, go that way, and he ignored it. And that was not a good thing. That was a foolish thing for a would-be king to do. Then when he decided to go further east, he didn't find out enough about the country he was going to. And he got really stuck on that south coast of Iran, which is ghastly mountain. I mean, there's nothing much there. You look at the map now, and there's very little human habitation to be had along there he'd made an arrangement with his naval force if you remember and they were going to meet up and they failed to

meet up and he lost a huge number of men this is the gedrosian desert business and that was lack of forward planning and a sy Syrian would have thought that was absolutely pathetic. They would never have done a thing like that, as far as we know. Then Alexander failed to produce a decent heir, or even a potentially decent heir, while he was there. He wasn't there for long. He may or may not have fully engaged with the rituals. I don't think that would have bothered him at all. And I think the Babylonians would have been pleased with it. But I think that enormous expenditure on, was it

his paramour's funeral? Hephaestus' funeral, that would have been really disapproved of. That's wasting money that could be used for something much better. And the New Year festival was the place to spend your money because that was where trading really went. You know, there's nothing like a good festival for people to come together

and sell each other things and make arrangements. There was nothing to be said for spending so much on that funeral. So I think they got a poor idea of him. I don't know if he was pressed to take a wife when he was there, but I don't think he wanted to. And he was a sufficiently independent was there but I don't think he wanted to and he was a sufficiently independent individualist to just say well no that's not my taste which you know it was up to him what his taste was but it was up to the country to produce one way or another some heirs. It's so interesting you know he marries two Persian wives royal wives like the daughter of Darius and daughter of Artaxerxes III, but neither of whom have strong links to Babylon that I know of. I might be completely wrong on that.

But as you say, no clear heir. And it's really interesting just for me to ask about that personally, because when you look at what happens next in the turmoil with the successor wars, you have the accounts of Greco-Roman historians. And you almost think that it's all just to do with the successor wars. You have the accounts of Greco-Roman historians, and you almost think that it's all just to do with the Macedonians. You don't really hear what the Babylonians think of all these armies marching to and fro. You're controlled for a minute by Archon, a general, then it's been taken over by another called Docinus, then it comes under the control of Seleucus.

Terrible mess. What do you think the Babylonians are just seeing this and they're having to witness all of this and you don't really hear what they think of all of it. No, but they believed in continuity in rule because that's when you lose order. That's when disorder comes and that's when you haven't got enough people for making the food.

You know, the farming's got to go on. The control, the taxes have got to be taken. And it falls apart after Alexander. It's a terrible mess. You've got to have heirs. And the heirs are going to have good advisors. I mean, we always say that with our own people. They've got to have good advisors. And if they don't, you know, they end up exhausted, drunk, whatever, making the wrong decisions. They need a firm person there to say, look, we need to talk about this. I mean, last, certainly not least, you have written a new book explaining all the details about Babylon's incredible ancient history. And this book is called? The City of Babylon.

The history from about 2000 BC to AD 116, which is when the Emperor Trajan went there. Finish with the Romans. Finish with Trajan. There you go. Yes. Well, there you go there was dr stephanie daly giving you a master class in babylon in ancient babylon covering figures from hamurabi to nebuchadnezzar to alexander the great and structures from the temple of belmadoc to the hanging gardens i'm so happy we've now released

that episode because it was such great fun to record and Stephanie was such a delight to interview. Now last things from me, you know what I'm going to say. If you would like to help us out as we continue our mission, our limitless mission to share these incredible stories from ancient history with you, you can just leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts spotify wherever you get your podcast from and you get our eternal gratitude our eternal thanks because it really does help us out as we continue sharing these incredible stories with as many people as possible and also giving these experts people like stephanie the spotlight that they deserve for having dedicated so many years of their lives to researching these fields,

these enigmatic fields from our distant past, and now sharing that information with you. Long may it continue on the ancients. Long live the ancients, I hear you say. And I also echo that statement, that sentiment too. That's enough rambling on from me. And I'll see you in the next episode.