The Ancients - How to Survive in Babylonia

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Would you be able to survive in ancient Babylonia?In this episode, Tristan is joined once again by Amanda Podany from California State Polytechnic University to discuss the realities of daily life in this fascinating empire. Together, they discuss everything from clay tablet literature and ancient board games to crime, slavery and female entrepreneurship in the era of King Hammurabi c. 1750 BC.Produced by Joseph Knight. Edited by Aidan Lonergan.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

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 episode we're heading back to ancient Mesopotamia, to the Kingdom of Babylon. We've talked about kings, heroes and major architectural achievements of this kingdom in the past, but we haven't really explored everyday life for people who lived in this area of the world more than 3,000 years ago. Well fortunately, pretty amazingly

when you think about it, a lot of information has survived about everyday life in Babylonia from almost 4,000 years ago. Who were these people who dwelled between the river Tigris and the river Euphrates, not just in the city of Babylon, and actually less so in the city of Babylon itself at that time, but in surrounding important places like Nippur and Sippar? This was a time when Hammurabi, one of the ancient Middle East's most famous kings, ruled over this area of the world. To explain all about this, how to survive in Hammurabi's Babylonia, well we've got the brilliant Professor Amanda Podani returning to the show. Amanda is such an uplifting person. Her speaking is captivating. You can't help but just be engrossed

by what she's talking about because she is so passionate about it. And I can happily say that this was one of my favourite interviews of 2024 so far. And that is saying something I really do hope you enjoy. And without further ado, here's Amanda. Amanda, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It's such a pleasure to be here. Our last episode on Hammurabi just over a year ago now, that was so much fun.

And we're back talking about ancient Babylonia, how to survive daily life, because I find this extraordinary. Archaeology has revealed a lot about daily life for people who lived in this area of the world some 4,000 years ago. It's right. And it's not just archaeology, but also it's a time when people were keeping a lot of documents in their houses. So when you excavate a house, you often find the people's records in the house. And so you can put a name to the person who lived there. You can reconstruct what their occupation was often. And so there's so much. It's a wonderful era when the texts and the archaeology both build on one another, so we can use both. It's really fantastic. And you can reconstruct the lives of everyday people who otherwise would be completely lost to history. This isn't just a time of kings,

mythical and real warlords and the elites this is everyday people too that is the most awesome part yeah it's pretty amazing and it's also i mean some of the people who owned houses that had records in them were obviously not the poor but we also have evidence for people who were not literate who would have been you know workers in fields and so forth because of the number of records that survive from administration and that survive. The laws of Hammurabi, for example, include a lot of professions that wouldn't necessarily otherwise be known to us. So there's a lot. Yes, we know a lot. We're going to dive into all of that. But first things first, no such thing as a silly question.

We've mentioned the area of Babylonia, but where is Babylonia? Babylonia is in what is now Iraq. It's close to where the Tigris and Euphrates flow closest together, sort of in central Iraq. And Babylonia was a kingdom in the time of the most famous king is Hammurabi, obviously. Hammurabi ruled from 1792 to 1750 BCE. So that's the sort of period we know very well for this era. And his kingdom extended for a short period of time all the way from the Gulf to what is now the border of Syria. But over time, it shrank. But still, we have that central area of Iraq that we have very good documentation of. And why in this period, I got my notes was that the old Babylonian period,

of. And why in this period, I got my notes was that the old Babylonian period. Why is it during this period that we have so many writing texts survive, that writing seems to become so widespread in the many different cities of this kingdom? I think there's a number of reasons. One very important reason is that there was a lot of centralization of control of the economy. In the previous period, what's called the Third Dynasty of Ur, there seems to have been a monopoly in a way on literacy by the state and by the temples. Those were the places that really needed scribes. With the old Babylonian period, you get much more entrepreneurial spirit developing. Not everything is being controlled by the state and the temples. And so you get private individuals who are merchants,

who are craftsmen doing really their business for themselves, and therefore they need to keep their own records. And so there seems to have been a growth in literacy, not an excessive growth in literacy, you know, it's not as though everybody can read and write. But people who needed to keep records do seem to have had at least some sort of ability to read the documents, even if they couldn't necessarily write documents themselves. So that also means that people had an inclination to keep documents in their houses. Another reason is that there was much more buying and selling of land going on. You could buy a house, you could buy an orchard. If you do so, you want to keep a record of that in your house so that you

can prove that you own that. People were hiring labourers and so the labourers would be, there'd be a contract maybe for the hire of a labourer for a year, you'd keep that in your house. So it just seems as though because there's more, as I said, this sort of entrepreneurial spirit going on, there's more need for more people to have records of their activities. And what exactly is this writing system and And why do we have so many tablets? I've given the game away there, tablets surviving. You have given the game away. Because they wrote on clay, which was an obvious medium for them. There's a lot of clay in Mesopotamia. They'd been writing on clay for, by this time, 1500 years500 years. Started writing in 3,200, so by 1,700. It was a very,

very established writing system. It's called cuneiform writing. It's wedge-shaped. And each sign in the cuneiform system stands for either a syllable or a whole word, or both. It can vary. And that means that there are hundreds of symbols rather than in an alphabet where you might have 26. So it was harder to be literate. It was not something where you could learn to read and write fairly easily. It was a long process of going to school to learn enough of these cuneiform signs that you could write what you wanted to write. It's a complex system in that a single sign often had different values depending on where it appears in a sentence. It was an investment of time to learn to be literate,

yes. I love that you mentioned the word schools there. We'll certainly be coming back to that. And I guess also, tablets, writing, such an important source for learning more about how to survive in daily life at this time. But of course, there is more archaeology than just that. We're going to explore all of that. But I've also got to ask, we've mentioned the kingdom of Babylonia, I've also got to ask, we've mentioned the kingdom of Babylonia, but why is it not really possible for us to talk about archaeology from the city of Babylon itself at this time? Yes, unfortunately, the city of Babylon, it's been excavated at the levels of the first millennium BC, the time of Nebuchadnezzar II and so forth. That's well known. So people will think of the Ishtar Gate and finds from Babylon. So Babylon has been excavated. But when they began to excavate lower levels in Babylon, they discovered that the water table had risen. And therefore, the levels that would

be from Hammurabi's time, from this old Babylonian period, are inaccessible because they're below the water table. So although we don't have Babylon for this period, we have a lot of excavations at other sites like Nippur and Sippar that are well known, and they tell us what it was like to live in Hammurabi's Babylonia, but not necessarily in the actual city of Babylon. So what are the cities of Sippar and Nippur? Where do they kind of stand in the whole kingdom? They are close by. I mean, these are cities that were controlled by Babylon. Sippar is to the north, Nippur is to the south.

Very far to the south, we have the city of Ur, which was also within his kingdom. And these are sites that have been excavated extensively. And they were controlled by Babylon after Hammurabi had gone on his expeditions of conquest quite late in his reign. Sippar had been subject to Babylon for a very long time, but an area like Ur had been brought in quite late compared to that. But these were cities that share a lot in common. They use the same language, they use the same building style. So we can extrapolate from what we know from these other sites to know what it would have been like to live in the city of Babylon. Fantastic. That's the answer I wanted. So let's say we go back 4,000 years and have just landed outside of,

well, let's say Sippar at the time of Hammurabi. What would you see if you're outside of the city and you're walking towards the city itself? What would you be greeted by? There's a big city wall. These are cities that were walled. And one of the things that a lot of people spent their time doing was being called up for corvée labor it's almost like a military draft only it's for labor service to do things like restoring the city wall so the city wall at sipper we have records of the need for it to be sometimes they would say rebuilt but certainly it needed to be maintained and so there was a lot the wall you see when you're walking up to the wall of siippar represents that kind of labor. You may not see it actually being worked on at the moment

you're walking up, but certainly in recent history in Hammurabi's reign, we know there was a lot of work being done on the wall of Sippar. So you walk up, there are city gates, there's a number of city gates, and you would enter through one of the main city gates. And as you walk in, you enter this dense area of occupation where there are a lot of houses built next to one another. It's not a planned city. So it's not as though you have nice straight streets on a grid pattern. It's a city like all of the cities in this region that grew up organically. So there was a citadel initially,

and then people settled around the place where the palace or the temple was located. And as they lived there over a long period of time, the ground level rose because all of that mud brick building, they didn't, you know, if you're going to rebuild a house, you don't take all the bricks out, you know, and get back to the original level, you just knock the wall down, you kind of flatten it and then build on top. So all of these cities were on top of occupation mounds. So that's another thing that would strike you as you're entering the city is that you have to go up to get to the city gate. You have to go up this, this tell is the ancient name for an occupation mound. And the entire occupation mound is made up of previous levels of human occupation. It's a completely artificial hill

on which the city is located. So you get inside it and you're going inside the city wall. And as I say, lots of noise, lots of densely packed houses, small roads that go off in all kinds of directions, no street signs. Obviously, it's a bit labyrinthine when you get into a city like that. You mentioned the word mud brick there in passing. What do we know about what these houses, residential houses, it looks like in that period? Almost every single house would have had a courtyard.

So they don't have a front garden or anything like that. The walls are right up against the street. You go through a door in what looks like a blank wall. You know, as you're walking along, there aren't windows onto the street because they didn't have glass. So they would have been these blank walls with doors in them. You go in the door, chances are you actually step down a few steps into the house because the

house tends to be on a lower level than the street. And inside, there are rooms around a courtyard. And so each one of these houses, it tends to be constructed around a central courtyard, which is where they get the light, which is where they get the air, rather than having a sort of garden in the front or the back. It's the courtyard is the open area in the house. And something quite interesting that I remember going to Pompeii more than a year and a half ago, but when you walk down those streets, you see like a big villa and right next to it is a very small one room house for someone who was much poorer. Now, was there a division of elite houses from poorer houses at

that time, some 4,000 years ago, or was it all kind of meshed together? No, it was all meshed together. Like Pompeii, you don't have much in the way of an area of sort of elite households. But that said, one interesting thing about Sipar is that there was an area of it that was called the Gagum. And one part of this area seems to have been excavated. And there is an area there of very small houses that are right next to one another along the street. And they're fascinating. They excavated in the 1980s. And they almost look like the size of single rooms just next to one another. They do have a little back room as well. So in that case, you do see a little neighborhood that seems to be slightly different

from the mix of big houses, small houses. And we can come back to the women who lived there, but that particular area of Sipar is unique. There's not much like it in other cities that have been found. I should say though, Tristan, that archaeologists have largely in the past focused on palaces and temples. So there aren't that many cities where a big area of private houses have been excavated. Sipar is one, Ur is another, but in a lot of Nippur to some extent, there's areas where we do have a sense of what the community looked like. But in many ancient cities, because especially earlier in the 20th century, the excavation really wanted to get at the big monumental structures, the amount we know about domestic architecture is fairly limited.

So it could be that there were cities that had these little sort of cell-like houses other than Sipar, and we just don't know. these little sort of cell-like houses other than Sipar. And we just don't know. Well, let's say, looking for somewhere to stay that night, you've got a friend who lives in Sipar some 4,000 years ago. You find their house. And just to learn a bit more about families at that time, would a whole family live in one of these houses? I mean, was it basically the family piece of property? Yes, definitely. And people didn't sell their houses very often because the family had such a strong tie to the house that was the family house, including that the ancestors are buried under the floor. It's not something that you really want to move away from.

If you've got your ancestors, you know, there's a crypt under the floor. That's where there's such a tie of the family to that house. But they did sometimes. So supposing you have a big house and the father dies and the house has to be divided up between two sons, say. They often would just put a wall down the middle of it. So rather than the two sons living in sort of the sharing it with their wives and children, they'd just build a wall, make two smaller houses, and they would continue to live in

that space. And then perhaps there would be an intermarriage and they would knock down the wall and then it would be one house again. But they were quite pragmatic about it. There's often this image that they would have lived in big extended households with grandparents and aunts and uncles and lots of siblings, adult siblings living together. But that doesn't seem to really be the case, at least certainly in the first millennium where there's a little bit more evidence. But you see, the nuclear household is really quite a thing. The husband, wife, and children do tend to have lived in a house together.

And if the man's father was still alive, he would still be the head of the household. It would still be his house. The grandfather would own the house. But life expectancy being as short as it was, there weren't many grandparents around. tended to be you know if you were living in a house it would be husband wife children but it's so interesting amount isn't it that kind of that idea of inheritance back then in that say if you're the only son and you live to adulthood and then you'd inherit the house but if times got rough for you and perhaps you know the idea of selling the house could be there but it sounds like a lot of the time that option wasn't there because this was so important to your family even

if you might have to you really wouldn't want to sell your house yes exactly and also you can do studies of neighbors i did this actually with a study of a city upstream from hamrabi's empire just a bit beyond it a a city called Terka. But looking at the documents from there, if you look at who's living in the houses, they're relatives, they're cousins, and you've got a little block of houses. And there tends to be these close ties between families going back generations. And so these generations of families who've lived near one another, probably interrelated by marriage in some cases, in which case we don't see it because they don't necessarily mention the women. But you can see brothers living next door to one another. When a house is sold, it's sold by brothers. So clearly there's a family decision that this little house has to be sold because for whatever reason they don't need it or they do need the money. they don't need it or they do need the money. But there's these strong, strong sibling ties,

even though they're not necessarily living in the same house, they tend to live very close to one another in the same neighbourhood. So interesting. Well, let's say that a family, they had five children. And so they can't split the building five ways. They can't put five dividing walls down there. And one of them has to go out and find somewhere new to live, but they can't afford to buy a house outright or to build one from scratch. Was there the possibility to rent a property back then? What do we know about that? Oh, yes. No, absolutely. People did rent. Yes. They would rent, especially fields. We have lots of records of fields being rented, but there's lots of rentals. Houses sometimes, yes. They would rent animals sometimes. You know, if you needed an ox for your plow, you would rent the ox for a year. And when you talk

about these clay tablets, one thing I forgot to mention when you asked, of course, clay survives incredibly well in the ground. And so what we find when we look in these houses is sometimes things that obviously they never intended for us to know. You know, it's just written at the time. But somebody, yeah, a record of, you know, I've rented this. It's just written at the time. But somebody, yeah, a record of, I've rented this ox for such and such amount of time, and we'll return it on such and such a date, and there's the cost of it. But they were very, very concerned with making sure that there were contracts for things. Which is another lovely thing about the Mesopotamians, is that because they tended to be a little bit litigious, they liked to go to court, they would, if you didn't get their dogs back on time, you'd get your court date. But that meant that you wanted the contract listing exactly the terms. Have you paid the

right amount? When is it due? All that kind of stuff. So we do know about these kinds of rentals, yes. Going back to your question about the five children, a couple of things. One is, supposing you've had five children. unfortunately, in the pre-modern age, most of them didn't live to adulthood. That was a given, really. And that is not just Mesopotamia all the way up to almost the 20th century. That amount of infant mortality was enormous and child mortality. So, if you've got these five children, perhaps three of them have lived to adulthood, at least one and a half of them is a girl, right? I mean, you know, the odds are four children lived to adulthood, two of them are women. They wouldn't be inheriting in the same way.

They wouldn't inherit the family house. The women would be given a dowry when they got married, which might include fields, it might include sheep, it might include furniture, but it rarely included... If it did include the house, it wasn't the family house because it was the boys who inherited the family house. So you don't get many instances where you have sort of five adult boys all saying, this is my house, you know, and the eldest son always got the preference in terms of the largest amount of the inheritance. But that said, there were men who did move to different cities. You know, they didn't necessarily always stay in the family house, especially if they were merchants. You know, they might move away to practice trading

in other cities. Even though obviously there was a desire to stay close to home, we know because letters passed between siblings who'd moved to different places that people did move away. Yeah. That's amazing that those letters survive. And because in those houses, am I correct in thinking that there were sometimes archives of texts, of letters written between people that have survived, which is amazing. So that's daily correspondence between family members more than 4,000 years ago. Yes. And the letters are wonderful. There's Old Babylonian letters, there's just enormous numbers of them. There's a whole series of publications of Old Babylonian letters in translation. A lot of them translated into German or French, but, you know, English, some of them. And they are fabulous. I mean, they're so interesting,

partly because the Mesopotamians, when they wanted to write a letter, because you had to hire a scribe usually, if you were going to write a letter, you only did it if you had a really good reason to. And so there's a sense that these people were constantly annoyed, you know, because sort of their letters are very often, why haven't you written to me? Why haven't you sent me the, you know, sheep that you said you were going to send? I need you here for harvest time. Get here right away. You know, there's this sort of urgency to the letters very often.

I think probably the urgency is because they've gotten to the point of, I'm going to have to hire a scribe to get my brother to do this thing or my sister. So I'm going to really make it sound like I need this now. There's a lot of that. But it tells us so much about how they interacted and what they expected of one another. I mean, it really does. I'm going on a bit of a tangent here. But I mean, what's surviving in Babylonia at that time?

How important, I mean, just how important was the harvest? Oh, huge. Absolutely huge. Almost everybody had some tie to the land. Even if you were a high official, you were often paid, as it were, in being given the right to a certain amount of fields, which you then obviously didn't farm yourself because you didn't have time, you're a high official, but you would hire tenant farmers to farm it for you. And that's your source of income. And so rather than getting paid,

you know, a check the way we would today, you've got this land that is yours to use. But you obviously have to be involved in the sowing and the harvesting and making sure that everything's happening correctly. And we see so much preoccupation with this in the laws, for example, in the legal contracts. So much of it is about the fields that would have surrounded the city where you lived. And those fields were in irrigation districts that were defined. They knew exactly the borders of their fields. They knew how big their fields were. They were very concerned about the canals that went along the sides of the fields and maintaining those. This is how everybody had to survive, was the produce of their fields. And so, yes, it's huge.

how everybody had to survive was the produce of their fields. And so, yes, it's huge. And what was the main types of produce that was produced in these fields in this agricultural landscape? Very largely barley in this area around Babylon and certainly south of Babylon as well. Wheat as well, but barley was apparently hardier as a crop and it's also more salt resistant. And as the soil became saltier with irrigation practices, the barley would thrive. And they used barley to make three major sort of dietary products. One is obviously bread, the other is beer, and the other is porridge. And so, you know, bread was the staff of life. I mean, it was what everybody ate in vast quantities, enormous amounts of bread, drank a lot of beer. And so the

fields were mostly producing that. They would have gardens as well. And a family would have a garden either if they had a large property, perhaps even a garden inside the city wall, but a garden outside the city wall was very common. And there they would grow vegetables for the family. And they would sometimes have an orchard of date palms, which was the main tree that grows and produces fruit in that area. And so they would be providing for themselves in terms of bread, vegetables, dates. didn't eat, I mean, they would own sheep and goats, but they didn't tend to eat them. Because, you know, you kill a sheep and you eat it, and then it's not going to give you any more of what you might want from it. So wool, milk, things like that, were no longer available. So most people, the average person probably ate a lot of fish from the rivers, and probably ate waterfowl, you know, birds. But it was more likely for the king to be eating

lamb and beef, as we would see it, not for the average person. So if you're walking into a place like Nippa or Sippar, and you were looking to get some food, would it be bread? Would that kind of be the mainstay thing that you would be looking for? And where could you acquire food if you're walking through the streets of one of these cities? Yeah, there's been some interesting research about marketplaces because for a long time there was this theory that there were no marketplaces in Mesopotamian cities. But recently they've found evidence, especially in cities in the north which have been more excavated in, you know, wider areas have been excavated of the residential areas, and they do find these big squares, big marketplaces that seem to have been excavated of the residential areas. And they do find these big squares, big marketplaces

that seem to have been places where people would have sold food, they would have sold tools, jewelry. I mean, in a way, if you think about a farmer's market today, it's got a similar feel to it. Lots of food, but also someone selling, you know, crafts that they had made themselves. And these large spaces also seem to have been used

for public gatherings. So it was not a permanent shop necessarily. You know, you don't sort of walk into the village shop. You have a place that's set up maybe with tents during the day, but later those could be moved aside. There may have been gatherings of the population. The term for it was mahirum. That was the Akkadian term for this area.

And the mahirum was clearly the place. If you arrived in Sippar, need to get some bread, need to get some vegetables, that would be the place to go. But if you're a traveler and you're just going through Sippar, there were inns where you could stay. And in the inn, you could get food. So you wouldn't necessarily be buying the food on the street and sort of trying to figure out how do I cook this or something. You could go to an inn and you could stay there, especially if you were on a long journey. These inns were situated at approximately 15 mile intervals so that someone travelling by day could reach an inn at night and would be able to sleep for the night there.

I must admit, I remember doing a chat with Ben Kane about a similar kind of topic, I must admit, I remember doing a chat with Ben Kane about a similar kind of topic, but in ancient Rome. And he stressed time and time again, if you were going through Rome 2,000 years ago, the absolute necessity of getting off the streets by nightfall, because that was the time of cutthroats, of pickpockets, of thieves and so on. We might not have the available evidence, but do we know of anything similar in a place like Sipar, of a need to get to an inn to get off the streets by night time? I don't think so within the city, really. Certainly when you're in the countryside and you're traveling, I think there was much more fear of bandits, sort of highwaymen in the rural areas

because people were more vulnerable there. But within the city, there's a surprising lack of evidence of nighttime violence or even just people hitting each other over the head because they got angry with one another. One would expect to find more of that in the laws and one would expect to find more of it in the legal cases. And it's not really there. There was even a study which was from an earlier period, but they looked at the skeletons of Mesopotamians and especially the skulls. And they found that there is remarkably little skull bashing in that seems to have happened. You know, because if there was a lot of street violence,

you would expect to find bodies buried with injuries that had killed them. And there really isn't much. So surprisingly, given how many thousands of people are living in a really compact area, very close to each other, there doesn't seem to have been much crime in that way. Well, come on then, let's keep moving on. Let's talk about toilets and sanitation. I know, very, very different, but we've got to. Because you just mentioned how all the houses are, of course, very crammed together, very close by in these small streets and a lot of people

in cities like Sipar. Were there easily accessible toilets for most of the population? accessible toilets for most of the population? No. If you had a nice big private house, you had a pit in it that was lined with clay drain pipes, big clay drain pipes. And on the top of it, they found in some of the houses, a little built toilet, you know, a little brick construction with slats on the top that you could sit on and do your business. And it was deep enough. I mean, these were really deep, like 10 meters deep, so that they would last a long time before you had to think, oh, we need to do something about this. And they were often in a bathroom, you know, in a tiled room that was separate from the rest of the house. Some houses in Ur had as many as four of these. I mean, a really big house might have like four toilets. But if the smaller houses, no. And so the interesting question is, well,

what did they do? They don't seem to be public toilets. It doesn't seem as though in the middle of the marketplace, you know, you have a place to relieve yourself. In people's houses, they almost certainly had chamber pots. I mean, they must have, obviously, they didn't run out of the city. And no, that wouldn't work. So they had a chamber pot, and they must have been somewhere where you dumped your refuse. It's unclear where, so we don't know. But interestingly, if you think about, well, what is a chamber pot look like? And one fascinating speculation is some of these pots that we find on excavation must be chamber pots. How would we tell a cooking pot from a chamber pot? Don't know. So it could be that

you're in museums, you have something that is for cooking right next to something that is literally the term in in sumerian means piss pot you know they talk about them and that this must be something that we are just not recognizing as for its actual purpose it's still so interesting you know but it kind of leads me on to talk about like flowing water and i say we don't know where they would have done their refuse once again talking to Ben Kane, he suggests that sometimes they would have just thrown it out into the streets, which may well could have been possible, quite a smelly place, you can imagine it. Were there sewers? Was there flowing water at places not only where you could wash, but also get water if needed for drink?

Yes, there was. There's one palace in the site of Mari, again, just at the edge of Hammurabi's empire, that has in the palace, the toilets there are fabulous. I mean, they have a channel underneath the toilet where clearly water was flushing. It was like very, very ancient flushing toilet from 3,700 years ago. That wouldn't have been common. But in the main streets, they did have drains, obviously, because it didn't rain often. But when it did, they wanted to get rid of the water. And it could be that that's where the sewage went as well. And there are some indications.

I mean, one thing they did with these giant sort of drain toilets was they had perforations in the pots so that it would leak out into the ground underneath. Rain is an interesting question because there's not a lot of it. It doesn't rain very much at all in this part of Iraq. And so for the most part, if you did throw your waste into the street, they've done studies that it's so hot, it would have been neutralized very fast. I mean, it just dries out. It doesn't become the kind of health risk that you would expect through most of the year in Iraq. So I don't know if they, I mean, we don't have evidence that they just threw it into the street, but if they did, it wouldn't

necessarily have been as smelly and disease ridden as one would imagine just because of the heat. Very interesting. Well, moving on from that, I must admit to other uses of water, because you did actually also mention earlier how barley you know main food source for people at the time and bread but also beer if you were going through one of these places let's say you're in the inn for the night you're getting some food now the drink of choice for you would water be available or was beer very much the main drink beer is very much the main drink really water is a bit dangerous yeah i mean water if you get it from the river is going to be poisonous you know because a lot of that refuse is going into the river eventually. They're doing the

washing in the rivers, you know, the rivers, especially near a city and the canals near a city would have been pretty dangerous to drink. So beer was great because the process of fermentation takes away the germs. So you can be sure that you're not going to get sick from drinking beer. And the beer that they drank seems to have been much less alcoholic than ours, at least most of it. It was nutritious. It had all sorts of protein and calories in it. But although they do talk about drunkenness,

and certainly drunkenness happened, and there were beers that were strong, the beer that they gave to children, because, yeah, children drank beer too, was not markedly clearly alcoholic because they weren't all just staggering around all the time. They talk about drunkenness as a problem when it happened. So they were aware that it could be a problem, but the average person drinking the beer that they would do on the daily basis, they didn't fall down drunk. Well, there you go. That is cool. If you're in a pickle, if you're in ancient Babylonia, drink the beer and not the water. Yes, absolutely. I'd like to move on to another type of

building, and this is about education. So let's say you have a family, you've got a young child in Sipar or Nippur or wherever. Could you send them to school to get an education? You could. You wouldn't do it if you were a farmer, if you were a craftsman, you know, if you were someone who didn't need literacy, it would be unlikely that you would send your child to school because it took that child out of the family's economy for years. You know, they saw children as a wonderful asset because they could help farm and they could help learn, you know, if you were a goldsmith, your son could start learning your trade. So the choice to send a son to school was really often the choice of someone whose family was traditionally literate. So a scribe would send his son to school. A merchant might send his son to

school because he needs to know how to keep records for trade. A priest, certainly, someone like a diviner. These are the kinds of professions where you would definitely need to have literacy and yes there were schools and the schools looked just like houses they were schools that were within the the community they a scribe's house often became a school when that scribe decided to take on students and you mentioned nippur and that nippur is the area where this is best known because on students. And you mentioned Nippur, and Nippur is the area where this is best known because of a very famous house at Nippur. When it was excavated, it was called House F by the excavators. And House F proved to be a scribal school. And we know that because there were hundreds and hundreds of school exercise tablets that were found there

by the little boys and were and older boys who were learning to read and write them. What do you mean by exercise tablets? So are you actually seeing the process of these little kids learning how to write? Oh yeah, it's wonderful. When they first start out, what we call kindergarten here, nursery in the UK, they are just learning to really take the stylus and make the wedges. Very, very simple, big wedges. You can see these little maybe five, six-year-olds, just like when children are learning to write, you know, very, very simple signs that they're making. And they gradually go to exercises that we call the tu-ta-ti exercises. And these are where they're taking the signs that are related to one another

by sound. So the sign ta, ta, do you make a ta sign? And then you make a tu sign and then you make a ti sign. So even though the signs look completely different, they're grouping them phonetically. And so, you know, you might do ba, bu, bi, or, you know, the related sound signs. And then they're just practicing that for probably months, just getting these signs right.

And gradually, then they move on to writing things like personal names and nouns. And so there's this whole process that you can see on these play tablets that give you this insight into the way in which they thought of education, you know, how they constructed education. And a lot of it was just rote learning, you know, how they constructed education. And a lot of it was just rote learning, just making, learning how to write nouns, learning how to write names, copying proverbs, things like that. As they got older, does the teaching become more complex? Does it always go to like a higher education as they progress more and more? Yes, absolutely. And so that there's a sort of elementary education where a lot of scribes seem

to have stopped. They had learned to read and write. They could do mathematics. They had a whole mathematics curriculum where they would learn things like multiplication tables, reciprocals, square roots, and they would do word problems. So, you know, if you have this wall and you have so many, how many bricks do you need to build this wall? Very, very practical, right? And it's a field with these sides, how big is the field? That they would have learned because scribes who were going to be doing work in the community would need to know that. They would need to, you know, if they're going out to survey a field, they need to know how big that field is after they've measured the sides. But you could continue beyond that to a sort of very formal education that was in literature and studying the works of

past kings, really studying ancient Sumerian, which by this time was a dead language. So they would go deeply into learning ancient Sumerian. And that was much less practical in a way. It was almost a graduate school education or something. It was something where you go beyond what you need for daily life as a scribe into kind of a community of scholars. And these scholars do seem to have communicated with one another. They had libraries. And a scholar like that might be someone who would take on students and, again, sort of continue this cycle of scholarship. That's amazing that you have those sources and a place like Nipa without building, surviving, where you can learn so much about that. Yeah. There's one scribe I particularly mentioned in my most recent book, which was a scribe named Elatum. And Elatum actually signed

one of his exercises. So we have his name, which is delightful. We can imagine little Elatum going to school and continuing through his scribal education. I wish there was a marker there, says like seven out of 10 or something like that as well but we can't you know that would be wouldn't it well if you've completed school what sorts of jobs would have been available you've always mentioned how those who didn't go to school they could become apprentices craftsmen or you know in their family but for those who had more of an education what sorts of jobs opened up for you well a lot of the jobs in the administration of the king in the court would have required literacy. And that would include not just the people who

were like the scribes writing down the king's letters or reading his correspondence from other places. That would be a very high up scribe, but also the scribes who are just keeping track of all of these details of the administration. So you would have scribes recording the taxes that come in. You would have scribes recording the workers who are working on a particular building project, the rations that are being paid to daily workers. They would be recording the fields that have been given out to civil servants and to the military.

The military were paid in a way that's called ilcum, which is like they're given a field for their use. So that would have been recorded. So anyone who's going to be doing that kind of recording is going to have to have had a scribal education, obviously. Merchants are going to be keeping track of what they're buying and selling. They're going to be keeping track. Also, merchants often made loans to people because they tended to have wealth on hand. So if they were making a loan, they would want to keep track of who they'd lent money to. And if you make

a loan, any sort of contract would include a list of witnesses, because witnesses to a contract were absolutely essential. It wasn't really considered an actual contract unless there were witnesses listed. And so they would be, you know, writing down the names of all the witnesses on that contract. And merchants would also be writing home often, so they'd be sending letters back home. And it was more convenient for them to be able to write themselves rather than to have to hire a scribe every time. So merchants, yes. Also, the higher-ups in the temple would need to be literate. And then there would be scribes who simply worked in a community, who didn't necessarily work for the king, but who were available if, you know, someone down the street wants to write a letter, they call their local scribe. Would you write

this letter for me? They want to buy a house. They call on that local scribe. Would you record this? And the scribe would have been paid for those actions that they did for their community. So you could be a sort of freelance scribe, as well as you could be a scribe working for the great institutions. And if you gain a good reputation, then you can get a lot of money in there if you're one of the best scribes, isn't it? That's really very, very cool. You did mention in the education how only boys would go to school. Well, that's actually, it's true of House F. There's no evidence of girls in House F. However, there were definitely girls who were literate. And the women who we know to be literate, for example, there are female scribes who are listed as having written contracts.

There are cases of, for example, women physicians. There are a number of women in positions that one would normally think of as being male-dominated, and perhaps a woman who had a school for girl scribes, is known from the city of Sippar, which we were talking about before. And her name is Hunta Adad. And her house was excavated. And in it was found, it's clearly a woman who lived there. She was a type of a priestess called a Kadishtum, was her title. But she had a scribal school because we find those exercise tablets and the work that had been done. And she seems to have taken girls as her students. And the reason is probably because in Sipar, there is this community of really powerful women called Naditum. And a Naditum was someone who was a businesswoman. Often she owned land.

She was often in a position of lending money. And so the naditum seemed to have had a need for literacy that was perhaps more than the average woman. And in their community, there were female scribes. So it shows, although I'm guessing it was still probably a patriarchal society with all these kings, as a woman, you could economically be very successful, at least in a place like Sippar with this extraordinary group of people who seem to be quite unique to Sippar. Or do we hear of them elsewhere too? We have them elsewhere. The Naditums were known in a number of cities in Old Babylonian

Mesopotamia. But in Sippar, we know about them particularly well because of the thousands of documents from their institution that had been found. And the term naditum used to be translated as nun with the assumption that they were cloistered women, religious women who had devoted their lives to the god. And in this case, it's the sun god to the god Shamash. But the more that we've looked into these naditums, the less like nuns they seem. First off, they're not cloistered, they were living in the community. Second, although yes, they were devoted to the sun god, and that was an important part of their role, they did spend a considerable amount of their time in praying to the sun god for the health of their families and so forth, they were businesswomen. They were given big dowries by their fathers. These were women who were sent to the gagum, which was their institution. They were sent to Sippar to be members of this gagum,

as Neditums, and they were given fields and they were given houses and they were given, some of them were given taverns to run and some of them were given big herds of sheep. And so they come in with a big chunk of wealth that is in Sippar, you know, that the land is in Sippar, that they control around Sippar. And they are then taking control of it because one other thing that is nun-like about them is they weren't allowed to marry. And so these are women who didn't have husbands, and therefore they would be doing all of the business of running their estates themselves. And they were really good at it. And they become a really important sort of economic engine in Sipar.

One thing I must always ask about is clothing. What types of clothing were the norm for men and women at that time? Yeah, men and women, they would wear woolen clothes, even though it was so hot. Wool was the usual material. Linen was used, but it tended to be very, for only special occasions. You know, linen was a very special fabric. Wool was available in vast quantities because there are tons and tons of sheep. I mean, so many hundreds of thousands of sheep we have records of from Mesopotamia. But that said, making fabric was a very, very time-intensive process because, of course,

the wool has to be spun into thread and then it has to be woven. There were innumerable women working as weavers at this time, so there was a lot of weaving going on. But an individual probably didn't have a lot of different outfits. There's a lovely letter, a very famous letter, in which a boy is writing to his mother and he's saying, you don't send me enough clothes. My friend so-and-so got two sets of clothes from his mother and he's saying, you don't send me enough clothes. My friend so-and-so got two sets of clothes from his mother and you only sent me one. Having a single set of clothes that looks respectable seems to have been normal. You know, having a change of clothes probably, but having a big wardrobe, no. It's just such a time-intensive process to make clothing.

So you were very much identified by the clothes you wore. And the interesting thing is when they would sign, you know, what we would think of as signing documents, if you had a cylinder seal, a seal, you would roll it in place on the clay in place of what we would think of as a signature. If you didn't, you would impress the hem of your garment on the clay, and that was considered to represent you. And so it shows just how closely associated you are with your clothing is that the hem of your garment, I mean, it's not recognizable. Nobody goes, oh, that's the hem of, you know, so-and-so's garment, but it almost had this magical connection to you that the hem of your garment was sort of part of you. And by putting it on there,

it was like making, you know, your signature. So that suggests that people looked a certain way all the time you know their clothing was identified with them and women wore something sort of a skirt and then a shawl that wraps around and forms almost like a sari you know if you think about an Indian sari the way that the fabric is wrapped it could be something like that sometimes they wear a long tunic a straight tunic men often just wore a skirt They didn't necessarily have a shirt with it. Very hot climate, obviously, that the skirt was enough. And over time, they went from, in the Sumerian times, skirts that were fringed.

And so you see a lot of, in early times, these almost looks as though they're wearing a sheepskin, and perhaps they were, to later where the fabric is clearly woven and much finer. And so you don't have this sort of sheepskin look to the skirts that the men wore. But they were washermen. We don't know as much about them for the old Babylonian period, but by the first millennium, the position of washermen, and they were all men, was something that was one of the many professions that people had. And they would brag about getting the whites really white. You know, if you're a good washerman, you getting the whites really white. If you're a good washerman,

you got the whites really white. That was something that obviously had to be done. You had to get your clothes washed, which suggests everyone had at least two outfits, but not many. It was more limited. I must also ask about, if you're walking through one of these streets, I'm guessing they must have had slaves. Was there any way that we know of that slaves were identifiable from free people in the Babylonian Empire when enslaved. Even if they'd been brought from outside, slaves might be purchased in foreign regions and brought to Mesopotamia, but they wouldn't have looked dramatically different. So you're right. It wouldn't have been particularly obvious. So they had what was called a slave hair lock. The barbers would shave the head of a slave, leaving a single lock of hair. You could see right away that that was a slave if someone had the slave hair lock.

And in Hammurabi's laws, there's actually a law that prohibits barbers from shaving off the slave hair lock. Because by doing so, you are making it impossible to tell that that person is a slave, and therefore they might be able to escape, they might be able to run away. And so there is a harsh punishment for shaving off this hair lock, unless you do it inadvertently. There you have Babylonian barbers as well, all these different types of professions that would have been in these cities 4,000 years ago.

It's absolutely brilliant. Naturally, Pompeii and ancient Rome, there was lots of graffiti. There were inscriptions everywhere when you're walking through the town. I'm sure there were temples as well in these cities like there were in Pompeii and Rome and so on. But would you see writing? Could you see the law codes or royal inscriptions and decrees or even just graffiti along the walls of these streets in these cities of the Babylonian Empire? Well, you definitely would see this in Hammurabi's time. You know, if you lived in a big city like Sippar, you would see the stelae that has, you know,

the big monument that has his laws on it. Couldn't necessarily read it, but you would see it. That's up there in public. But it's kind of rare, it seems, for those to be in public spaces. Most of the royal inscriptions seem to have been in the areas that people couldn't get to. So they might be on the walls of a palace. They might be

actually often in this period buried under the foundations of the palace. That was often a place you would put the royal inscription. It's sort of where nobody can see it, but it's telling the gods this particular king built this. It's also telling future kings who might be, you know, rebuilding the palace or temple who constructed it. It's hard to know about graffiti because what survives with mud brick is just the foundations. You know, whereas Pompeii, of course, Vesuvius preserved so much, if you've just got the foundations of a city, you don't necessarily know what was on the walls. We do sometimes find bricks where they've engraved an image on it. Often you find, for

example, a brick or a piece of stone where they've scratched in the shape of the favourite board game. So they've put sort of a board so that they can play the local board game, which is often called the Game of Ore because it was first discovered at the Royal Tombs in Ore. So yes, probably, but in terms of the kind of evidence we have in Pompeii, no, unfortunately, we don't know. I'm guessing that also means it's very difficult to get a sense of how colourful one of these cities would have been if, once again, you don't have that evidence surviving. Yes, I think they were pretty much brown. I mean, I think we would know if they had lime plaster. If they were using lime plaster and plastering the walls white,

that survives in the ground. And if that had been the case, I think we would see much more of that than we do. It was the ziggurats, you know, the big temple towers. There's some evidence that sometimes the very top layer of the ziggurat might have been painted a different color. And certainly in later eras, in the first millennium, the ziggurat might have been much more dramatically colored. But in this period, no, mud brick is pretty brown. And so the sort of splashes of colour would have been on clothing. I mean, they dyed their clothes, the fabrics. They're very famous for textiles in Mesopotamia.

So you might have seen wall hangings, rugs, and these would have been brightly coloured. But the walls themselves, probably not, unless they were painted, in which case we wouldn't have evidence of the paint. You know, that wouldn't have survived. I'm going to ask one more question because you piqued my interest as soon as you mentioned board games and i realized we haven't really talked about leisure at all but but very quickly amanda going back some 4 000 years ago let's say you're in and in i mean what kind of leisure activities were available for you to do in one of these cities do we know much about that the board game

definitely was huge we see lots of evidence of it and the fact they buried people with it in their tombs suggests that was the best way of getting through the afterlife. You're going to be playing this game. And they bet on it. It was a game that could be played simply by children, but also could be a betting game when you got older. telling. And there's some of the myths like this Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, there's evidence that it was told orally for a very long time before it was written down. And there are other stories. You probably would have someone coming into town who would have memorized this enormously long poem and would perform it and would get an audience for it. There's also perhaps even some singing involved because there are choruses where, even though it doesn't rhyme in the way that we think of, you know, a chorus would rhyme, there are whole sections that repeat in literature, in many works of literature. And those are probably the parts where everybody joined in, you know, like we know this part, we can join in, it repeats just as one would sort of sing along with the chorus.

And it gives us a sense that this was a participatory thing that it wasn't just something that scribes were writing and and keeping track you know copying in school but these were stories that had a wide currency and that were enjoyed well there we go i think that's a lovely note on which to finish amanda this has been absolutely awesome i love looking at stuff about survival and daily life and there is so much from Babylonia some 4,000 years ago. Last but certainly not least, you have written a massive book all about this and so much more. It is called? It's called Weavers, Scribes and Kings, A New History of the Ancient Near East. And yes, it's available. It's also on audio as well as the physical book. I'm putting a plug for that because I read the audio version. So I'm the narrator.

Plug away. You deserve it after that hour of expert information. Amanda, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Well, there you go. There was Professor Amanda Podani talking all things how to survive in Hammurabi's Babylonia, a time almost 4,000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. There was so much information at hand, from

toilets to shops to urban layouts of places like Nippur and Sippar. I really do hope you enjoyed today's episode. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to The Ancients, whether that be on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or elsewhere, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast, so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.