The Ancients - Life and Death in Ancient Babylon

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Babylon was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. But what was life really like for the people who lived there? Behind its magnificent temples and royal palaces lay a city of crowded streets, disease, danger and everyday struggles.Tristan Hughes is joined by friend of the show and Babylonian extraordinaire Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to uncover the realities of life in Hammurabi's Babylon. Drawing on the remarkable texts left behind by its people, they explore everything from marriage and childbirth to taverns, rubbish-filled streets and the strange demons believed to haunt the home. What did it mean to walk the streets of Mesopotamia's most famous ancient city?MOREThe Fall of BabylonListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Tower of BabelListen on Apple Listen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. Producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early ad-free podcasts and exclusive subscriber-only episodes every fortnight. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Babylon, 3,700 years ago. The most powerful city in Mesopotamia, the seat of the famed king Hamarabi remembered for his law code. The home of the great Zigarat, the temple of Marduk, the royal palace, and thousands of mudbrick houses spread out in all directions either side of the Euphrates River. Downtown Babylon. Life for Babylon's people was far from easy.

Disease was rife. Survival past the age of 30 was unlikely. And yet, they saw themselves living at the heart of the world. So how can we presume this? Well, we're very fortunate to have a wealth of astonishing texts survive. Elegies, songs, poems and incantations that give us amazing insights into Babylonian society almost 4,000 years ago. From toilet demons to winding streets overridden with garbage and rabid dogs.

From the joys of marriage, to the perils of childbirth, to the pleasures of the taverns and so much more. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is your guide to life in Bronze Age Babylon. Our guest is a returning fan favourite, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones from the University of Cardiff, and the author of Babylon, The Marathon. mother of all cities. Lloyd, can't get rid of you. It is a pleasure to have you back on the show. Well, thank you for that rather veiled compliment. I'm grateful to be back. Thank you very much. You're one of our fan favourites and you're one of my favourites as well. And it's always such pleasure having you on the show. Thank you very much. We've done everything. But recently, we have done a few episodes on Babylon. And this time we get to explore daily life in Babylon,

which is quite the topic, isn't it? I think it really is. You know, you know, there was a trend about 30 years ago when lots of books came out with the title, you know, Daily Life in Ancient Athens or Daily Life in Rome, and they've kind of disappeared from the bookshelves a bit, which is a great shame because I think, you know, what we call social history, cultural history, is something that people really respond to. It's, you know, about how we live and how we die, you know, how we operate as family units, how we just basically negotiate our way through this crazy journey called life. And I think that Babylon in particular is so worthy of that look because of the sources that we have.

And what are these types of sources that we have? Well, the cuneiform evidence from Babylonia is just so rich and so abundant. In a way, we have the kinds of sources that my friends who deal with ancient Greek and Roman history would kill for. You know, we have personal letters, laundry lists, hymns, titles of love songs. We have contracts, wedding contracts, housing contracts. Everything is there, really from the kind of great sort of, you know, educational steps that the Babylonians made in mathematics and astrology down to, yeah, the humblest kind of shopping lists.

It is the richest pickings, really. We're going to delve into so much of that. And in particular, lots of this evidence survived from this period more than 3,000 years ago. That's known as old Babylon or the first Babylonian. The old Babylonian period is what we're dealing about here. So I suppose you might be familiar with it if we said this was the period of Hamirabi, for instance. So let's think around about the time 1770, 1750, something like that, BCE, obviously. So, yeah, this is the kind of formative age of the Babylonian world when Amarabi is busy giving us his laws,

when Babylon has risen to become really a superpower in the Mesopotamian region, has really dominated and sort of seen itself rise to a great commercial and intellectual center as well. So it's the first great age of Babylon. Do we know just how big Babylon was at this time? It's hard to be precise because, unfortunately our archaeology of Babylon is really poorly known, and that's because of the fact that Babylon itself, of course, rose on the banks of the Euphrates River, and that means that the water table beneath Babylon is very, very high. So while we've been able to access what we call

Neo-B Babylon, which is very late 600s BC, Hama rabbi's Babylon has all but been washed away. You know, it's not there. So even though in the early 1900s, German excavators went to Babylon to try to get down to those trenches, they just couldn't find anything. But we can make good comparisons with better surviving archaeology from Babylon's sister cities like Nipur and Sipar, which are very close to Babylon. So we can get an idea of the street layouts and so forth from that. Plus, of course, then we have all of this fantastic literary material, which talks about the life. in Babylon. So that's the great redeemer there. And we're going to draw on all of that. First of all, I'd like to kind of almost put ourselves in the shoes of a traveller of someone who was

approaching Babylon at that time. So the approach to Babylon, what should we be picturing? Should we be thinking, first of all, of verdant countryside, of fields and gardens and everything as we were approaching this great city? Yes, I think there's a feel of that about it. I think most people would have approach Babylon, of course, via the river Euphrates. You know, that was the main road of the day. So if you were floating down towards Babylon, you would have seen irrigation canals absolutely everywhere. We now know that the whole of Central Mesopotamia essentially was this kind of landscape interlocked, intersected with dozens and dozens, let's say hundreds of man-made irrigation channels, drawing water from the rather temperamental tigris. It tended to flood,

and this was a way of controlling the world. And of course, all of this water is needed for farmsteads and for irrigation within the cities itself. Babylon itself, incidentally, looked more like Venice than, say, modern-day Baghdad. It was completely intersected with canals. You know, it was it was La Serenissimo in many respects. It must have been really beautiful. So as you approached the city, and you would have seen in the distance, its huge white walls dominating the horizon, you would have passed through numerous fields, farmsteads. It's difficult to know where the suburbs began and ended, really, in Babylon. You know, it was all a bit of a sprawl out there. But lots of this were either royal land being tilled by farmers or else were private donations, private lands that were being utilized.

So there would have been everything. The Babylonians were very self-sufficient. They grew all their own vegetables and all their own fruits, of course, you know. So they would have been date palms everywhere, and there would have been, you know, hedge rows. I mean, it would have been quite incredible, a lot of communal labour going into the landscape. This is what I wanted to ask. I mean, was this landscape also very much the breadbasket of Babylon at that time, where they sourced all of their food from?

Yeah, completely. They didn't really need to look anywhere else for those, for the basics, you know. Everything else needed to come in. So stone, wood really needed to come in. I can't imagine that, you know, wood, for instance, you know, it had to be bought from the mountains of Turkey or from the Zagros or from, you know, if you wanted really fine wood from Lebanon. I can't imagine the cost of kindling in Babylon.

You know, to make all of those glazed bricks must have been a real expense for the Babylonians. But on day-to-day stuff, you know, all the food they needed was there. All the beer they needed could be produced from it as well. So, yes, you know, living in this uptown world was very self-sufficient. Come on, Lloyd. Let's talk about the food. What types of food were they eating? Basically, the Babylonians would eat anything.

If it moved, there was a chance that they would eat it. They really did. I mean, you know, food, meat is scarce in antiquity. So you did eat anything. And we have a lot of Babylonian recipes still surviving. A lot of them are actually contained in some tablets which are kept in Yale University. and some students there have actually had a go at recreating these things. Unfortunately for us, the tablets kind of read sort of like, you know,

Ilamite stew, take meat, one leak, some peas, this is what it is. What's missing, of course, is any idea of how you prepare those ingredients, any cooking time, what you do with them, you know. So our knowledge of the actual dishes themselves are a little bit incomplete, But really, they enjoyed their food, and they enjoyed their beer. And of course, one thing we should say about the beer in Babylon was that it was also part of their diet. So rather than drinking the unclean water of the Euphrates or these irrigation canals, you know, with dead sheep floating in them and so forth, they opted to drink beer instead. And this beer, the alcohol content varied a great deal.

So, for instance, you could have a low alcohol content beer, which actually was more like porridge. than beer. And this was a really great way to get in your calories, essentially. The other thing they tried to do as well was to put fresh produce forward. So a seasonal diet, a seasonal variation was clearly needed and, of course, was practical. There's a fantastic kind of caricature of a cookbook about kind of oat cuisine, you know, what do you get at certain times of the year? So it says something like, you know, in the month of Kismlu, what is your food? Ah, then you will eat donkey dung and bitter garlic and gone off milk. It's a parody of like, you know, what?

And then it says, you know, oh, we're in the month of Shabbatoo. What do you eat then? Oh, we will eat piping hot bread and the buttocks of a donkey stuffed with fly shit. It's things like that, they say, these really great things. So it just parodies the kind of desire for oat cuisine. in Babylon among its wealthy. Did they eat insects, though, as well? So if they saw a scorpion or something like that,

they'd be like, all that's scary, but that could also be dinner. Very happily, Manchuang scorpions, and the best thing of all was locusts. And actually, we have reliefs. These are Assyrian reliefs, I must admit, but of men carrying skewers full of scorpions. And a couple of years ago, I was in Cambodia, and I tried locusts for the first time. And you know what?

They were gorgeous, flash-fried in some honey. I was eating them like popcorn by the end. Really? They're very nutritious and they were delicious. Yeah, so they ate everything, really, really. I mean, you know, foxes, bears, anything they would eat. The only thing I can't find are dogs. I don't find dogs on the menu, but I find pigs are plenty.

Yes. Which are often linked together in the Babylonian mind, the dog and the pig. Kind of trash eaters, you know, vermin. Well, we'll get to that and exploring kind of the streets of Babylon and the smells and, yeah, the rubbish and so on in a moment. But before we get to that, Let's say we've entered into old Babylon, Hemarabi's Babylon, and before we go to kind of down the particular winding streets in the residential areas, there are those bigger buildings

that you would inevitably see towering over the landscape, wouldn't you, right in the centre? Yeah, so the most important building, I suppose, and the one that, you know, you couldn't fail to see, was the great Zygirat. So that's the magnificent temple that was dedicated to the god Marduk, who was the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon. Now, we don't really know what it looked like because there are no descriptions from this period.

But judging by other ziggurats that we see in Ur and Uruk, which are still standing, it must have been a series of platforms at least four, if not five or six, stories high, with the shrine of the god right on the top. It probably wasn't built of glazed bricks. We think of Babylon and we think of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon. with all of its glory, but I don't think it was quite like that. It was probably actually plain mud brick, but perhaps with relief bricks to give it some kind of interest. The Babylonians were brilliant brickmakers. I mean, they were renowned around the ancient world for it, and they could create bricks,

which had elements of animals in them, gods, goddesses. So I think the facade was probably more like that, with these steep staircases, which took you up. And somewhere in that area, there would also have been a palace for Nebuchadnezzar as well, probably sitting on the side of the Euphrates somewhere. So while our evidence for the actual buildings are meager, we know that at least there would have been a residence for the king and there would have been a residence for the god. I love this mention that you do include in your book that it was almost like the Babylonian dream to work in one of these great buildings in the central of Babylonians. Absolutely. I mean, what could any Babylonian ask for other than, you know, to serve his God in his great teminus and his great sanctuary or to serve the king. And there are all of these wonderful Babylonian letters written between would-be bureaucrats

and official serving in the royal palace saying, you know, let me behold the king, let me fix my eyes upon my son, this kind of thing, my son, S-U-N, you know, the son of Babylon, that's what Hamirabi was. Yeah, a great desire to live there. You know, the Babylonians thought of themselves as the most blessed people on earth. I mean, they were living in this superstructure. Civilization ran through the very streets of it. So, yes, they loved their city. And there are numerous hymns which kind of,

oh, just praise, these pions of praise about living in Babylon, being Babylonian. All right, we've got the big monuments out the way. But now to the fun stuff, Lloyd, now to the actual houses and households and daily life of Babylonians at that time. Yeah, yeah. I loved researching all of this. I really did because, you know, the thought of kind of walking the streets of an ancient city, you and I have done it many, many times. Okay, you know, we've been very lucky to, you know, to go to Pompeii or D.R. El Medina or whatever to do this kind of thing. But even though ancient, old, old Babylon has gone, we've still got enough information in those texts for us to imagine, virtually, as it were, in our minds, the journey that we can take. And I really enjoyed. researching and then writing the chapter in my book, which I've called Where the Streets Have No Name,

just to take my readers on that journey. Well, I mean, first off, Lloyd, was Babylon a neat city in how its streets were laid out? No, not at all. If anybody is a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, I think Babylon might have been his model for Ankh-Morpork because it was chaos. for all of its, you know, splendor and style and all of this, actually downtown was a nightmare. So you could have really large thoroughfares, which would be called something like the way of shamash or something like that, you know, grand titles. And he'd walk down these for maybe a mile. And then it would end at a dead end in front of somebody's house, you know, in somebody's doorway.

There was no rationale to it whatsoever. there was no city planning going on here. And because mud brick, of course, you know, was cheap and plentiful, a house could suddenly appear in the middle of a boulevard, which had no planning permission or anything, that was never required. And likewise, you know, extensions to houses were forever being built, or a wall would fall down and a new road would pass through it. There was complete chaos, I think.

So there's also, you know, we've got lots of small streets. I mean, alleyways, I suppose, running everywhere, where the houses are really packed very close together. So the streets themselves would have been very, very narrow and probably would have been covered with kind of top hallins and canvases, you know, to take the sun away. And the outside of people's houses presented a very, very uniform structure plaster on the top of mud brick and then no windows at all. So there's no way you can see into anybody's houses, you know. so light wasn't there because houses, of course, were all based around courtyards, so that's what gave the house the light. And in fact, there are Babylonian proverbs which say things like,

if your house is flashy, then it means your family will fall. But if your house is modest in appearance, then your family will prosper. So it's the idea of, you know, not too much on the outside. So, and of course there were no street names, or at least not put up on walls. So, I mean, unless you were really familiar with the geography of Babylon, you could have wandered around the city streets for hours because they all looked so alike. But still, no, do we get like those tablets surviving? I might think of it like Ayanazia, the copper merchant and others where you have the letter surviving and there's no kind of detailed address of where they live in it. It's just you go to that city and then you have to ask around where is the house of Ayrnazir or whoever, right?

That's exactly it, exactly. So you depended on the local neighbours, basically, to get you where you needed to go. And keeping a bit more on the streets before exploring those houses that you've highlighted already, Lloyd, I just love this idea that it could go from, let's say, a wider stone street where carts could go down. And then just, with a click of the finger, go to kind of a one-way, small dirt alley. Absolutely. With a 90-degree angle to go where the carts can't get around any longer. and your oxen no longer fits down

and you have to go into reverse. Absolutely. It's bizarre, isn't it, to think of, you know, this great super city in that kind of way. But I think that's the way that most cities were in antiquity and indeed up until the 19th century. You know, we think of Paris today and we think of the great boulevards of housemen,

but I think if we went back to early medieval Paris, we'd be pretty shocked at what we saw. And can we also imagine that these streets, these public areas, would they have been very smelly places? filthy in a way that we can't quite imagine. I mean, piled high with rubbish, there was no government sector which was responsible for cleaning the streets at all.

And of course, even most urination was done outside on the streets. And in fact, again, the Babylonians talk a great deal about that in their omens. If a man pees against the wall of a certain place, blah, blah, blah, something will happen to him. If he pees in another place, something else will happen to him. So, you know, they live their lives in this kind of way. If his urine goes over a door jam, he will not have a sun.

If he urinates into an irrigation canal, the weather god will flood his fields. There's all of this kind of stuff that goes on. But also, of course, defecation is done in the streets openly. Plus, even those, I mean, there were toilets nowhere, not even in private houses of the wealthy. What? No, no, no. At best, there was a basket. it, and if you had servants, that could be dumped in the street or in the Tigris. So the smell and the filth was everywhere.

Trash is king in Babylonia. It always has been in these great cities, always will be, I suppose, to a certain extent. And of course, this attracted a lot of insects, flies, and then the kind of stagnant canals, if they weren't being run with fresh water, would also attract, you know, mosquitoes and malaria was rife there. And then plus we have wild dogs and wild pigs everywhere in the streets of Babylon. And this is attested in many, many texts. And of course, in a way they were doing a good job because they were actually eating, devouring all of the rubbish.

That's what they do. But the dogs were particularly feared for rabies, of course. And we have loads and loads of incantations, you know, individuals going to the temples to plead for. protection against rabid dogs. So there's one that reads, the dog is long of leg, quick at running, short of sustenance,

poor in food. His semen is suspended from his teeth. Whoever he bites, he leaves behind his child. So rabid dogs in the streets as well. Pigs, they did eat,

however, they did eat pigs, even though they recognized that they were, you know, filthy as omnivores. But pork was one of the cheap meats they could eat.

But wild dogs they were scared of because of rabies, because, you know, I can't get over this fact that the Babylonians didn't even have latrines or anything like that. For a culture that loved water. Did they fear them or something? There was a demon of the latrines. A demon?

This is what I want to ask you about. Yes. Yes, there's always, you know, yes, there was a demon waiting in dark places. So any time they, you know, went into a corner, a dark corner and pulled out a bucket, they were always afraid that something was lurking there. Oh, the Babylonian mind is full. of demons. It really is. There were demons going to get you for everything.

But toilet time, when you're supposed to be alone as well, you know. But I think it also stretches our idea of what privacy is all about to. It's strange that they would rather squat in a street where people could watch them than go alone, where there's a possibility that the demon

of a toilet could come and get them. Incredible, isn't it? Really amazing. Exactly. Private toilet time in ancient Babylonia would probably be the quickest of any civilizations known in humans. It's known in human history. Okay, moving on from that. So let's go into the houses themselves.

And you said they're made of mud bricks, so these great local material, locally quite material. And are they designed for the hot weather of somewhere like Babylon? Yes, of course, of course, absolutely. I mean, these are ergonomic, really. So for what we know of the houses, and again, this is mainly from Nippur and Sipar. They tend to have one courtyard.

Wealthy families could have two courtyard houses. and this courtyard of course was used for all the practical things so cooking and weaving were done there and from the courtyard light would disseminate into the interiors so there were small very dark rooms around this courtyard which could be used mainly for things like storage not really for you know we wouldn't assign a room something like we do as even a kitchen or a living room there was nothing like that at all these spaces were flexible many times houses doubled as places of business as well. So, you know, there could be a canteen being run there

and you would simply then put up a stall outside your door or on the rare occasion you would have a serving hatch cut into the wall as well. And also things like woodworking, you know, you're making of stools, chairs, this kind of thing was done there. Only things like tanning, leather work was done outside the city walls because of the stink. But the house itself also had upstairs.

We know that. There tends to be references to ladders or else to steps. And, of course, the flat roofs of houses, even in the Middle East today, are vital because actually it extends your living space. Because what's better in the nights, in those long, sultry nights in Mesopotamia, than to actually sleep on the roofs, of course. Also, that's where business can be done as well. You know, the women can be up there.

They can be, you know, doing their textiles. They can be looking after their children. So that's a good thing. We know that the mud bricks that built these houses tended to have bits of straw in them to kind of hold the mud together. And straw and wood, expensive wood, but in kind of like broken pieces really, not large, large planks, kind of were packed down to create a ceiling. and then the structure for the roof space itself. This was a bit terrifying in itself because we have lots of records of roofs caving in

and people falling through their roofs. The laws of Hamirabi actually state very clearly that any builder who doesn't create a solid structure and if a roof falls in or if a wall caves in, then he is responsible for the maintenance and the restoration of that. So that's a good thing we should bring back. And then also in these structures were a myriad of insects, of course.

So, you know, and rodents, vermin. Free dinner. Absolutely. Yeah, they were everywhere. And in fact, the Babylonians were so aware of the kind of other creatures that lived in their houses that they had omens for that as well. So, for instance, they would say they would look at ants, all the ants climbing up the wall constantly there must have been. and they'd say things like, you know, oh, if black ants appear in the house, the head of the house will reach an extraordinary old age. But if red ants with wings are seen in the house, then his wife will die.

You know, so they were looking for omens all the time. And the other thing, which was really disconcerting were the presence of snakes in the houses as well, of course. And there were professional ways to deal with this. Snake charmers are the way to get rid of your unwanted snakes. And so we have lots of texts talking about the hire of snake charmers who would come in. into the house, charm the snakes, and then take them out and, you know, probably throw them over the neighbour's wall or something. I've had too much talk of snakes recently. First off with going to Australia, and secondly,

one of our colleagues wants us to do the biggest snake that ever existed, Titanaboa. And I hate snakes with a passion. So thank you so much, Lydide. Do we know much about, you describe it more as a household rather than a family, what we should think of with the average Babylonian household? So we have to do away entirely with the idea of the nuclear family, you know, 2.3 kids and all that kind of thing. The household in Babylon really was certainly under the head of a pater-familious, there's no doubt about that. Usually with one wife, but two was not uncommon, and then a brood of children. And of course, it was really desirable for a man to have many sons. There's a great poem which talks about the number

of offspring a good man should have, and seven seems to be like the idea seven sons. Seven. Seven sons. plus daughters, of course, who usually don't get named, given sort of personal names in our sources. They are always the daughter of or the sister of somebody. And then, of course, beyond that, there was the kind of extended family. So a man and his wife or wives could also be living with sets of in-laws, with cousins, nieces, step-children from previous marriages, and also, of course, servants and enslaved people as well. These were all seen as the integral parts of the household. So we need to think in terms of very extended families.

And if we focus on kind of the man and wife or man and wives in particular, Lloyd, because I know you dedicate a lot of talk to what we know about marriage in old Babylon, because there's lots of talk of that also surviving as well. And it's really, really interesting. Yeah, it's great stuff. I mean, first of all, marriage is absolutely at the heart of the Babylonian legal sense. system, which is interesting in itself, which actually is perhaps surprising that it's so good to women. It really is something that, you know, Hamarabi obviously saw there's a problem here

about women going into marriages, arranged marriages, of course, with no safety catch at all. And a lot of the laws talk about the right that she has to her dowry upon divorce or upon repudiation, which seems to have happened quite a bit, and also then to make sure that she is looked after if she is rejected by her husband, who does not copulate with her, you know, and is returned to her father, that she goes back with no particular shame at all, you know, nothing, nothing to do with her. So there are, there's really interesting stuff around that, of course. But also then, within the kind of texts, we also have the kind of pressures that these women lived under, while men boasted a lot about the number of children that they could have,

if they were lucky in that way. The text don't really speak about boastful Babylonian women talking about how many sons they had reared. But there is one really interesting little Babylonian proverb saying, she who has given birth to eight children lies down in peace. And you think, no kidding. I mean, you know, they were expected to be, birthing factories, really. Gosh. But the sad thing is that the number of deaths of women in childbirth, especially first-time mothers, was extraordinarily high,

something like 60% of childbirth for the first time. A girl usually 12, 13, 14, it was extremely high. And we have the most incredible kind of funerary elegies written about these young women who give their life. up so far, you know. And just as we talked about demons of, you know, the toilet, there was also demons of the bedroom and especially of the birthing chamber, particularly a demoness called Lamashtu, who had the kind of like lionine head, a hairy body from which she had these pendulous breasts with which she fed dogs and pigs and she rides on the back of a, of a wild

ass. And she was supposed to be the stealer of babies. So newborn babies right at birth, you know, those who died was said to be taken away by Lamashdu, as were the mothers as well. And to try to counter that, these women would tend to wear little amulets showing the goddess Lamashtu around their necks or around their waists. And there was this hope that these amulets would expel this demoness from coming and doing her thing. All in all in all, you know, childbirth was a terrifying, terrifying event. absolutely Lloyd and I hope you don't mind you include one elegy in your book that I've got in front to me now that I feel like I should read because it's beautiful but harrowing at the same time

because it's for a woman who has passed away in childbirth but it but it says um so she's almost kind of foreshadowing she says like on the day I carried fruit how happy I was happy was I happy my husband on the day of my labour pains my face became dark on the day I gave birth my eyes had an unhealthy appearance. My hands were opened in supplication as I pray to Belette Ili. You are the mother of those who give birth, save my life. Ever since those days when I was with my husband, as I lived with him, who was my lover, death crept stealthily in my bed. It's brought me out of my home. It separated me from my lover and set my feet toward a land from which I shall not return. That's how it means. It's incredibly poignant, isn't it? It really is. It really is.

Of course, you know, the other side of that, I should say, is like, while we don't know too much about weddings and the kind of, there was no kind of official marriage right. We do know a lot about the wedding celebrations. And there we have a completely different tone in all of our literature, because we have lots and lots and lots of wedding songs. And I love them because they show us the other side of, you know, the non-sentimental side. So the kind of wedding songs that we have sung in Babylon are tend to be called what we like to call Bal Ballet songs. So that means that they are songs sung, first of all, by a chorus of men, and then the next verse is taken up by women, and then the men pick up the refrain and back and forth. And these were probably sung outside the door of the wedding chamber.

So this poor girl and a new husband were inside terrified, not knowing what was going to go on. And the songs are all about encouraging the young couple to have sex. They're really remarkable. I think they work in the way. I always think this exchange song, if you've ever seen the movie Greece, you know, the musical, Summer Nights, there. It's fantastic. So it goes between these couples, you know, and basically all the thing is about make love, be like Ishtar, enjoy yourselves.

And we've got dozens and dozens and dozens of these songs surviving, but even more, titles of these songs which have not survived. But there's things like, oh, go away, sleep, let me embrace my darling. I'm cleaning myself for your love. I love the one. Your love is an obsidian blade. Your love making is golden. I always think what would Elvis do with these?

It really gives us an idea into the Babylonian mind, which was far from being prude when it came to things like sex. Well, I mean, exactly. when we've already covered about, you know, going to the loo in the street in public compared to in private, very open about that and very open also about something that, you know, sometimes many people don't talk about as openly in modern day society, which is sex. And it's all matters of sex, right? Absolutely, absolutely.

No taboo on this whatsoever. Interestingly, taboos on sort of speaking about love, like deep emotion. We've had that beautiful epigram. And that's the kind of way in which love is. talked about. And also in medical texts. So we have this one diagnosis from a doctor talking about a man who goes around town all day, sighing and sitting by himself in corners and holding his head in his hands and saying, oh, me, me, or my. And the doctor says, well, it's love sickness, isn't it? You know, that's what he's suffering from. But on the whole, when they talk about male, female,

female-female, male-male interaction sexually. It's very clear, it's very obvious. They don't hold back whatsoever in this. And they employ a lot of metaphor and similes, especially agricultural things. You know, so animal metaphors, he is a stag. You know, she is the cow. She is the canal.

He is the water. He brings forth milk. You know, she eats his cheese. It's all of this kind of thing that goes on constantly. And of course, sex was available everywhere as well. Prostitution, of course, male and female, as well as multigendered sex was available anywhere. Taverns, bars were a particularly good place to pick up prostitutes. And I think there's a very, actually a very thin line between what constituted a pub in Babylon and a brothel.

They're often dealt with in the same kind of breath, if you like. It's interesting, isn't it, in the epic of Gilgamesh, when he, you know, when Gilgamesh himself has gone through all of his trials, he ends up at a bar, you know, at the bar at the far end of the world. And there's a barmaid there called Siduri, who is the kind of divine barmaid. She's a goddess barmaid. And she does what those kind of barmaids have been notorious for throughout history. She's a good listener. She's the kind of tart with a heart kind of character, you know, she listens to his woes, she gives him good advice. But in many places, in, you know, real Babylon, these were the kind of women that,

you could hire for sexual activity too. And what type of people in Babylon would visit an establishment like a tavern slash brothel? I think all sorts really. We know, for instance, that outsiders who came into Babylon needed places to stay. And so these were also inns, you know, where you could rent rooms. But I think that the Babylonians were a social lot. And they like to mix together. The whole idea of, you know, eat drink and be merry.

really means a lot to them. It certainly does to eat together and to drink together. Drinking together was seen as being a civilized thing. There's a wonderful lyric which praises beer in which the guy who sings the song, as it were, it says, I spin around in a lake of beer feeling wonderful, feeling wonderful while drinking beer in a blissful mood. My heart is filled with joy and I've clothed my liver in a garment fit for a queen. That's all the drink he's been taken in, you know. There's something about mixing and doing all that together, which is appropriate. And if you think of the way that beer was consumed in Babylon, it wasn't drunk in pints like us, but in big vats, big jars which sat on the ground and you sipped your beer through a long straw made out of reeds. And that was

a communal thing. So five or six of you sat around the same vat. It's like us having a big, you know, vat of sangria or something like that, you know. It was, it was drawing you together, I think. Plus, if you think about the realities of Babylonian life, you read my mind. Babylon was, you know, by, you know, eight o'clock at night in the Middle East, the sun goes down. And lamps, oil lamps in the normal Babylonian house would have cost a fortune to run and you didn't have real firewood to burn either

so how much easier it was just to go down to your local pub where they had all of those things and to sit together in company before you kind of struggled to find your way home and even struggled to find your front door because it looked like everybody else is

yes you need to ask your neighbour where it's actually where do I live again but at the same time I mean, should we also kind of emphasize the fact that, you know, we mentioned near the start how people in Babylon at that time consider themselves, you know, at the center of everything, you know, beating harder civilization. And yet we then mentioned how smelly and actually how not great it was. Should we emphasize the hardships of life back then for men and for women, you know, after a day at work?

And actually how the taverns were probably even more back then, you know, that place of happiness. Absolutely. social activity and so. It was tough. Life was tough. Life was short. Most people were dead by the age of 30. You know, that's the reality of it.

And we know that, you know, in between all of the filth and so forth, there was also starvation. So begging was commonplace. You know, not everybody could get their full bellies, you know, and took whatever they could. There's an incredible story, which was very, very popular throughout messaging. subatamia, but it originates in Babylon. It's called The Tale of the Poor Man of Nipur. And it's about this hero called Gimil Nunerta. And he has nothing. He has absolutely nothing to his name.

In fact, I'll read out the beginning of the story for you. It says, his storage bins lacked pure grain, his insides burned craving food. His face was sad, craving meat and decent beer. Having no food he lay hungry every day. And I think, you know, many people, while not necessarily reduced to Gil-Nanurta's situation, nevertheless could not necessarily anticipate the next day's food, or they lived on what we would call a subsistence diet, just enough calories to get through the next day, which is why things like the big feasts that were laid on by the state of the largesse of the king could last for, well, 12 days at a minimum, but 30 days sometimes, you know, a whole month sometimes, people feasted at the expense of the state in these great

New Year festivals, for instance. But of course, that wasn't always so very common. And most of the time, I think people struggled from day to day. Was there any sort of charity? Do we know their opinions towards that? Was there help for those? in need in Babylon at that time? Not that we hear of officially. I mean, there's no kind of state dole, for instance, whatsoever, just to keep people away from complete penury. And we don't really hear about charity.

I can't even think that there's a Babylonian-Arcadian term for charity. What there is is responsibility on the behalf of the wealthy, especially the king, to see that justice is done. But justice is different from charity, isn't it? That comes in very different forms. I know of nothing where there are kind of regular handouts given. It may well have existed, and I will actually look into this. I mean, you do wonder if these great temple structures didn't have a responsibility.

I mean, we hear of like in Babylon and Sipur, there were convents, nuns, attached to these great temples. And you'd think that that kind of, you know, food bank sort of situation would occur there. But I've not come across anything, Tristan. It's a really interesting point, actually. I will look at the idea of charity. Well, one more question on the taverns before going on. You mentioned, of course, you know, how one source of evidence we have for this period in Babylon and everyday life and addressing issues is Hamarabi's law code and his laws. Do we see any laws in relation to, you know, the notorious acts that went on in the tavern or what was acceptable and what wasn't?

We do. So there are price lists for sex charges. So a prostitute will, you know, I don't know whether they display these, but certainly they would state. You know, it's half a shekel of silver for a normal intercourse within the tavern itself, but half of that for a knee-trembler on the streets kind of thing. So they say these kind of things. But the law also stipulates that a nun, so a Narditu priestess, what we would call a nun, must not frequent a tavern.

And it's kind of interesting, isn't it, why laws are written? It means probably a nun or a couple of nuns had gone to taverns and somebody complained. So, yeah, they are banned. But otherwise, you know, the idea of cheating and defrauding individuals through weight of things. So the weight of, I don't know, some grain that might be purchased within a tavern. And there's a certain regulation about who can trade within taverns as well. But actually, as for the kind of license to what goes in, what goes on in within the tavern, in terms of drinking or excess behavior or rowdiness even, I find nothing.

that at all. Fair enough. Well, Lloyd, let's talk about death as well, because it's also important. First off, given you mentioning, like, the amount of rubbish and garbage there was, how smelly the city was, you know, rabid dogs and so on, do we think, I know, it's impossible to say for certain, do we think disease was arguably the biggest killer at that time? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, they had no concept of hygiene, of bacteria, of germs whatsoever, you know, so whatever they touched was transmitted. And, you know, we find constantly, constantly a reliance on medical practitioners to try to help what the Babylonians saw as afflictions which were brought on them by the gods. You could only become ill if you had done something to you displease the gods. That's

the way it worked. And therefore, medical practitioners, you know, really were kind of divided between what we would call a GP to prescribe medicants made from herbs or postuses or linen bandages or whatever, and then what we might crudely call witch doctors who were essentially exorcists knew the spells. And in fact, these two spheres of operation completely merged into one. So you wouldn't go to a GP and ask for something to help your headache. without going to a magician, a magician or a sorcerer, and saying to them, please tell the demon who is, you know, giving me this bad headache to go away, to ward off. And so the two work like that all the time. So it's very, very clear that disease was rampant of all sorts of diseases,

you know, from headaches through to, you know, incurable cancers, we're all going on, which is not necessarily, you know, drawn on by the environment. But many other things were like malaria and typhoid and things like that, and diseases especially that comes from, you know, diureas and this kind of stuff, which comes from exposure to human feces. And so we know that all levels of society are affected by this as well.

I mean, you can't get away from it, you know. It's interesting that the Babylonians never developed a kind of psychology about purity, you know, purification, keeping things clean. If you look at their neighbors in the Hittite world, world, they were obsessed about purification and cleaning themselves. The Babylonians had no concept of that at all. And we don't even hear of like, you know, Tigris or Euphrates waters being used in purification rituals per se, you know, watch in the waters and clean yourselves. And I think that's

probably because the Tigris and Euphrates, you know, around the urban centres were pretty filthy in themselves. Absolutely. Yeah. Epidemics must have been a certainty happening in those places. I know we disagree on this particular topic, and it's from later, but I've got to bring it up, Lloyd. What does Alexander the Great Likely Die of in Babylon? Disease. Yeah. Tifoid, malaria. All those things you've already mentioned.

So that probably were still around. I think it brings him down anyway. I think it really weakens him. Of course. It's poised. Oh, well, we disagree about that till the sun goes down. That's another day. And do we know much about kind of the rituals,

about the burial, about what would happen if someone in your family did, possibly? We do indeed. Now, this is really strange. We've discovered no great cemeteries in Babylonia. And that's because the Babylonians had a very different conception of the afterlife to say the Egyptians. You know, Egypt essentially is a funerary culture. You know, all of their great monuments or certainly their tombs are there, of course, because there is this belief in another world and that life will go on. The Babylonians had no concept of that. For them, death was death. It's a nothingness. It's a blackness that goes on beneath the world where you're still conscious of being human, but without any of the pleasures of life. So it's a very, very pessimistic vision of what goes on. The dead could come back, of course, and haunt you if they weren't being thought about, if they weren't being given regular offerings and, you know, their names being spoken again. and there are many, many, many texts which talk about ghosts and spirits coming back from the dead.

So there was a conception that, you know, the dead needed to be put at rest properly, but even then it wasn't guaranteed they would stay in their place. So where were these people buried? Well, it seems that more than anything else, the Babylonians buried their family dead beneath their houses. So the houses were for the living and for the dead. And so we have evidence that the dirt floors were dug up and into sometimes stone-lined chambers, but sometimes just dirt chambers. The ancestors would be, the dead would be placed there.

And these would be cleaned out every few years. The bones of the dead moved to the side in preparation for a space for another family member and so forth. So you literally lived in the same place as the dead in your family. And that's why we see things like every month in most Babylonian households, you would have a family meal where the dead were expected to be there as well. It would take place of the new moon. And this was, you know, a place would be laid for the dead. Really? Yes, yes, yes, because they're only underneath you, after all.

You know, they're not far away at all. And in this place of absolute nothingness, the kingdom of the goddess Erishkeghal, where there is just dirt. and dust, that's the way that they see death, then it was nice for them just to have a little bit sort of like a glimpse of what their life once had been. If you set a table place for them and you say, you know, we remember you. That's something that gave them great joy.

And it's those who don't get it, who get troublesome and come back and haunt and cause all sorts of malicious and awful things to happen to a household. They'll become the next toilet demons. Yeah, exactly. for those. Lowy, this has been such a wonderful chat exploring these so many different aspects

of social history when it comes to Babylon, right? The lives of the people who they were and how they lived. And I want to see more of this being done. I really do, you know, because we do have the sources beyond Babylon. There's a great deal out there. I do think that people like this kind of material because sometimes it makes us think,

oh, gosh, they did things differently then. And at other times you just think, oh my goodness me, they're just like us. You know, it goes in those kind of really sort of polar opposites. So that wonderful epigram you read about the dead wife, the young mother, I mean, that is as meaningful and as heartfelt as anything we could ever read today about a family in a similar situation, while other things, perhaps like, you know, the demon of the toilet,

is less identifiable in our own world. But I love the ricocheting between these two extremes. I think it's fascinating. It really is. Lloyd, a couple of shoutouts for you at the end. First of all, your book, which talks about all of this and so much more. It is. It's called Babylon, the mother of all cities, or the US version is called Babylon,

the biography of a metropolis. And that covers all things Babylon from the old Babylon to Alexander and beyond. Right up to Babylon in the modern imagination. Lady Gaga, her Babylon, for instance. It's all there. That could have been another title, but that slips through the net. And lastly, you also host a podcast with another friend of the show, Professor Helen Bond, and that is. That is called the Biblical Time Machine, which is a wonderful opportunity where weekly we release a podcast, where we talk to experts, scholars in the field of biblical studies and ancient history, in which we try to put the bio-evalued.

the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, firmly into its ancient setting. Lloyd, this has been fantastic. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. And no doubt we'll have you back on in due course. I hope so. Tristan, thank you very much indeed. Well, there you go. There was the brilliant Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones returning to the show to talk all

things life and death in Babylon, in old Babylon, 1,000 years ago. And there's astonishing sources that survive. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that episode just as much as I did recording it. We have recorded several episodes with Lloyd about various aspects of Babylon's story over the years, and in the show notes of this episode, we'll put links to two of my favourites. One, on the fall of Babylon, the end of Babylon, the Neo-Babolonian Empire to the Persian King Cyrus in the 6th century BC, and another on the building that became the inspiration for the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. The great Ziggurat, the Atamananaki.

We'll put a link to those episodes in the show notes. If you've been enjoying the ancients, please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me.

I will see you in the next episode.