The Ancients - The Walls of Babylon

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

The ancient metropolis of Babylon was famed for its wonders like the Tower of Babel and the mysterious Hanging Gardens. But few Babylonian monuments were as wondrous as the towering, blue-bricked walls and glittering gates that surrounded the city and protected those inside from enemies on the Mesopotamian Plain.In todays episode of The Ancients, Tristan continues our mini-series focusing on the ancient world’s greatest architectural wonders by shining a light on the great walls of Babylon. He is joined by Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones to tell the fascinating history of these legendary walls and explore what remains of them, including the magnificently reconstructed Ishtar Gate in Berlin. This episode was produced and edited by Joseph Knight. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up 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, where we are continuing our Wonders of the World mini-series this March, we're heading to present-day Iraq and the ancient metropolis of Babylon. Now, Babylon had more than one wonder in antiquity. There was the Etemenarche, the real-life Tower of Babel, this great ziggurat to the Babylonian chief god Marduk.

There was the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, where Alexander the Great would ultimately die. There was also a beautiful, a massive bridge across the river Euphrates. There was the more mysterious Hanging Gardens. And also, there was another monumental wonder that surrounded Babylon and sometimes made it onto the official list of wonders of the ancient world, the walls of Babylon. We're going to be delving deep into these monumental fortifications. What has the literature and what does the archaeology? What do they reveal about the walls? Who built them?

How they were built? And so on. But we're also going to explore a famous reconstructed section of the walls, the blue-coloured gateway that is the Ishtar Gate. To explain all about this Babylonian marvel, well, I was delighted to interview Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff. Lloyd, he is a great friend of the podcast and one of the best speakers I have ever interviewed, so I'm delighted to say he's back to talk all the things in the halls of Babylon.

I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Lloyd. Lloyd, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast today. Well, thank you very much, Tristan. It's a real joy to be back. It seems like a long time since the last one. God, what was it? Was Cyrus the Great the last one? It was Cyrus the Great, yeah.

And Babylon and the Bible. Absolutely, absolutely. Massive hits. I've got them in there, all of them. But today we're talking about, well, Babylon still. And the walls of Babylon. This is kind of one of those wonders of the ancient world that kind of got onto the official list. Yeah, in a couple of the earlier lists that we have of the seven wonders, certainly the walls

were there, later replaced, of course, by these strange gardens. More about that later on, I dare say. But yes, the walls, they're certainly worth talking about. Let's set the scene. How far back into ancient history are we going to get to the time of when the walls of Babylon are about to be constructed? Well, the original walls can date right the way back to about the 18th century BCE, when Babylon was becoming a power in its own right in the Near East, under King Hammurabi, Babylon becomes the most important of the Mesopotamian cities. Hammurabi himself conquered the big, big cities of Isin, Ur, Uruk, all fell to Hammurabi. And therefore, Babylon needed defending. And so we certainly have literary evidence for the existence of walls there.

However, we don't really get archaeological evidence for walls until the end of the Middle Babylonian period. So we're talking about 1200 BCE. And then afterwards, really the sort of glories of the Babylonian walls are as late as 700, 600 BCE, mainly the work of Nebuchadnezzar II, the famous Nebuchadnezzar from the Hebrew Bible, of course. So on the whole, we're talking about these, but we must remember that Babylon was attacked many times. The walls crumbled because of attack or neglect many, many times. We know, for instance, that when King Sargon invaded Babylonia, he completely destroyed the city walls and much of the city

itself. So, you know, they were lovingly built together again. So basically what we have here is a typical bit of Near Eastern tell archaeology. So think of a tell as a kind of like a mound of habitation. It works like a kind of sponge cake, if you like. And if you were to cut your way through the sponge cake, then you'll see the layers of jam and cream and so forth. Well, essentially Babylon or any other ancient near Eastern city is like a big sponge cake. And as archaeologists cut their way through it, we can see the levels of habitation. And we can do that with the walls, essentially. We can see where there were walls, essentially. We can see where

there were walls, where they burnt down, where they crumbled, and where they were rebuilt as well. So it's not the story of one wall, it's the story of many, many walls. Do we know what Babylon looks like just before these walls are constructed? How should we envisage Babylon at that time? Well, I suppose there's a kind of an ideological clue that we have in a really remarkable late middle Babylonian text. So again, sort of like 1100, something like this. It's very fragmentary and it does give us a kind of topographical view of the city. Somebody was trying to describe what the city looks like and gives us lots of names of roads and gates and this kind of thing. But what I really

love about this particular text is the introduction to it because it has this kind of wonderful hymn to Babylon, really. So this is kind of like a Babylonian perception of their own city. So if I may, I'm going to read it to you because it's just so cool. It goes like this. Babylon, on which fame and jubilation are bestowed. Babylon, the seat of plenty. Babylon, the seat of life. Babylon, the might of the heavens. Babylon, the light of the heavens. Babylon, the bond of the heavens.

Babylon, called into being by the heavens. Babylon, the city whose brickwork is ancient. Babylon, the city of jubilation. Babylon, the city whose ordinances are precious, Babylon the city whose rights are select, Babylon the city of the king of the gods, Babylon the city called into being by Marduk, who is the king of the gods, Babylon the city whose luxury is inexhaustible, Babylon the city which brings peace to its menfolk, Babylon the city which loves truth, Babylon the city which brings peace to its menfolk. Babylon, the city which loves truth.

Babylon, the city of truth and justice. Babylon, the city who hates evil. Babylon, the city of men of influence. Goodness goes on and on. It goes on and on. I could go on, but I'll just end with Babylon, the city whose people are glutted with wealth, whose festivals are full of rejoicing and dancing. Babylon, the sacred city.

It's lovely kind of poetry in a weird kind of way, isn't it? And Babylon is right at the centre of it, as you could kind of guess from the words you were saying there. But does this emphasise how, at that moment in time, not just the rulers, but also the people who lived in Babylon, they believed that they were at the centre of the world? They were the centre of the world as far as they were concerned, absolutely the epicentre. And the Babylonians were very aware by this point of Nebuchadnezzar of their rich heritage, of course. They say that, don't they? This is the city that was built of old bricks, so they know that there's something special about them. But also they're very aware that their culture is the dominant

culture across the whole of the Near East. They had been invaded only two centuries, three centuries before by the Assyrians, but the Assyrians essentially become Babylonianized themselves. Babylon was the center of art, of culture, of poetry, of music, of theology. And basically, anybody who tried to conquer Babylon was eventually conquered by Babylon's culture. The Assyrian kings become entirely Babylonianized by the fall of Nineveh. So the Babylonians do have this very self-conscious self-confidence, which is reflected in a hymn like that, but is also reflected in the city itself. So let me just say, for instance, now there's a lot of debate about how long,

how big these city walls were, how much of a circuit did they encompass. But there's one text which suggests that the walls encompassed an area which was equal to something like 444,333 qubits, it says. Wow. Now, that's a kind of like a magical number. We don't have to take this sort of seriously.

It's a magical number. And what it kind of adds up to in the Babylonian thought was totality. So in other words, everything that is enclosed within these walls of this magical number is the totality of the world. So Babylon is the centre of the world, essentially. And so you mentioned measurements like that. So what literary texts do we have that mention, that talk about the walls of Babylon, these wondrous walls in detail?

Well, we have this strange late Middle Babylonian text, and there they try to give some length in cubit. But of course, it's not the Babylon that we now know from the archaeology, so that's difficult. Herodotus, the Greek historian, of course, gives some ridiculous numbers for the length of the walls in Babylon, which are completely unfeasible. And in fact, every Greek who talks about the length of the walls of Babylon are giving fantasy figures more than anything else. And I think most commentators, even the most ardent Herodotian supporters have to count out to the fact that this is more fantasy than reality. What we now think is going on in Babylon is that we've probably got a wall which encompasses not only the old inner city of

Babylon, the Babylon that Hammurabi knew, but also under Nebuchadnezzar, we've got another city wall which enlarged the space considerably. So the inner city, the core, was a kind of rectangle, which was divided by the river Euphrates, which ran directly through the city center. And then in the end of the 17th to the 6th century, Nebuchadnezzar adds this huge wall on the outside of Babylon, which encompassed what would have been, I suppose now, domestic areas, residential areas, as well as new temples and palaces, which were being built at the time. So it would have swollen in size by about 80% under Nebuchadnezzar.

It becomes a megastructure, a superstructure, the whole of Babylon, really. And we estimate that while we can't really give facts and figures as to the measurements of the wall, there are these kind of sayings and stuff we find in Babylonian texts where it suggests that maybe it would take something like four hours to walk the length of the wall at a sort of regular walking speed kind of thing. So that gives us a bit more of an idea in a way, a bit more of a human manageable idea of the size of the parameter of the walls themselves. So a good four hour walk it would take to get around the city. It's that kind of detail that leads Aristotle very famously to say, you know, that when Babylon was taken, he doesn't say who the enemy was, but say by the Persians, some of the inhabitants of Babylon

didn't realize that the city had fallen for three days because the news hadn't spread throughout the whole city yet. We have to think of Babylon as the greatest and the biggest city on earth at the time. And its walls and its many gateways, I think, reflect that. I guess the other thing to note here is that we're talking about walls which actually have double layers to them as well. So Babylon's wall wasn't just one simple construction. It was double-faced, as it were. So there were two walls with about a

12-meter gap in between the two walls, and that was packed with rubble right to the very top. So therefore that gave us a surface, which was then packed down, which we could actually walk on as well. And I think I was thinking about this myself. So we've got a kind of like a 12 meter or 39 foot walkway, okay? Which is wide, that's really pretty wide.

It's wider, for instance, than the walkway okay which is wide that's really pretty wide it's wider for instance than the walkway the ramparts that we have in the medieval chinese city of xi'an for instance if you've ever seen pictures of that or walked it you know it's huge so babylons would have been wider than that so why we can't take you know herodotus and his idea that the walls of Babylon were 90 miles or 90 kilometers long, which is completely a fiction. I think we can believe what he says, that the ramparts were wide enough to drive two chariots side by side down them, and probably with a bit of space over as well, to be honest. So this is a a mammoth construction and here's another remarkable figure for you as well it's about the number of bricks that would have been used okay so this has been

done by some work of some germans only the germans could do this kind of work uh in the pergamon museum who have done a digital reconstruction of the gates of babylon and also the walls. So given that an average Babylonian brick, okay, was 33 by 33 centimeters, it would take some 595 million bricks to have constructed their walls in their totality at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. So that is more than just a cottage industry churning out mud bricks. This is a mammoth scale operation. And Nebuchadnezzar only wanted the very highest

level of brickwork for his walls. And so whereas the old walls of Babylon were made just from mud brick, which is basically mud and straw left to set in the sun. For Nebuchadnezzar, the majority of his bricks are made from kiln firing. So this is a longer process. It's more costly, obviously, in terms of fuel and this kind of thing. But of course, the effect is so much more long lasting. And we know, in fact, that Nebuchadnezzar was so intent on the kind of durability of these walls that he even replaced old mud bricks with the new fired bricks as well to make things right. And you know that there's some inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar which are really quite remarkable. He says at one point that as his men were digging down into the foundations to replace some of these bricks, they came across old cylinder inscriptions of previous kings. He

talks about Naram-Sin, for instance, you know, that he found there. And he says, you know, I didn't move them or anything. I just added my own inscriptions in the foundations of the earth. And this is something that Mesopotamian kings have been doing forever. These cylinder inscriptions as foundation deposits, basically saying, I am Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabopolassar. I have done all of these great things for the gods. These are not inscriptions to be seen by anybody else, but they show the king's priority, his loyalty, but also his ambition for Babylon as well. So here is a king with a remarkable vision of both the durability and the longevity going forward of his city, but also very much aware of quite literally the foundations on which his city is based as well, the history of his own city as well. So he's a really fascinating

man when it comes to how he articulates himself through his building projects. It is the building projects, isn't it? And I know like some time ago, you mentioned how almost like the old town of Babylon was one side of the Euphrates. And one of those other building projects, you mentioned the Hanging Gardens and there's the Great Temple and the palaces. But didn't he always make a massive bridge across the river Euphrates as well? Absolutely. So we have one sort of suspended, not quite suspended, but raised bridge, which spanned part of Euphrates, which went into this kind of processional way, which was a new creation of his too, which led it to the Ishtar Gate then. So it wasn't wise,

of course, always to make too many bridges across Euphrates. After all, the Euphrates acted as a convenient moat and safeguard then for Babylon. But certainly he did this probably for ceremonial reasons more than anything else, of course, rather than for things like trade. Babylon had his own harbour. And so, you know, that was the kind of industrial area of the city. And even, you know, outside of Babylon, where there were masses of irrigation canals and fields, date palms, stretches of arable land, which were farmed out by farmers who were kind of paid for the rent, as it were. Even these little settlements by Nebuchadnezzar's time were also getting their own fortification walls built around them as well, which is really

fascinating. So little pods of habitation outside of Babylon proper. So in a way, if you were a visitor coming to Babylon, it would be sometimes difficult to know where Babylon started. It became far more of a kind of urban sprawl by the 7th, 6th centuries BCE than it had been 500, 600 years before. And these fortified little suburbs almost kind of thing, which is super interesting. I mean, one other question on that, if Nebuchadnezzar, if we're just focusing on the walls, we'll get to the Ishtar Gate in a moment, but if he spends all of this time to create these walls especially with these massive ramparts too especially acquired mud bricks and all of that my big question is why i'm guessing it's much more than just a defensive purpose yes absolutely i mean this is propaganda

in mud really isn't it you know this is what he's really all about of course you know you can never assume that things are going to stay as they are that there's going to be a happy equilibrium in terms of superpower structures in ancient mesopotamia but by and large the walls go above and beyond what is really needed for practicalities, you know. And I think this gets emphasised in the way in which the names of the walls that we have sometimes are kind of more apotropaic than anything. So, you know, a name of one part of a wall might be something like Adad despises his enemies, Adad the god of thunder, of storms. So you can see that the walls have a magical function to them as well, of course. Because let's not forget, you know, within Mesopotamian thought,

from the earliest times when the first cities like Ur and Uruk get built, the building of an urban structure suddenly demarcates different space, doesn't it? So there's interior and exterior. The interior is where the civilized world is, okay? So this is where communication, food, clothing, drink, education happens. Anything then beyond the city walls is the other. And of course, this is where, you know, the wild are, not just animals, of course, but demons and monsters and ghosts. Enkidu.

Enkidu and all this kind of stuff is out there. The Epic of Gilgamesh is all essentially about, at the beginning at least, that divide between the us and them, the urban center, the civilized world, and the outside, which is terrifying. And I think the walls of Babylon express that concept still. It's not one that disappears.

It's as much to do with the kind of a theology of Babylon as it is to do with any defensive mechanism. But of course, going to and from those walls, you also mentioned that alongside all this ideology of Babylon and obviously a defensive purpose too, to show off the power of Nebuchadnezzar as king of the world, the walls had quite a few gates. Yes. Herodotus says there were a hundred,

but I think that's him doing a bit of a riff on Homer, of course, Thebes of a hundred Gates and all of that. We know that Babylon had eight gates. I think there were five of them inside the inner city, so the old city that Hammurabi would have known, would have had gates. We don't know how many then, but certainly this text from the Middle Babylonian period

says that there are five gates and actually names the Ishtar Gate as one of them. So the Ishtar Gate has a very, very long history. It's well, well before Nebuchadnezzar does his version of it. There was a gate called the Ishtar gate there together with an Adad gate, a market gate and so forth as well. So by the time of Nebuchadnezzar, this has swollen to eight gates in the outer walls as well. And all of these serve a function of protection. And again, you know, a gateway is a strange thing, isn't it? Because the gateway is obviously the weak part of the wall.

It's the bit that's going to be attacked first. So there's always that wariness of what a gate can be. It can be a welcoming portal, of course, as well, you know, where processions can happen and people can take sanctuary. But also then there's this double thing about it needing to be a secure barrier against this world of reality, soldiers and invaders and marauders. And also, of course, the ideology of demons and ghosts and all

of this kind of thing, you know, trying to get into. So the gateways in Babylon really ramp up this kind of magical apotropaic function. So in this cuneiform text that we have from the late middle Babylonian period, we have these great titles, epithets, which are given to the gates. So while a gate might have been known as the Urash Gate, it also has then this kind of lordy title around it. So for instance, the Urash Gate was called, The Enemy is Abhorrent to It. The Zaba Gate, which is on the eastern side of the city, is called, It Hates the Attacker. That's the name of it there. We have another one inside the inner city, very old gate called, O Shamash, Make Firm the Foundation of the Troops. So can you see they have these very much apotropaic kind of functions to them. And of course, the most famous of all these gates,

the Ishtar Gate itself was known in antiquity by the Babylonians as Ishtar overthrows its adversaries or its assailants. So the gate overthrows for Ishtar, as it were, its assailants. So you can really see that these gates are very much magical portals, more really than practical portals in many ways. These various gates, you highlighted how their origins stretch far before the wondrous walls of Babylon, but it is Nebuchadnezzar who brings them to the next level, isn't it? Yes, quite literally to the next level, because of course, again, we go back to that sponge cake analogy, okay? So Nebuchadnezzar now is the icing on the top of the sponge and of course the gates have a deep ancestry so some of

their foundations are quite literally lower down on an archaeological level so the ishtar gate that we now know the famous one was on a higher level of of course, than the older Ishtar Gate. So when Nebuchadnezzar was building his version of the Ishtar Gate, he dug down to the foundations of the old one. And if you go to Babylon today, the old one can still be seen there, and Nebuchadnezzar would have seen it himself. But then he built kind of on top and around it, you see. So that's the way in which these kind of things worked. So what we have in situ in Babylon now is probably a kind of late middle Babylonian, 1200 BCE gate.

It has the same decorative features, but without the glazed bricks, but it does have raised bricks in the form of animals and dragons and this kind of thing. But of course, what we don't have is any top to it at all. So we don't know if there were battlements or ramparts or anything like that, which really leads me on to what we think the Ishtar Gate of Nebuchadnezzar was all about. And I'm sure some of your listeners will have gone to the Pergamon Museum

in Berlin, where they've reconstructed the most magnificent, you know, it's breathtaking when you see the Ishtar Gate in all of its kind of lapis lazuli blue colour. But there's quite a story behind it, really, because when the German excavators in the early part of the 20th century were at the site of Babylon, they discovered in the area of the gate, only the remains of this previous gate and baked bricks, but all around them were shards of shattered glazed bricks. Now we know that Nebuchadnezzar was building in glazed bricks, and this is really quite an advanced thing. It was the latest fashion, basically, Nebuchadnezzar started for these beautifully coloured bricks.

And it's something, of course, that goes on in the Babylonian building tradition then under the Achaemenid Persians, for instance, if you look at Susa or Pasargada or whatever. But for Nebuchadnezzar, this was a first. And the German excavators realised that they were lying everywhere. And so they started putting them together, collecting them.

And sort of as a kind of jigsaw puzzle, well, putting bits and pieces together on site. Well, they appealed, first of all, to the Ottomans who were ruling Iraq at the time to transport some of them back. And then to the British who had afterwards taken over the rulership or the governorship of the Kingdom of Iraq and got barrel loads of these shards fragments back to Berlin where they were put into I think it was something like 22 huge vats of fresh water changed regularly to get rid of all the salt and grain that was stuck to them and then they started the process of putting them back together and of course it quickly became

apparent that they simply did not have the full gate. They only had bits and pieces of it. And so the then director of the museum commissioned some ceramics works in Berlin to create glazed brick surfaces to imitate the fragments of the gate that they collected in Babylon. So now when you go there, what you see is actually 80% of the gate is 20th century, and only 20% is actually ancient Babylonian. The only things that are genuinely Babylonian are the animals. Everything else, the ramparts, crenellations, the decorative lines, it says far more about 20th century aesthetics and what we want Babylon to look like than actually what Babylon might have looked like. So that comes as a bit of a shock, I think, when you look at the hard facts.

That's quite disconcerting. But the animals, they are from fragments, they are the genuine things, but we can't even be sure that the arrangement of the animals is accurate in any way either. So what is sold to us by the Pergamon Museum as this wonder is actually a little bit more of a dodgy experience when you think about it. It gets close to Babylon, but not close enough. Well, let's avoid the dodginess by actually exploring these animals. Okay, we don't know exactly how they were laid out on the gates, but we know that they had these decorations of these various animals on the walls of Babylon. First off, what types of animals are we talking about? Well, we've got three. We have the lion, and the lion is the symbol of the goddess Ishtar, who of course is a great kind of martial goddess, but also a goddess of sexual desire as well. So

she has this kind of gender shifting identity about her. So the lion is her beast. Then we have the bull, and it's worth saying these are wild bulls, and that's a figure of the god Adad, who is the storm god, the thunder god. And then finally, we have this composite thing, this kind of dragon-headed, snake-necked, lionine-bodied, but with eagle's feet. This thing is called the Mushashu. And the Mushashu dragon, or Mushashu serpent, is the symbol of Marduk, who of course is the supreme god of Babylon. So these are the three types that make up the decoration, but they come in different ways. So the lions are only found in the ceremonial procession way, which leads up to the beautiful gate itself.

On the gate, we have the bull and the Moshashu dragon. All of these figures again are there for an apotropaic quality they're there to ward off danger and evil i don't think they represent necessarily the god's presence on the wall as it were but they are there to say that the gods are ever watchful for the prosperity and the safety of babylon so i think that's what they're there. It's like wearing a kind of talisman around your neck or your evil eye, that kind of thing, but on a grand scale. And just to give you something of the scale, so these lions, for instance,

that line up on the walkway, the great processional way into Babylon, these are made up of, I think it's 46 bricks in 11 lines, where it makes up one roaring lion. It's a real kind of remarkable feat of design and engineering that these brickmakers, who of course were superlatively good in Babylonia, could make these raised figures.

And it's kind of like this jigsaw put them all together in that way. So that's all of them, you know, harmoniously then create these lions. And there are different colour ways used too. So the lions and the bulls and the mushashus alternate between kind of like an orange colour to being a pale white cream colour. Sometimes they're on lapis lazuli backgrounds.

Sometimes they're on pale turquoise backgrounds as well. So there are colour changes as you go through the walkway and then approach the gate itself. And I just want to, if I can, quote something from a colleague of ours, Mark van der Meer, one of the greatest seriologists of our time. He has this really wonderful passage in an article he's written about the experience of walking down

the avenue, the processional avenue, in the nighttime where these lions are approaching the gate. He says this, at night, only the brightly coloured bands and animals would have been visible, the blue of the walls merging into the dark, but during the day the glazed bricks of the background wall shone like the stone of a seal, and this calls to mind a passage from the era epic where the god Ishum likens Babylon to a gemstone seal on the neck of the sky, and visitors feel surrounded by the goddess Ishtar walking among her lion symbols confronting them then one faces the gate itself also colored dark blue it depicted some 150 dragons and bulls the symbols of the god Marduk and Adad protectors of the city beautiful evocative image that Mark puts together there of the senses at work in a site like Babylon.

And that's surely what we should always try to remember when we try to walk the streets of Alexandria, Babylon, Persepolis, Rome, whatever. We try to get those feelings back again, isn't it? All of our senses would have been working overtime in a place like this. And also, if you are coming from the countryside, you've never seen something like this before. You see it, then you walk through it, and you're just amazed by the amount of manpower would have taken to build something precisely which actually goes on to my next point i mean lapis lazuli of course originates from afghanistan doesn't it so really far away to get that a statement of power but does it also emphasize as you hinted at earlier the sheer quality the great quality of the craftsmen who

went and kind of polished the stone who were there right at the center of the building process i think it really does it's worth saying that the blue is not genuine lapis oh so it's not from the bad action no but they've clearly seen and used lapis They know it very well and they know how expensive it is. And so this is a kind of knockoff lapis and they've done it by mixing various components together. So it's all knockoff, but that doesn't, I think, take away anything from what you're saying because the effect is the same, of course. Now, I also think there's something that goes beyond this idea of resembling lapis, which is a truly a kind of like a stone of the gods because in a lot of near eastern thought the hair sometimes even the skin of the gods was thought to be made

of lapis as well so i think that's also kind of imbuing a sense of divinity into the gateways we should also say that we're not sure of course if all of the gateways had this kind of, you know, mega treatment to it. But we certainly can be sure that the Ishtar Gate did because of this great processional way that's attached to it, which was used essentially for the great New Year festival once a year, when the statue of the god Marduk was paraded from the Euphrates through the city centre to his temple, which was at the centre of Babylon itself. So maybe the Ishtar Gate got a special treatment. So we're not so sure about the others.

Do we know about the walls themselves? Were the walls... From what we can tell, they were whitewashed. So with a kind of like a gypsum, I suppose, is what we would think about. But we also know that many of the bricks were stamped with the names and titles of Nebuchadnezzar as well. They weren't meant to be seen because they are always laid face down,

but you know, his name is there in the core of the brick. We also find, there's some great examples. We have found, there's one brick in the British Museum where one of the workers has scribbled his name in Aramaic into the wet brick. And my favorite one is in Berlin. The brick has a dogma, a paw print, right the way in the middle of it. And you can really feel the brickmaker's frustration. Anyway, it was too late now. You know, the brick has been made, the stamp was on,

and then the dog walks through. And anyway, it's put in. And several years ago, I was in the Pergamon Museum in the archives there, and I was allowed to hold one of these stamped bricks with Nebuchadnezzar's names and titles in it. And you could very, very, I mean, it was a beautiful stamp, which is, you know, sort of obviously cut in reverse and then stamped into the still moist clay and then went on to be baked. The stamp was very, very clear. You could read the name in the cuneiform very clearly. But then the other thing which was amazing was that there was bitumen all over the bottom of the stone, of the brick, which of course made it watertight. And I think

probably the whole course of the wall at the bottom was coated with bitumen because Babylon had a real problem to deal with throughout his life, and that was basically rising damp. The water table at Babylon was always very, very high and therefore would permeate into mud brick very easily, of course, and therefore could potentially bring the whole constructions down. And so Nebuchadnezzar tried to set that off by putting bitumen, which is essentially a tar, onto the bottom of his bricks as well. Let's move on. Let's talk Persians and the legacy of the walls as we start to near wrapping up at the end of this episode. But we've got to talk about the legacy. Oh, yes. What happens in those decades after Nebuchadnezzar? So that Neo-Babylonian

Golden Age has now been and gone, and you get the arrival of the Persians. How does that affect the walls of Babylon? Well, first of all, when Cyrus the Great takes Babylon, one of the things he writes in his own cylinder, which of course he buries within the foundations of the Temple of Marduk, is he notes that he did a big repair job on the walls to begin with. And that's because for the 10, 12 years of the reign of Narbonidus, the last indigenous Babylonian king, he kind of left the city going to disrepair. He just not bothered with it at all. So the first thing that Cyrus can say, you know, as king of Persia, now claiming to be king of Babylon is, I fixed the city again. You know, I restored it to what

it was. He too, incidentally, finds a cylinder in the foundations which belong to Ashurbanipal of Assyria. And he says, no, this is the name of a king who came before me. And he leaves his mark there. What's really fascinating is that the work that's been done by Italian and Iranian archaeologists at Persepolis, which is the great ceremonial city of the Persians in southwestern Iran near modern-day Shiraz, has really rewritten the history of the site over the last 10 years. Because we used to think that Persepolis was completely the work of Darius the Great, starting in about 519 BCE. But the work that's been done by these Italian and Iranian teams at a place called Tala'ajuri, which means the Hill of Pot Sherds, just a mile beyond the

platform of Persepolis, so very, very close indeed, reveals now the foundations of a huge Babylonian-style gateway, essentially the Ishtar Gate, transferred to Persia. And this is clearly the work of Cyrus the Great. So Cyrus got to the site first, and I think he was trying there by building this enormous gate. I mean, it's on the scale of the Ishkar Gate, exactly on the scale, at Persepolis. I think his purpose was to rebuild Babylon or to model his empire on Babylon, of course. It was so important to him. Now, what happened to that gate? Well, it's highly likely that his successor, Darius I, probably pulled that down. likely that his successor Darius I probably pulled that down. But there are marks, very, very clear ground plan that we can see. But more interestingly, I think we even have some of the decoration from the front of the gate. And what do we get? Well, we certainly have Mushushu dragons

there. And we also have a bit of cuneiform, which says the word shari, which shari means, of course, in Babylonian, king as well. So it seems as though Cyrus was even following Nebuchadnezzar's design plans for the facade of the gate as well. So it's really quite remarkable. You know, and had Cyrus lived longer, the site of Persepolis could have been very, very different indeed. And I love that, how we know archaeology there at Persepolis, and also archaeology currently ongoing at Babylon with Dr. M.O. Altea and so on. They are learning more about the walls and the legacy across all these Mesopotamian civilizations. It's extraordinary. Constantly. The work that's going on in Babylon, I'm glad to say, is bringing up more and more

evidence for us all the time. And of course, Babylon has suffered so much in the last four or five decades, and especially from the 1990s, where American troops were stationed there. They even created sort of concrete areas for the bringing of trucks and so forth. They put down sandbags everywhere. These sandbags split and then have gone into the archaeology itself and therefore corrupted what the archaeologists are having to work through. So it's wonderful to see the site is properly receiving much needed attention because before even the Americans got there, Saddam Hussein, you know, in his dreams of grandeur was emulating Nebuchadnezzar and creating bricks with his own name stamped into

them and rebuilding Babylon on his own image as well. So, you know, the city has a long, long, long history of being knocked about. But really, in the 20th century, it suffered some of its worst damage. So I'm very, very pleased that archaeologists, especially archaeologists, are taking back control of it. And also, it's becoming more and more of an ideological site for the Iraqis generally as well. It's being sold now as something which is a genuine bit of Iraq's history. And Iraqis, you know, are going there, visiting the site as tourists themselves. And I really hope that in the near future, the site will be opening up to more Westerners and foreigners who can go back to Iraq.

You know, I'm longing to go there myself. So that's one of my aims in the next few years me too i've never been but i'd you know having done this podcast now for a few years and doing more and more on babylon this story it just really is astonishing i'd love to see it we should make it happen yeah well many documentary opportunities in the future my friend i mean last question i've got to ask about the end of the wars, if we know anything about that, because, I mean, I know you're shaking your head already, but I just kind of want to ask, like, because we've the Greeks, Herodotus, they gain this legendary status in the next

century. Can we imagine them at the time of the Seleucids in Alexander? We just don't know. In Alexander's time, they must have still been there. They start disappearing under the Seleucids, definitely. By the time the Parthians get there, the next Iranian dynasty, they've all but disappeared, really. And of course, mainly because they had been so well made by Nebuchadnezzar that they were pilfered. So it wasn't really a slow disintegration back into the mud,

but actually it was pilfering by builders who were keen to create factories themselves or housing or basically ranches for cattle, whatever it was. They were well pilfered in antiquity. Well, Lloyd, this has been fantastic. Lastly, but certainly not least, you are embarking on a new project or you're underway. You're already doing a new project all about Babylon, including the wolves. Yes, absolutely. A new book I'm writing, hopefully, you know, should be finished later this year, early next year, on the history of Babylon. And it's really aimed for your kind of listener, you know, the informed listener who wants to know more about this remarkable city, walls, gates and everything.

Well, it just goes to me to say, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. You're very, very welcome. Thank you. thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast you're very very welcome thank you well there you go there was professor lloyd's luellen jones talking all things the walls of babylon i hope you enjoyed today's episode it's always a joy when we cover babylon combined with a great architectural wonder and you really can't go wrong i've got a feeling that they're going to be more babylon episodes coming up in the near future, so watch out for those. You don't want to miss them. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to the podcast, whether that be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, make

sure that you are subscribed, that you are following The Ancient 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.