The Ancients - Tower of Babel

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

The Tower of Babel story is iconic. Featured in the Book of Genesis, it explains how different languages came to be across the world. But what are its origins?Join Tristan Hughes and Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in this special episode of The Ancients - recorded live at the London Podcast Festival - as they delve into the biblical roots of the myth and uncover the real archeological remains that inspired the fable. They explore how ancient ziggurats influenced depictions of the tower, discuss the intersection between history and faith and discover how age-old texts and modern archaeology combine to unravel the mysteries behind the story of the Tower of Babel.Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight, audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK.Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

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 Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're exploring the captivating story of the Tower of Babel. Famous from the Bible, the Tower of Babel features in the book of Genesis, with its story explaining how different languages came to be across the world. But, as with so many famous myths from ancient times, there usually is a

historical basis to them, at least some sort of historical influence. And that is the case with the Tower of Babel, because archaeology has revealed a real-life influence for this tower and its story, another great structure that dominated the skyline of ancient Babylon, a ziggurat. The Tower of Babel is a great story where archaeology and the Bible have combined with thrilling effect. Now to explain the story of the Tower of Babel and the real influences behind this story, well I was delighted to welcome back Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to the show, one of our favourite ancients guests of all time, a fantastic speaker. Now this was a very special episode because it's the first one we have ever done in front of a live audience.

That's right, we had a sellout crowd at the London Podcast Festival a few months ago for this event, and hopefully we'll be doing more like it in the future, both across the UK and further abroad too. The US, Canada, Australia, let's see. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, enjoy this special episode of The Ancients in front of a live audience as we explore the captivating story of the Tower of Babel. Lloyd, good to see you. How are you doing? Very good, thank you very much. It's great to be here. We've probably all heard the name Tower of Babel. It's one that, of course, is linked closer to the Bible, but it's also one that

has an archaeological tale to it too. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's all too easy to kind of skirt over the relationship between the text of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of ancient Iraq. But I think with the Tower of Babel the two do begin to align themselves and in fact when archaeologists first started to go to the Middle East to Iraq part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century they kind of went with a bible in one hand and a shovel in the other you know and they were determined that whatever they dug up was going to map on to the Bible. And so when early archaeologists in the late 1840s, 1850s to the 70s were wandering around Iraq, obviously they could see these remains of these enormous mud brick structures that were still surviving. So almost immediately, archaeologists began to say, ah,

we have discovered the Tower of Babel. And there were many contenders, in fact, in the first sort of hundred years of archaeology in that part of the world for the actual tower. I don't think it's ever really, we know what it was, but I don't think it doesn't exist any longer. So what we've got now, of course, is just the text really to go with. And I luckily have it here by my side. So we're going to start with going through what the story is in the Old Testament of the Tower of Babel, and then we'll go into the archaeology and then the later history. So let's start. What is the story of the Tower of Babel? So it's a very brief account.

It's only nine verses in the 10th chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. I'll read it to you. If you know it, please join in. Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And said one to the other, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down, that's an interesting one, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, look, they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one

another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. There ends the first lesson. So it's essentially it's a text which recounts a kind of divide between God and humans. God and let us come down. God and the others who are in heaven are afraid that these mortals are going to gain power over him. So he's very scared that these human beings have got the nonce to build cities, to communicate ideas to one another. So will he be redundant in the long run?

That's essentially the story. So he confuses them with multiple languages so that they can no longer communicate. And therefore, none of these plans will ever come to fruition. And this is a story that also, just to set the context and the background there right from the beginning, this also happens, it's very early on in the story of the Bible, at least the Bible that we have today. We're just 10 chapters in. Two of those chapters are on the Adam and Eve story. We've got the chapters about the flood just before this, and then we're into the Tower of Babel. So this is very early on in the structure

of the Hebrew Bible. The next question is, it has to be, was it real? So, a couple of contenders then, as I say. I think it is real. I think whatever the tower was, there's no doubt that the Jewish Hebrew scribes were recording the presence of ziggurats. And they are dotted all across. So what is this? So a ziggurat is essentially a step pyramid. So a very broad base, then another broad base on top, slightly smaller, up, up, up, up, to about maybe six or seven levels. The internal structure of a ziggurat is not like a pyramid. It's dense.

It's just packed with rubble. So it's just an outside kind of staircase, really. And the whole purpose was to have a shrine at the very top of the apex. This is where the god was thought to reside. And essentially what the Mesopotamians, whether the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, they all believed the same thing. That these artificial mountains, because Iraq is flat. It's Iraq that we're largely talking about. By and large, and also southwestern Iran as well.

By and large, it's flat. And so these are artificial mountains. Mountains always played important roles in mythology, of course. And if you haven't got mountains around you, then you're going to build them. So it's just something in human nature, isn't it, to build up, to get closer to the heavens. So the Babylonians believed that the ziggurat was the place where heaven and earth meets and in fact it was the point where a god could step out of the heavens and down onto earth so it was a divine staircase essentially for the gods to come down this is exactly what yahweh the

hebrew god does in this reading as well but woe betides anybody any mortal who tried to reach up to heaven that way. So it's one-way traffic only, decidedly so. But these were the great cult centers of the gods throughout the Mesopotamian world. Every city, every town almost, had its own ziggurat, which was usually dedicated to one or sometimes more gods. In Babylon, for instance, in the great city of Babylon itself, the biggest metropolis on earth by the 7th century BCE, there were two enormous temples, great ziggurats there. One was the place where the god Marduk, who was the supreme god of the Babylonians, he took his rest and his comfort. It was like his own house, if you like. But the other one, which was built opposite that, was his state temple. It's like his office, if you like. And it was, without a doubt, one of the biggest structures that the world had ever seen.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get too far too quickly. Let's not follow the party too much. Because there's a few other contenders we got for ziggurats in the meantime. Because it's quite interesting with the whole term ziggurat. And first, we're a little bit of a tangent. But I felt I had to say it. Recently, I was in Petra.

I was fortunate to go to Petra. And one of the places we visited was this place known as the high place i put to sacrifice it's called and it's one of the biggest mountains above petra where they have an altar and you see it again and again with all these different ancient cultures they build up high because they their gods are above them so you know kind of in words of uh the scholar jody magnus they're kind of cooking up a barbecue. So they'll be offering meat or whatever. The smell wafts up to heaven. The God smells up.

Absolutely. Barbecue and goes down. And, you know, you get new factors. There's a wonderful Babylonian text which says that, you know, when they offer sacrifice that like that, the gods buzz around like flies. They're really that keen. That's what they believe. That's exactly it. So it's this stairway to God. And you have to build on the high place. And if you think about the Hebrew Bible itself, where does God get seen or spoken to? Moses goes up

to Mount Horeb or up to Mount Sinai or whatever. So if you're in an environment which doesn't have that natural rock formation, then you've got to build that. Now, let's talk about these ziggurats, because it's more than just Babylon, as you've mentioned, they're all across Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, and a bit of Iran too. Let's go back to at that time when archaeologists were going out there with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other, and they were seeing these big ziggurats, and they were thinking in the back of their mind, they just can't get it out of their mind, Tower of Babel, Tower of Babel, got to find it, where is it? Were there any early contenders when they were looking at the back of their minds, they just can't get it out of their mind, Tower of Babel, Tower of Babel, got to find it, where is it? Were there any early contenders

when they were looking at these ziggurats that they think, oh, this could potentially be that? Yeah, the one that caught their eye was at a place called Dur-Kaligalzu, the fortress of King Kaligalzu, which was built in the Kassite period, so about the 12th century BCE. And it's located about 50 miles north of Babylon. Deu Caligalzu was a Babylonian new build. It was like a Milton Keynes of its day. They built it from scratch as a kind of like, you know, an offshoot of the capital. Some people have decided it's like, you know, the way in which Paris and Versailles operated. So it was a getaway of the capital. Some people have decided it's like the way in which Paris and Versailles

operated. So it was a getaway for the king. And there, there was a huge ziggurat built. And by the end of the 19th century, much of its inner core still remained. And it towers about, even in the 19th century, about

30 meters high, out of what was possibly 60 meters high, I think. So it was a biggie. In the 1980s, under Saddam Hussein, Saddam rebuilt the first platform of it, in fact, with two staircases that go up. And now it's a must-have venue for local weddings. There are lots of brides and grooms have their pictures there. So that, for a long, long time was a contender. The other one was in Iran, Chogha Zambil, which is still the best preserved ziggurat in the world today. I mean, you can still, I mean, if they'd allow you to climb up right to the top of it, it's incredible. But as archaeologists went deeper into Iraq and also as the archaeology itself got more sophisticated,

they realized that Babylon itself has more than enough evidence for these ziggurats. And don't forget, the Bible is very succinct and very precise in saying this is the tower in Babel. and very precise in saying this is the tower in Babel. So Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon. So Hebrew word for Babylon. And Babylon itself, Bilbil or Bilbol in Akkadian means the gate of the gods. So there's an etymological precision in that. It's not a Hebrew scribe just thinking, oh, this could be anywhere. It is the Tower of Babylon that he's actually talking about. Surely they should have realized this earlier, those early archaeologists going out there. No, because, don't forget, the work on language was only slowly developing. So we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon. So we have to wait certain generations

until all the pieces get put together. There's an interesting thing as well, isn't it? Because for us, you know, it's such a, you know, the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledygook that comes out of it. You know, we're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other. For us in English, babble works really well, doesn't it? Because you're babbling on about something. It means we're incoherent, we don't know. But

actually that has nothing to do with the naming at all. But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble, in fact. So it's all built into the Hebrew already. So they were playing with Babylon and babbling as well, which luckily in English we've inherited. Lloyd, you're dishing out facts here and there. This is why we get you on. Well, let's then focus our chat on Babylon. And you mentioned the ziggurats, and you've got another passage there. You reaching out for that forces me now to ask you, what have you reached

out for? I've reached out here for an inscription from the reign of King Nabupalasa. So who is Nabupalasa? Nabupalasa is the king who restores power to Babylon at the beginning of the 7th century BC. Babylon was razed to the ground by the Assyrians. Nasty, wicked Assyrians. The Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon. They really lay waste to Babylon. And in a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the 17th century,

Nabalapalasa, Babylonian born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty and he begins a revitalization campaign for the city of Babylon. And he begins to glorify it. You'll probably know his son better. His son was Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar II. And between them, Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar beautify this city on a scale that had never been seen before. Because Babylon at that time, this is the most populated, or it seems the richest, the wealthiest to their kings. It's the center of the world. This is the golden age of Babylon. Yeah, and one of the reasons why the Assyrians hated it so much, because culturally it was the center of the world. Everything came out of Babylon. Mathematics,

astronomy, astrology, literature, music, mythology, you name it. Babylon was the kind of the great epicenter, the great almost factory of all of these great cultural movements. And it roedd yn y math o'r eicefn, y ffactor mawr o'r holl symudiadau diwylliannol hyfryd. Ac fe wnaeth hi ddigwydd yn llawer o ran ysirwyr, bod y dynastiaeth newydd hwn, a'i enwom yn arwain dros y byd Neobabylonean, yn yr emperiad a ddodod i Iran a'r nôl o Egip, a hefyd y cyfan o'r Lefant, yn dechrau ei ddod yn gwybod. of the Levant, they started to beautify it. They had no worries about money because it was flooding in from the conquered territories and also from the spoils of war. And the conquered territories, how far are we talking? Well, we're talking right the way up to the top of Syria, right the way down

to the north of Egypt and across all of the Middle East to Iran as well. Perhaps the most significant series of conquests were the conquests that took place in the Levant in what is now Israel-Palestine. So the destruction of Jerusalem, for instance, the plundering of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, the goods that poured into Babylon from that alone, you know, helped pay for these huge, huge building works. Not only ziggurats, but also new royal palaces, new gates. The famous Ishtar Gate is created at this period, all in this very distinctive blue glazed brick. It's part of the walls of Babylon. Yeah, absolutely. The walls themselves are about 11 miles around, for instance. You could drive two sets of chariots at the top of the walls I mean this was this was

huge it was a metropolis a true true great city long before Rome before Alexandria there was Babylon and right in the heart of this is is the religious you know the religious pulse of the whole thing sits in the city center with these two temples belonging to the god Marduk. Marduk was the Babylonian god par excellence. There had been other gods who'd come and gone, but Marduk, he was considered to be the great wind god. He defeated the demons at the dawn of time, Tiamat and her evil band. He was wise. He was considered to have umpteen eyes and many ears, so he saw everything, he heard everything, and he was believed to reside in his temples there. So he has two temples, one of which is called the Entem Anuki, biggest temple in Babylon. The name means the foundations

of the heaven and the earth. So that really gives us a good example of Babylonian thinking on this ziggurat. It was the connecting point between our mortal existence and the existence of the gods up there. And this is where the cult of Marduk was continued every day. A myriad of priests would be going in there to placate the god. And ancient Babylonian religion worked in that kind of way. You kind of almost made sacrifice. You made your prayers. You incensed and clothed the statues.

You fed the statues with food, almost as a preemptive strike. Don't do anything bad to us because we do all these really good things for you. bad to us because we do all these really good things for you you know so it's a very important role that the priests of Babylon had to maintain this so what we know of this great ziggurat well first of all we can see it in the ground we can still see the outline of the the ziggurat today so if you go on Google Maps you zoom in you can still see very clearly the outline of the ziggurach heddiw. Felly os ydych chi'n mynd ar y mapau Google, os ydych chi'n zoomio i mewn, gallwch chi ddim ond gweld yn glir iawn y llwybr y ziggurach.

Ac pan ddodd archeolegwyr hyn, yn bwysig nawr, wrth gwrs, mae'r holl beth wedi'i ddod yn y llaw, y math o gwaith bryd o'r gwaith, ond gallwn ni ei mesur, ac mae'n mesur 96 x 96 o metr o amgylch, mawr,

ac mae'n cael ei ddodd i fod wedi'i adeiladu 96 o metr around, huge. And it's said to have built up 96 meters as well. So this is the biggest cigarette of all. This is the mother load, it really is. And it's one thing that both Nebuchadnezzar and his father were building on top of a pile of rubble that had been left by the Assyrians. So there had always been a site for worship of Marduk there, but they decided to renew their efforts with it. And the Babylonians were known throughout antiquity as the master brick bakers. And they used two forms of brick.

They used simple baked brick in the sun to do the foundation work, most of the stuff. Roedd yn defnyddio gwaith bric sy'n cael ei ddefnyddio yn y sôn i wneud y gwaith sy'n cael ei ddefnyddio yn y sôn. Ond wedyn roedd ganddyn nhw sgiliau i wneud gwaith bric sy'n cael ei ddefnyddio yn y sôn hefyd. Felly, yn hyfryd. Ac wrth gwrs, fe wnaethon nhw ddewis am y bwyd lapis lazuli hyfryd fel codi allan. Felly dyma'r ziggurat. Roedd yn rhaid i chi ei weld o amser a amser a amser o gwmpas. Roedd yn eu llwyr mwyaf, eu triodd mwyaf. shone. You must have seen it from miles and miles and miles around. It was their greatest glory, their greatest triumph. That is something we always forget about these great monuments, particularly in the Middle East and in Egypt and places like that, when they're in their full glory. It's not just the size of them, it's the brightness in a way, just how they just shone in the landscape.

And coming down from this ziggurat there there was a processional way, again, of blue brickwork with other raised brickwork of lions lining the whole thing up. And then that went to the Ishtar Gate. So this was a monumental processional way which led to this huge ziggurat. One scene never forgotten without any doubt. And the archaeology, this is where we kind of piece our story together, the beginning of it. Do people now believe that this is the inspiration, at least, for the Tower of Babel? Was this the Tower of it. Do people now believe that this is the inspiration at least for the Tower of Babel? Was this the Tower of Babel? Not everybody thinks that, but I am one of those who does think that. And I think it because we've got to stretch our timeline a little bit to understand this.

Because the one thing there which is interesting, so 600 BC, 700 BC? Yeah, so 700 BC and by 600 BC it's complete, it's finished, it's there. And the book of Genesis supposedly set 3000 BC, which begs the question, yeah. So how can it possibly be the ziggurat when we're talking a book set in BC, but now we're at 700 BC. Well, the truth of the matter is this, of course. The book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible. The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible is not the order in which they were written. The books of Genesis, the book of Genesis and the others, the Exodus story of Moses and so forth,

these were all written by Jews in exile in Babylon. In the middle of the 6th century, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonians were taken en masse into captivity. Certainly, when I say en masse, all of the elites, the elite Jews, so the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual were suddenly taken to this new city. And in fact, we know more now about the Jewish settlement in Babylon than we ever did. So back in the 1990s, we discovered a big hoard of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian, and they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one particular

area just outside Babylon, which is called Al Yehud, Jew town, Jewish town. It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while many of them seem to have, you know, maintained something of the Hebrew faith, whatever that was at the time, many of them became completely Babylonianized. They marry Babylonian women, they take Babylonian names, or at least they take Babylonian and Hebrew names and so forth. So we see a lot of assimilation going on. So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon, because otherwise what we're dealing with is things like the you know, the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian exile of the Jews,

and how traumatic it was. And indeed it was traumatic for them, ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God, but they actually, it seems now, that some people coped a lot better than others. You know, so some people assimilated, some people couldn't quite assimilate very easily. So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the book of Psalms, very famously, Psalm 137, by the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept, and our tormentors, the Babylonians, said to us, sing us some songs of Zion. How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land? So this particular psalm?

It's a Babylonian period psalm. It was written during the exile. It's all about how can we talk about God when we are no longer in his presence? Because when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, as far as the Jews believed, God had disappeared. God was absent from their lives. So they were in this foreign place without their God anymore. So if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma. But also now we've got the Jewish text

from Babylonia saying, oh, well, actually some of them were all right. But it comes down to this, Some of them were all right. But it comes down to this, doesn't it? When we're far away from home and we want to remember who we are as a people, we need to start thinking about our histories. And there wasn't a written history of the Jews at this period at all. So the scribes of that period start writing a national history for themselves. So they write the story of Moses and the exodus in the hope of course that they'll go home one day from Babylon and have a second

exodus from captivity as well they start writing the stories of Jacob of Isaac of Joseph even of of course the garden of Eden a paradisos's a persian word the flood of course and the flood is absolutely a huge huge thing atahasis the story of the flood in babylon so essentially this kind of formative what we might call prehistory of the israelites is formulated and set down in now what we would think of as the holy scriptures in the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon. So all around them, the Jewish scribes who are writing this world is also incorporating, of course, their current experiences too.

So, for instance, this is why God in this section of Genesis comes down from the ziggurat, because that's what Babylonian gods did. So they're picking up on these things. The idea of God's omnipotence and omniscience is something which is inherited from the god Marduk, for instance. The Hebrew God had never had those attributes before. This is all something that's been put together by these scribes who are trying to deal with both their exile, but also what's around them. And certainly the story of the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Babylon, gets written into that narrative importantly there. Because what the

Jews want, of course, is for the time to come when they will be freed from this place. And the whole y naratif honno yn bwysig yno. Oherwydd beth mae'r ddews eisiau wrth gwrs yw am y cyfnod y byddant yn cael eu ffri oddi wrth y lle hwn. Ac mae'r holl bwysigrwydd o'r text hwnnw i Genedys X yw bod y cyfnod y byddant yn cael eu llifio eto. Bydd pobl yn mynd yn ôl i'w gartrefau o'u hunain. Bydd y cyfnod y bydd. Ac mae hyn yn cael ei ysgrifennu fel haneswyr as a myth, essentially, which is written into a canonical history of the Jews of that period. So I think it's important that whenever we try to read the Bible, and you know, I'm a man of faith, I'm a priest, so I have to train myself over the years to read this as a religious text with meaning and substance for me but also as a historian I have to look at it in also a cold kind of way and come to terms with it in those ways actually when when

I do that my my faith is only increased in fact it's turned out that way I'm glad to say but yeah so we have to we have to remember that the Hebrew Bible in itself is a construction. And the Bible as we have it now, the Old Testament as we have it now, doesn't really get fixed. It doesn't stop moving around until about the first century BC. It's a very new text when it comes to antiquity. So they're thinking about,

as I said, they're creating these stories at the time that they're in exile in Babylon, and some of them are yearning to return to that area of the world to Jerusalem to where they've come from and that they don't want to forget that as well because this is over two generations isn't it it's a long time and then they're looking around at one of these stories they're looking for you know kind of inspiration not just from other mythical stories in Mesopotamia like the flood story which has its origins in Mesopotamia they must also they're looking around at the great monuments of babylon beautiful babylon the most incredible city in the world at this time and then lo and behold right at the center

is this huge tower probably unlike anything else they've ever seen in their lives before when you think of it that way it's a strong possibility that that definitely then can influence them when they're they talk about a certain tower in the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Absolutely. I think you've hit the nail on the head. And it's certainly my belief that's what's going on there. They are trying to deal, you know, they're dealing with a real life, what's around them. And I think that there's hostilities between the two groups of Jews who are living there, those who have assimilated well into Babylon, and those who are yearning for home and don't want anything to do with Babylon.

And I think part of the reaction that we have in the story of the Tower of Babel is against those who are too content to be here as well. You should be ashamed of yourselves. So it's interesting because we have two big prophetic books written at this time as well. One of them in Israel, big prophetic books written at this time as well. One of them in Israel, still remains in Israel, people who were still there. And the other in Babylon itself, the book of Jeremiah is written in Jerusalem. The book of Ezekiel is written in Babylon. And in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet says all the time, relax, enjoy it, enjoy it. Marry a Babylonian woman, you know, do well, make well for yourself. And he actually prophesied and said, God says, make businesses, settle down here, enjoy. Back in Jerusalem, at the same period, Jeremiah is saying, woe to Babylon, may she burn, may she fall. And I

think what the Hebrew scribes are doing, basically these are Jeremiah followers, that they are anticipating the fall of this wicked city after all. Whereas the reality now we know is a lot more laissez-faire than that. I just love how with this story, it's that we're not just looking at the biblical text, it is exploring this amazing archaeology because Mesopotamia is such a rich part of the world for ancient history today. I mean, it's no surprise that of ancient episodes many on mesopotamia babylon assyria the persians sumerians all of that proved amongst the most popular because there is just something that is so attractive about it because we're learning more about it not just about the everyday people but with all those canary form tablets like we're

learning more about the everyday people whether it's people in exile as in our chat today or just a person who owns a brewery you know or babylon from 3 000 years ago and i think that's that's the real joy of dealing with cuneiform evidence in particular because we all right we're not necessarily getting you know literary masterworks all the time but what we do get are personal letters from you know dad to the eldest son, or we get tax returns. As dull as it sounds, they are actually fabulous. Tax and sewers, okay? They're the overrated things. The study of Mesopotamia is alive and vital, and it's adding to our knowledge of antiquity

and how to be human all the time as well. But what's fascinating about Babylon in, you know, in the biblical tradition, because I suppose that's how most of us then have inherited Babylon, okay? And as I say, you know, the first archaeologists went out, they were their spades and Bibles. I suppose that the story of Babylon doesn't just stop when the Jews go home from exile. First of all, it's important to say that many thousands of Jewish families stayed in Babylon. And the great Babylonian scholarship that developed in the late antique period

all comes from Babylon as well. So Babylon always was a huge Jewish center and remained so until the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when many of the Jews of Babylon left, the Jewish presence in Babylon has always been enormous. rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible was written in Babylon over the centuries after its demise as a great center. I know they're eating their bread, but they're also drinking their beer aren't they I just want to talk about beer but beer's big in Babylon huge in Babylon massive got a goddess for beer you've also got a goddess for hangovers as well which is great yeah love that I had to get that in there anything about beer in Mesopotamia is fantastic. So it seems like this great monument,

the Etem Menanki, this great ziggurat in Babylon may well have influenced them when the story of the Tower of Babel. But of course, that's almost just, I mean, that's the structure itself. The whole story is about the multiple languages, isn't it? And how they kind of explain going from one language to all these different languages being created and people not being able to understand each other. And that must have been the Jewish experience in Babylon. So do you think that's, is Babylon cosmopolitan? So cosmopolitan.

So, you know, the Jews who came there, you know, only had their bit of Hebrew to go with. Suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian, bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek, Persian. All of this mix was going on in Babylon, as multicultural as London is today, essentially. That's what we need to try to get into our minds. And I think that was kind of unnerving the Jewish elite, the scribes and so forth as well. They didn't feel comfortable with any of that.

And I think that gets filtered into this story as well. So that altogether leads ultimately to the creation of this story. But it must have taken a bit of time to create at the same time. So often, with so many things in ancient history, we think, OK, here's one part, here's one influence, here's another influence, and bam, it must have happened straight away. But I'm guessing to then create that story, it takes a bit of time in its own right to develop. I guess so. I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes created the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. But certainly the story of the Tower of Babylon is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE, certainly. But it has a life well beyond even that, because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New

Testament as well. And this is where it begins to perhaps have more relevance to the modern world, you know, because this is how we kind of know it more. So, you know, the book of Revelation. Yes, let's do this now, because this is, I don't even know how to describe this. It's, yes, confusing. Confusing and mind-blowing, the book of Revelation. So sometime, imagine Ephesus, 90 CE. So about 90 CE, first at the end of the first century in Ephesus, there's a man called John, probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on an island of Patmos. He's

been exiled there, a little Greek island today. But he lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus, big, big city in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are, like many of the churches of Asia Minor, are surreptitiously pushing against the Roman Empire and its domination. Because essentially what the book Empire and its domination, because essentially what the book of Revelation is about, you know, Revelation, literally, it means the unveiling. So it's the unveiling of a truth. And the truth is, for John, is that there is only room for one empire,

and that's the empire of Jesus Christ, not the empire of the romans because this is yeah this is deep in roman and certainly not exactly certainly not the roman empire emperor who at this point was domitian who was pretty mad on self-aggrandizement and being called a god and so forth okay so very subtly in the new testament we find a pushback against roman imperialism essentially they have to do it subtly because, of course, there's every chance of persecution. And we've already seen under Nero what, you know, persecution of Christians can do. So what John and other writers like him do at the time is that they use the image of Babylon. It's reutilized from the Old Testament now, and it's used as a metaphor for Rome.

So in the book of Revelation, when we learn about the whore of Babylon, for instance, riding upon the back of the great beast, what we're dealing with there, of course, is the emperor of Rome riding the empire, the Roman empire itself. So Babylon becomes the shorthand for Rome all the way through the book of Revelation. If you read it with that code in mind constantly, so the beast itself, Rome, has seven heads, so the seven hills of Rome and so forth. And the more you read Revelation with this anti-Roman imperialist thought, the more apparent it becomes. So Babylon is kind of reactivated in the Christian mind. That old Jewish paradigm of the wickedness of Babylon and everything that the tower represented is brought back into play again with Rome. And of course, Rome is therefore cast as a second Babylon.

And what happens to Babylon? Well, it falls eventually. It disappears to dust. And this is what the Christians are saying in this unveiling of a new truth. This is what is going to happen to Rome in its turn. It's going to follow the way of Babylon too. But they don't say that directly. They have to use Babylon as a cloak almost for that resistance.

They use it constantly. Absolutely. Then, of course, there's another afterlife to this too. Because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century. Renaissance time. Yeah, yeah. the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century. It's at Renaissance time. Yeah, yeah. And especially during the European Reformation, the image of Babylon is once more reactivated by the Protestant reformers. So now the second Rome, Papal Rome, is also cast as another Babylon as well. So the papal throne is the throne of Satan, for instance.

The great whore is now the pope and so forth. And this all comes to a head in two particular ways, this kind of utilization of Babylon in this way, in Christian understanding, in the sermons of Martin Luther, but also in northern European art of this period, because from about the 1540s up until the 1580s, there is a plethora of images, paintings, and also prints of what else but the Tower of Babel. It becomes one of the most important art subjects in Northern European painting.

And many of you will probably know that Peter Bruegel the Elder, in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Babel. The best known to today is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. If you Wikipedia the Tower of Babel, that's normally the image which also comes up. Yeah, which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because Bruegel himself trained as an artist in Rome. So when he returns home and he wants to paint this antique scene of the Tower of Babel, he has Rome in his mind straight away. So his Tower of Babel is round. It's not a square ziggurat. It's round,

but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really. And it's kind of unfinished. It's got a big split in it. It's full of arches that go around. And of course, what's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum. So he sees the ruins of the coliseum and he thinks okay this must be the the roman babel and this is what he paints and it's really fascinating the way he does it as well because first of all just as in genesis it's it's a work of hubris by humans because the scale of it is enormous when you look at the the painting, you know, the city of Babylon around, which is his Antwerp, it's tiny, tiny diminutive little figures,

you know, vast, and it's unfinished. And even the bits that have been finished have been finished so long ago that they've started to crumble and they're being patched up while they haven't even started the beginning of the end of the top of the of the tower yet so it's constant work in progress as a way man laboring away with his own vanities to build this project and in the in the

front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on the king of babylon the king of rome the pope so all of this comes together perfectly in this visualization of what a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a defunct religion, and a wicked urban center is all about. So that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going. We're talking about keeps on going. We're talking about keeping on going just before we completely wrap up. Shall we talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2? Feels a bit different, doesn't it? But there is a link here.

Yeah, of course. So Adam Douglas, you know, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that, you know, how do we, how can we communicate together, you know, because we're all living in a Babel world, okay, that, you know, unless you, you know, do the, put the hours in and learn another language. But he came up with the idea of the Babel fish. So it's a little silver fish, which you can just insert in your ear, and that will give you the power to understand anybody. So it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel effect, and he calls it the Babel fish, of course. And it's no coincidence, isn't it, that language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us.

I mean, this has been fantastic. We've gone from the Book of Genesis, then Babylon, exploring the archaeology, and then the later legacy of the whole story of the Tower of Babel. But it is interesting. I wanted to do this topic this topic one because it's a name that we've all probably heard of and but we don't know too much about but two because it is a story also of archaeology as well and with so many things of the Bible it's it's fascinating whether it's King Herod how archaeology and non-biblical sources are revealing more about the real King Herod or Pontius Pilate, or the story, of course, of Noah and the flood and the influences from Mesopotamia. There are so many parts, you know, well-known stories from the biblical account that you can align or you can look to alongside archaeology to make, in my opinion, make it more available to more and more people? Most definitely. And I think it's a real sad fact that we've created this very artificial

divide between ancient history and biblical studies, because the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, it is another source. It's an ancient historical source. I teach it as easily and as readily as I teach Gilgamesh or as I teach Homer. It's just part of the package that I teach to my students because it's important to see this as a holistic one. And the Hebrew Bible doesn't come out of a vacuum. It is part of a Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian, and later on Greco-Roman world, all of it is being influenced by that. And all of the books of the Bible, of Old and New Testaments, have their agendas which draw on current situations of the authors, of course.

Well, Lloyd, I think this has been absolutely fantastic. I think we'll draw the interview to a close here. I think lastly, though, I mean, tell us a few. You've written countless books on this area of the world, Persians and Babylon. Tell us a couple of those relevant to today's chat. So the most relevant, I suppose, is one that's forthcoming. So it's one I've just finished writing, and it's called Babylon, the Great City. And that's a history of Babylon from the year dot until the fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a long, duré history.

More generally in the area, I've written on Persians, the age of the great kings. Persia, of course, was part of, you know, dominated Babylon for 300 years. And then more generally, lots of stuff for the Asian. Just once again from me, thank you so much for your time this evening and taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to come here for our first ever ancients live show and hopefully the first of many and lloyd once again thank you so much thank you

okay OK. Can I go home now? Well, there you go. There was our special episode on the Tower of Babel in front of a live audience at the London Podcast Festival with Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to it. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can

also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.