The Rest Is History - 145. Babylon

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Greatest city on earth. Den of iniquity. Imperial oppressor. Wealth and power. The ancient city of Babylon has been mythologised for millenia, but how much do we actually know and why does it still resonate today? Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings. So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilisation had been fashioned out of mud. Back in the beginning, when all the earth had been ocean, Lord Marduk, king of the gods, had built a raft of reeds, covered it with dust, mingled it with water to form a primordial slime, and out of this raised a home for himself, the Esagila, the first building in the world. And this could still be seen eons later,

standing in the heart of Babylon. But it had needed no temple to make the Babylonians appreciate what could be done with earth and water. They knew it in their bones. I will take blood, Marduk had announced in the earliest days of the world, and I will sculpt flesh, and I will form the first man. So that was the former vampire novelist, Tom Holland, dominating the Persian fire fire talking about Babylon. Well when I wrote that I had no idea that Marduk had actually sounded like Winston Churchill but that wasn't Churchill at all that was that was like I will take mud I will take blood I will make humanity. That was the that was the king of the gods what are you talking about?

So Tom you've wanted to do Babylon since we first talked about doing this podcast, haven't you? Yeah, I really have. To many people, I would say, speaking as a sort of modernist, Babylon is impossibly ancient, unknowable, exotic, confusing. But romantic, don't you think? Yeah, romantic, exactly. Well, romantic, but also it has this kind of sinister edge, doesn't it? Because the word Babylon for centuries in Christianity and afterwards took on this sort of meaning of corruption, I would say, and evil, doesn't it? Because the word Babylon for centuries in Christianity and afterwards took on this sort of meaning of corruption, I would say, and evil, didn't it?

Yes. And it still obviously has that right into the present day with Rastafarianism. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to do Babylon right from the beginning is that Babylon, in a sense, is the era of the birth of civilization. So Babylonians saw themselves as the heirs of Uruk and Ur and these very, very early cities. Yeah. But I think if you're, so the kind of child I was, obsessed by Greek history and by the Bible, Babylon featured in both. So I would have picture books about Greek history and you'd see portrayals of the Ishtar Gate and the ziggurats and all these kind of incredible monuments. And they would be done in a kind of heroic way.

You'd be expected to kind of admire the dazzle and the splendor of it. And then there'd be an illustrated Bible and you'd have, you know, the Judeans weeping by the rivers of Babylon. And there it would be sinister. And I think it's that mix of the glamorous and the sinister that right from my childhood has kind of haunted me. And so that's why, you know, you read that very purple passage of prose. I find it very difficult to even think about uh babylon and not kind of lurch into into the fake a vague hint of purple so uh so that's something's no need to you sound like you're making excuses now which is no i'm not i'm not because i think that that sense is actually bred of the city itself because um the city had a kind of consciousness of itself as being the center of the world itself because the city had a kind of consciousness of itself

as being the center of the world. The Babylonians would approve of your prose is what you're saying. I think they would. I think they would appreciate it. And I think they would absolutely, they'd probably be offended that it's taken us this long to do an episode on that. So Babylon is impossibly old. And I think what we should do is, well, I think we both think we will come back to the

early, the really early stuff in another episode. But let's concentrate now on the most famous period of Babylonian history, the most colorful, the most well-chronicled. And that's the period from Nebuchadnezzar onwards. So Babylon at that point is about, what, more than 1,000 years old? Yes, probably founded around 1900 BC. And the Esagila, which was mentioned in the Magnificent opening that you read. Magnificent. That seems to date back to about that time. So in that sense, the roots of Babylon are very venerable.

But there's a complication, which is that Babylon, for a long period, has had this terrifying neighbor called Assyria. And if you imagine Mesopotamia as a kind of a bottle, Assyria is like the kind of angry hornet trapped inside the bottle. And at one point, an Assyrian king, Sennacherib, had actually flattened Babylon completely, presumably wiping out the Esagila as well. So the great city that you shut your eyes, you imagine the blue and gold bricks, the incredible monuments, all that kind of stuff, this has rebuilt um on the kind of models that pre-existed but but relatively speaking babylon in that sense is both a very ancient and quite a modern city and as you say the person who is responsible for this great process of construction um is nebuchadnezzar and just for

those people who don't know so babylon is in modern-day iraq it's south of baghdad yeah on the banks of the euphrates so it's in this sort of cradle of civilization mesopotamia between the two rivers yes the other river being the yeah and it's got a thousand year old more than a thousand and they're very conscious their own history aren't they their own heritage and stuff yeah well they they um they come to think of babylon as being kind of the very earliest city. They see Babylon as a gift from the kind of the junior gods to the senior gods. I mean, actually, they also, confusingly at the same time, are aware that there are other cities that are actually much older than Babylon.

And so they have this kind of dual sense of time. But basically, everyone in Mesopotamia by this point sees Babylon as the kind of the great fulcrum of the world. It's the centre of the world. It's the centre of time. It's the great home of culture. And that's as true for the Assyrians as it is for the Babylonians themselves. So that's the key to its status. They've been occupied lots of times and attacked lots of times by different rising and falling, the Hittites, hittites the cassites all these different all these kind of guys yeah all these guys who keep evading they steal the god marduk um who we mentioned in the introduction they take him off to their city and then inevitably he always comes back at some stage yeah and babylon then rises again that's basically the story of the last 1400 years of babylonian, isn't it? Yeah, so basically the prehistory of Babylon

prior to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar is a series of people with strange names turning up at Babylon, nicking the statue of Marduk and the Babylonians and getting it back. All right, very good. So I think what we should do is we'll come back to that and do that in real detail in a future episode.

But let's get back in with nebuchadnezzar so what century roughly are we in now tom we are in the sixth century bc sixth century so we are roughly equivalent with what um with with with the first that we know of the ancient greeks i guess yes so um yeah so so this is um ath Athens and Sparta are starting to emerge as major powers in Greece. It's the early years of Rome. And of course, you know, very importantly, there is, you know, the Persians are kind of gearing up. They're still subordinate to the Medes at this time, Babylon is greater, richer, presumably more sophisticated, more kind of politically important than any of these places. Well, whether it's politically more important, whether it's the greatest of power will be measured by what happens to it at the end of the century. But indisputably, it is the greatest city, not just of its age, but of all time.

There has never been a larger city. So there are about quarter of a million people in the city um and this is what the babylon of nebuchadnezzar absolutely is and so nebuchadnezzar succeeds his father when tom uh when does he succeed that's a good question 605 yes yeah so there's a battle with the egyptians in syria so the egyptians are also trying to make a comeback at this point um the the babylonians defeat the egyptians nabopolassar dies in the battle nebuchadnezzar takes over uh and the assyrian the egyptians retreat and it is this that opens up not just syria but the kingdom of judah okay let's come on to judah in a second

because that will bring us into the bible which which I want to talk about. But first, you mentioned the city. So the city of Nebuchadnezzar. So now we can, perhaps for the first time, really get into what Babylon is like, because we know, don't we? We have descriptions of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, and we have a sort of sense of the topography. Is that right? We do. So we have an account by Herodotus who almost certainly visited it. And as is normally the case with Herodotus, it's a kind of mix of kind of imaginary, you know, he's projecting Greek ideas about society. Don't tell me the founder of history is making stuff up, Tom. He's not making it up.

Well, so the classic example of this is talking about marriage and the role of women in Babylon. And he cites two customs, one of which is that daughters get auctioned off and all the good-looking daughters get auctioned off first. And the money that is given for their dowries then enables the uglier daughters to be married as well and to be given dowries and Herodotus really approves of this he says it's a wonderful custom absolutely thumbs up from Herodotus for that um but then there is the custom that he describes as the most outrageous of the Babylonian customs and this is that every woman in the city he says has to go to the temple and offer herself up for money for sex to anyone who wants her. And they have no choice in the matter.

Everybody has to do this. Everybody. So even the kind of very grandest woman and Herodotus says that they arrive in litters and veils so that no one can see them. And then someone will come in and sleep with them and then they go off and then that's it. Their due is paid. So there is this debate as to whether how how reliable is this it seems so it seems to draw on what is a very ancient tradition of that the princesses dedicate themselves to a god called shamash who's the sun god

and there's evidence for this going right the way back to the very beginnings of babylon um but they're actually they certainly in the time of back of the time of ham rabbi these women seem more like nuns than kind of temple prostitutes yeah um they basically seem to have lived under an obligation of celibacy um they uh they and actually they're kind of quite economically significant players there could be some annual ritual you know there could be couldn't there could be there could be some annual ritual, you know. There could be. Couldn't there? There could be. There could be. So that's, and we'll come again to this, the extent to which Herodotus and other classical

authors are just making stuff up from scratch, whether they're misunderstanding things that they see. And definitely with Herodotus, there's a lot of very, very detailed factual analysis that has turned out to be very accurate. And so that combined with the archaeology gives us a sense of probably of what Nebuchadnezzar's city looked like. Okay, well, stop. Let's imagine you're Herodotus or whoever, you're approaching Babylon for the first time. So you're approaching it across flat, flat, alluvial lands. Yeah. And the banks of the

Euphrates, you see in the distance through the heat haze, the first thing you see, I imagine, is the enormous city walls. Yes. So the walls are wonders. So the seven wonders of the world, the seven is sacred to the Babylonians. So it's possible that this idea, which gets picked up by the Greeks and then recycled by classical writers, that this is originally a Mesopotamian idea. And one of the wonders of the world in one of the lists, the walls of Babylon feature. And the Assyrians had hailed them as a wonder of the world. They are on a stupefying scale. They extend for three square miles. They're surrounded by moats. And there are further walls. There's a wall that's built by Nebuchadnezzar called the Median Wall, which is designed to keep the Medes out, which goes for 50 miles.

So these are vast, vast fortifications. And they serve as a kind of symbol of everything that the monarchy is about. So they are, well, there's an inscription by Nebuchadnezzar who says, he describes the wall of Babylon as the primeval boundary that has been famous since the distant past, the firm frontier as old as time, the lofty area as high as the heavens, the strong shield that bars access from enemy lands. I mean, in truth, it's not primeval because they keep being sacked and keep having to be rebuilt. But the idea of the wall of Babylon as a kind of wonder really is very, very ancient. And Herodotus is blown away by them. And he describes-

They're blue, Tom? Are they blue? Well, we'll come to that. They're crenellated. So they're on a massive scale. They're so broad, Herodotus says, that a chariot can wheel around on the top. But you also get this famous gate,

the Ishtar Gate, which under Nebuchadnezzar has the kind of the famous blue and gold tiles. These are mud bricks, but they're sheathed in blue and gold. And we know about that because German archaeologists discovered them and shipped them up and took them to Berlin, where you can see this kind of incredible reproduction of it. And it's a great double gate. And the Ishtar Gate leads into what the Babylonians called May the Arrogant Not Flourish, which was this great processional way. And you go in through the gate and there you have the palace, which is fittingly stupefying for the king of Babylon.

Everything you'd expect. Wow. And then you go down the processional way at the far end of the processional way you have what was called the um the etem ananki which is the stupefyingly enormous uh ziggurat 17 million bricks 100 meters high so as high as the great pyramid uh seven stories although herodotus says it's eight um and this is this is the building that that had been sacked by the Assyrians, destroyed by Sennacherib, the Assyrian king, and has been rebuilt ever since. And this is the construction of this great tower is what in the Bible becomes the Tower of Babel. So this is the Tower of Babel. I mean, literally the Tower of Babel.

And presumably, okay, so some memory of it has made it into the bible into the old testament yeah presumably is that because it was built by slaves who have and a folk memory of people being enslaved and having to work on this building i don't think that's no i don't think that's the focus of it in so in the in genesis it's it's about the arrogance of the people who are building it right and god punishes them but know, the tower isn't finished. They will start speaking different languages. So hence, you know, a Babel. So it's essentially about the arrogance of the people who are building it.

And that, you know, will come to how the Jews fit into this. But essentially, every take that the Judeans, the Jews have on Babylon is that it is an oppressor. It's spectacularly rich. It's full of gold. It's full of purple. But it is doomed due to its arrogance. Kind of cruel and tyrannical. Yeah, exactly. And so that's what the... And I'm sure that the memory of the Tower of babel is because this ziggurat was still in the process of being completed when the judean exiles arrived there and see it which we'll

come to in a second just another thing babylon's not just a city of power but it's also a city of pleasure uh the city whose people are glutted with wealth the city of celebrations rejoicing and endless dance is that that is that your purple prose again? No, that's an inscription of the time. And it reflects the fact that Babylon is simultaneously a very ordered city. So there's a kind of grid pattern, but within those grids, there are kind of labyrinths. So you can completely get lost. And that's where its reputation as a city of pleasure comes from, kind of fueled by the Bible, but also by Herodotus' story of temple prostitutes and by the bible but also by the herodotus's story of temple prostitutes and so on and also by the image of the goddess ishtar who gives her name

to the the famous gate who is the goddess of love who is imagined as as stalking the the taverns so if you have come in across the plain you've gone through the gates you're plunged into this incredible presumably incredibly cosmopolitan unbelievably cosmopolitan it is sights and smells and different languages and yeah all this kind of stuff yeah the biggest city in the world by miles it's the largest city that's ever existed on the planet it's the most cosmopolitan it's it's stupefyingly rich uh and it's it's incredibly sophisticated because you're starting to get banks so we have that there's a record a banking family called the agibis whose library has been found you know record of all their

correspondence and everything and it it shows how the the babylonian empire is sufficiently large that this banking family in babylon can have kind of outposts in in other cities um And it's the reason why Babylon works as a kind of, you know, a shorthand for a massive, multicultural, cosmopolitan, imperial, wealthy city where you can get up to all kinds of sexual practices that maybe you couldn't in a village. You know, Babylon is the archetype of that. And that's the power of its myth. So do you think it's the first city to have that kind of reputation as the kind of by the sink of iniquity and a place of unlimited possibility? Well, it's difficult to know, but the combination of the Greek and the biblical accounts of it are essentially what have created that image of it that has survived. They're able to do that because babylon has elements of that yeah i mean it is it is an absolutely stupefying place and it is

actually the you know in the list of the wonders of the world it's the only one that has certainly two wonders maybe even three so there's a there's a kind of there's a famous obelisk that gets into some of the wonders of that list the seven wonders of the world the the walls feature in a lot of the lists of the wonders of the world and of course seven wonders of the world. The walls feature in a lot of the lists of the wonders of the world. And of course, it's the most famous wonder of all. In fact, yesterday I asked Sadie, my wife, what do you think of when you think of Babylon? And she said, the hanging gardens.

Of course. So the hanging gardens are the most enigmatic and the most kind of tantalizing of all the wonders of Babylon. But Herodotus, who you say went to Babylon, doesn't even mention them. He doesn't mention them. So what's the thinking with the hanging gardens? Well, Herodotus doesn't mention them. If he visited Babylon, which I think he did, that would be about 100 years after its fall and its conquest by the Persians. Maybe he didn't see them because the gardens are in a kind of palace complex, so you don't get to see them. But there's been no archaeological evidence for them at all.

And so there's been a very, very interesting book written by Stephanie Daly, who I think is at Oxford, who argues that actually the hanged gardens of Babylon were not in Babylon at all. The story is that, and we get this from Josephus, who is writing in the first century AD. He said he says that it's Nebuchadnezzar who builds these gardens. And the story is, is that he has a median wife and that she's homesick for the mountains of her homeland. And so Nebuchadnezzar builds this great kind of complex.

And the thing about it is that it's done on kind of steps. So imagine a bit like the kind of Greek theater or something like that going up in stages. And that there are trees that are planted on the highest level of these tiers that are being fed by water. They must be fed by water because otherwise they can't reach into the soil. You know, they're in kind of flower beds. And there's no evidence for this. No such structure has been found. No such structure has been portrayed in Babylon.

I mean, it would be very, very difficult to do that in Babylon. But you do have portraits of this in Assyrian wall paintings, and you do seem to have kind of evidence for it. And in particular, you have the kind of screw that gets attributed much later to Archimedes, that there's evidence for that having been developed by the Assyrians. The irony that the Assyrians of all people, the Babylonians, that the most famous Babylonian thing was probably Assyrian, you're saying? Well, I'm not remotely qualified to judge on whether this argument is accurate or not. I mean, I read Stephanie Daly's book. I've read it twice. I read it before doing this podcast. Again, I reread it. I'm completely convinced, but that's because I don't really know enough to judge.

But I mean, it's not just the Assyrians, it senecrib who's the guy who who flattened babylon so kind of really rubbing salt in the wounds um and her argument is that when senecrib destroys babylon he says well nineveh is now babylon yes you could see how um how that would work and we there's a lot so herodotus is absolutely he takes for granted that um that babylon is a part of assyria and the assyrians and babylonians are basically the same people you have a historian called diodorus who's writing um i think second century who says that um the king who who built the hanging gardens was assyrian so in other words there's a swirl of yeah possibilities there um and. And it's also possible

that Nineveh was, so the tradition is that Nineveh is white from the face of the earth. This doesn't seem to have happened. It does seem that there were palace complexes because we know that later kings are going to Nineveh and kind of studying it, you know, for examples of how they can kind of model their own palaces and so on so who knows but but i think it's a very very good argument that actually it's not the hanging gardens of babylon it's the hanging gardens of nineveh well that's answered the questions by simon girdlestone and dick of axe both who asked about their hanging gardens um dick of axe's question though raises another issue that hangs over the whole discussion of of babylon because dick of axe wanted to know whether the

gardens of babylon were linked in some way to know whether the gardens of Babylon were linked in some way to descriptions of the Garden of Eden. And he said, what are the links between Babylon and the Old Testament? Now, obviously, this is a massive issue. So the Jews, the portrait of Babylon and indeed of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar's feast, the book of Daniel. Let's get into all that now. So why are there Jews in Babylon? Okay, well, first of all, should we be calling them Jews? Probably not at this point. Israelites? No, they're the people of the kingdom of Judah. So they'd been the United Monarchy under David and Solomon and so on. Then it is split. You'd get the northern kingdom of Israel,

10 tribes of, so there are 12 tribes of Israel. 10 of those tribes form northern kingdom of Israel, 10 tribes of, so there are 12 tribes of Yibreel. 10 of those tribes form the kingdom of Israel that then gets destroyed by the Assyrians. And the 10 tribes get carted off into exile by the Assyrians and they vanish. So the question of where the 10 tribes are, it's kind of abiding mystery. Two of the tribes centered on the city of Jerusalem survive. And that's the kingdom of Judah. And compared to Egypt or Assyria or Babylon, you know, it's a a minnow these great empires keep coming along kicking sand in the in the face of the kings of judah and so they're constantly trying to you know work out which you know should

we side with the egyptians or the assyrians or the babylonians whatever nebuchadnezzar he he's seen off the assyrians the babylonians have seen off the assyrians they've seen off the Assyrians. The Babylonians have seen off the Assyrians. They've seen off the Egyptians. 597, Jerusalem is conquered. The king gets taken with a whole load of Judean noblemen. This is Jehoiakim. Am I saying that right? That's, and fascinatingly, his kind of ration dockets have been found in Babylon. So he gets treated with honor in Babylon. You know, he gets kind of put in a hostel for defeated kings with all his, you know, all the Judeans. They get given a kind of rations for meals and things. I mean, quite a lot. You know, he's treated honorably.

And his uncle is installed as a kind of Babylonian puppet. And he gets given the name of Zedekiah. And he's back in Jerusalem. He's back in Jerusalem. Yeah. And he makes the fatal mistake 11 years after this initial siege of deciding that it would be a good idea to rebel against the Babylonians. Turns out to be a terrible idea because the Babylonians capture Jerusalem. They destroy Solomon's temple, you know, the temple that had stood at the heart of Judean life. And in the words of the Book of Kings, they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes,

and they put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and they bound him with fetters of brass, and they carried him to Babylon. Right. So it's not just Jehoiakim and Zedekiah that are in Babylon, but a large proportion, or maybe I'm exaggerating, maybe a small proportion of the Judean people, because there's the sense that they're in exile, right? Absolutely. So what numbers are we talking about? Hard to know, but it's certainly the kind of, you know, it's the elite.

So it's the nobles, the priests, the scribes. You're not taking a load of peasants. And they've been what, put in prison or just put in no quarter of the city or what no so this is this is a common thing that that everyone in mesopotamia does is that when they conquer a people they will remove you know the kind of the leaders and and take them to the capital um well not not just capital some of them get kind of dumped in in kind of regional cities so ezekiel who famously has the vision of uh the bones coming back to life he's not in babylon but clearly there are a lot of there are a lot of judeans who are in babylon and so the question of what kind of influence does this have on on the writing of um a lot of the books of the bible is a huge huge issue because

are some of those books of the bible um we're talking about books of prophecy, aren't we? Like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on. Are they written in Babylon? Are they written after they've come back from Babylon? So Jeremiah is a prophet who has foretold the ruin of Jerusalem. And then he remains kind of, he doesn't get taken to Babylon.

He just kind of hangs around going, everything's awful. But having prophesied that Babylon will destroy Jerusalem, he then says, and this is the key thing, and this is why perhaps the Judeans start to become Jews. The temple has gone, but they don't give up their belief in their God. And indeed, their belief in their God seems to kind of sharpen and become more monotheistic as a result of the experience of being in Babylon. Perhaps some have said, some scholars argue, because the Babylonians themselves are idols that instills a kind of enhanced sense

of hostility towards idol worship because it's associated with Babylon. Those are two totally different versions, Tom. So one is what become the Jews are copying Marduk, and the other is they are so revulsed by Babylonian religion, they're doing something different. Yeah, I think that the latter is much likelier, because the hostility towards Babylon is absolutely palpable. And it's Jeremiah who enshrines it most powerfully. So you quoted from the book of Revelation, the book of Revelation is drawing on Jeremiah's vision of the destruction of Babylon that he hopes will come. So Babylon has been a golden cup in the Lord's hand that made all the earth drunken. The nations have drunken of her wine, therefore the nations are mad. That's exactly the kind of idea that you get with the horror of Babylon. And then one of my favorite verses in the whole of Bible,

Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and an hissing without an inhabitant. And that is a prophecy that again hangs over Babylon because actually the prophecies turn out to be accurate in the long run. Well, I mean, Babylon's been sacked so often in its history that you could reasonably predict that it would probably be sacked again. But Tom i'm being very very cynical and um apologies to any listeners uh who are displeased by this but you could say that this is a bit like the is this much more than the how should i put it the internet ramblings of somebody who's really embittered about some geopolitical development and they're saying we will get our revenge you know the equivalent of a kind of russian troll saying the West will pay for this or that or whatever.

I mean, because Jeremiah is basically wanting to see visited on Babylon the same thing that has been visited on the kingdom of Judah, right? Absolutely. And the Judeans are simply not, you know, it's not like the Greeks who in the long run will be able to, you know, Alexander will be able to cast his invasion of Persia as revenge for the persians having burned the acropolis in athens the judeans have there's no you know they're too small um to have any prospect of that and most most people in in um you know who who get well like the you know the 10 tribes of israel they just vanish and disappear they get absorbed into the the population of the city that they've been transported to. What's really distinctive about the Judeans is that that doesn't happen. And that the Judeans, although they seem to have been utterly humiliated, the temple of their God has been wiped out. It seems that their

God has been caught wanting all the kind of the furnishings of the temple in Jerusalem get taken to Babylon. The Judeans do not give up on their God and they do not lose their identity. And if anything, their identity gets sharpened. And that is what's interesting. And it seems to me that their identity is sharpened by, well, you can call them kind of the internet ramblings, but it's a kind of a sense that the only way that they can make sense of the horror of what's happened is to see it as part of the plan of their God, which is a kind of incredibly arrogant thing to do. And they're nobody, they're kind of tiddlers they're the kind of very very small fish yeah but they're saying that they end up saying that ultimately everything that happens to babylon is the expression of the will of their god and so the the stories that you get particularly in the

book of daniel are a kind of fascinating distorted mirror held up to that well this is what i wanted to ask about because they have this really fascinating treatment of people like Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, don't they? Because on the one hand, they see him as a symbol of cruelty and oppression, of tyranny and of kind of power, of all that is evil about power. But at the same time, it's very clear that Nebuchadnezzar is the instrument of God's will, that he has been picked by god to punish the people of judah for their sins isn't he so he's so they're sort of saying you may be very evil but at the same time

you're actually an instrument of our god's plan so you're just a tool yeah and and also that because of what nebuchadnezzar's done therefore he will be punished and that and and babylon will be punished and they're able to say that because they know what happens which is basically nebuchadnezzar dies you get this this this guy called um nabonidas who is is not of the royal family but seems to have been a very distinguished general he's quite elderly when he becomes king um he's actually the he's the the son of a priestess in the um the syrian city of haran where they worship sin who is a moon god he's very keen on sin but more generally nabonid as we mentioned him in the first episode he's he's a great antiquarian he seems to have decided that that that marduk's promotion to to kind of the rank of top god is um is historically inaccurate

and so he i mean it's very odd he goes off to to a place in North Arabia, a place called Tamar, and he's there for 10 years. And it's very strange. You know, what is he? What, you know, why is he doing it? Is he doing it because he thinks the gods have ordered it? Is he doing it because he hates Babylon? He doesn't want to have anything to do with it. He can't, you know, he doesn't want anything to do with it he can't you know he doesn't want to have mixed with with marduk means he's doing a kind of akhenaten equivalent um is he going there because um tamer is a strategic center from which he can build a great trading empire in arabia or is he mad and we don't really know but what we do know is that um this makes him very, very unpopular in Babylon, where he has left his son, Belshazzar, as regent. And this is foolish because the Babylonians see the king's obedience to barley is planted, where the king has to go to the temple of Marduk. He has his ears pulled and he's slapped. I can see why you'd want to avoid that. Well, yeah, the Balaamians want that. And then you go in again.

And if you cry, then that's a great sign because tears show that Marduk is pleased. So you really, you know, you're really getting slapped around. Nabonidus doesn't do this for 10 years and so therefore what's been going on while he's been off in in arabia is that the persians under cyrus the great um have defeated the medes they've defeated the lydians who who rule basically what's now Turkey. So Cyrus is very much the coming man. And Cyrus is a master of propaganda. And he said there's a famous, the Cyrus cylinder, which some people say, this is the first bill of human rights.

It's no such thing. It's a very, very Babylonian text in which he's basically saying, I'm going to respect your gods. And this means that in the long run, Nabonidus proves powerless against Cyrus's invasion. Cyrus, because basically there are lots of people in Babylon who are unwilling to fight for him. And the story goes, it's in Herodotus' wonderful story, you know, sense of how vast Babylon is, that the Persians break in and Babylon is so huge that people in

the city who are celebrating a party as Babylonians do, don't even realize that they've been conquered. The city is so enormous. So that's the Herodotian take. But, of course, there's the famous biblical take on this story. Tom, let's take a break. Yes, let's do that. Sorry, I'm talking too much. No, no, no.

It's absolutely fascinating stuff. Take a break and we'll come back and we will do the Book of Daniel and the extraordinary story of Belshazzar's Feast and then we will be talking about Babylon and its fall and its afterlife. See you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about Babylon.

Tom, I cut you off because we were just about to talk about probably the single most famous depiction of Babylon ever, which is the Book of Daniel. So everybody knows this. Daniel, well, they don't do that anymore, but they used to. Daniel is invited to a feast with his pals, isn't he? And Belshazzar, who we mentioned before the break, has got all the looted gear from the temple.

And he says, you know, tuck in. And they don't want anything to do with it. And then these words appear. Well, you can tell the story more. You tell a story in your purple prose, Tom. No, go on. So am I right in thinking that these, I don't know, there's all thunder and lightning or whatever it is,

and the words that appear on the wall, these sort of only… Phantom hand. Phantom hand, exactly. And it takes only Daniel can read them, only Daniel can translate them. Is that right? Yes. So this phantom hand appears and writes on

the wall this is the writing on many many tackle or passion is that right that's right yes and nobody can understand it so daniel translates that many god has numbered thy kingdom and finished it tackle thou weighed in the balances are not found wanting perez by kingdom is divided and given to the medes and the persians and so that's the the famous scene of the fall of Babylon, which has been, so there's a famous painting by Rembrandt of Balthazar looking like a 1980s cricketer gazing in horror at this mysterious hand. But also John Martin in the early 19th century who did vast canvases of huge cities and lightning striking and idols toppling um and and i i think that that is a absolutely fundamental

part of the kind of the mystique of babylon is is because of the book of daniel which is written after after babylon has fallen when's the book of daniel written probably so probably third century oh golly a long time after so it's it's it's quite a few centuries after it um and it gives this distorted history so nebuchadnezzar's the guy who sentences daniel to the lions he sentences um shadrach mishak and abengnego uh who are three of daniel's pals to a fiery furnace they both come they all come out of that and survive daniel gets enshrined as um an advisor a kind of dream reader to um to to nebuchadnezzar so he's kind of like the equivalent of joseph and his technicolor dream coat yeah he is to pharaoh um then uh nebuchadnezzar goes mad all right but he didn't go mad though in reality no so this is

this is clearly nabonidus so this is this is tradition that nabonidus has gone mad babylonian tradition that is then attributed to Nebuchadnezzar. And again, it's kind of brilliant description. The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from men and did eat grass as oxen and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hairs were grown like eagles feathers and his nails like birds claws. And William Blake did a famous kind of illustration of that. Absolutely brilliant. And then you have this account of the fall of Babylon

where Belshazzar, rather than Abinadus, is described as the last king and it falls and the Medes and the Persians take over. Actually, it's the Persians. And from that point on, Babylon is subject first to the Persians, then to the Greeks. So the Daniel story, just to the Persians, then to the Greeks. So the Daniel story, just to wind that up, the Daniel story, which obviously proved enormously influential because it really enshrined in the kind of Judeo-Christian imagination, the

image of Babylon as a place of power, of corruption, of hubris, kind of great luxury of the feast and then looming disaster, didn't it? Yeah. But that's written centuries afterwards. And it's just a basically basically very very garbled version of history would you say it's it's holding up a very distorted mirror and a lot of of so daniel's prophet so so uh nebuchadnezzar is the guy who has the dream that bart van loo talked about um oh yeah the idol with the feet of clay yeah um and he has visions of um of beasts coming out of the ocean all these kind of things uh and essentially this is predicting that babylon

will fall that the persians will rise then that the greeks will rise um in due course it comes to be seen as uh as as foretelling the rise of rome so this idea of cycle of empires yeah or come on to rome on. Rome and Babylon. Interesting relationship in imagination. And so Daniel is, you know, whoever's writing the book of Daniel is writing in the knowledge, firstly, that the Babylonian Empire has collapsed and that Babylon has been conquered by foreign masters. But also that the city itself is starting to go into decline. And that didn't happen straight away, though. No, it doesn't. But also that the city itself is starting to go into decline. And that didn't happen straight away, though.

No, it doesn't. It's absorbed into the Persian Empire and it's still the biggest city on earth at that point. Yeah, there's a rebellion under Xerxes, who's the king who invades Greece. And the Great Ziggurat is very badly damaged. But it's still, you know, unbelievably, it's the largest city still in the world so when alexander enters it it's it's a very alexander place i mean he ends up dying there well i was about to say when he arrives he's greeted by the townsfolk because they see him as a some of them at least seem to have seen him as a pretended to see him as a liberator from persian rule am i right a bit like in egypt yeah i mean of course they're they're

saying that obviously because he's standing there with his with his sword with his yeah and his phalanx i mean yeah of course i mean they're used to that it's it's telling that that's the place that he spends a lot of time at the end of his reign that's the place that he dies yeah because it's not i suppose it's it's it makes sense because it's not persian not quite persian but a bit persian well you think i mean i mean a lot of so a lot of these cities it's it's it's makes sense it's not persian not quite persian but a bit persian well you think i mean i mean a lot of so a lot of these cities it's conquered they they get renamed they get given greek names babylon doesn't yeah babylon is too famous um and alexander clears the the rubble that xerxes left of of the great ziggurat and is preparing to rebuild it and that never actually happens um and what then

happens is that um all that kind of region of of mesopotamia um becomes part of the selucid empire so one of the heirs of alexander and they never think about establishing their capital at babylon tom well they they they so they build a new capital called mod modestly, Seleucia. On the Tigris. On the Tigris, yes. And there is, so one source says that one of the kings orders Babylon to be emptied and that the people should go to Seleucia. So this is, and people say that this is where basically Babylon starts to collapse as a city. Difficult to know. There are counter traditions. So one of the kings, Antiochus III,

he actually puts on the robe of Nebuchadnezzar when he's performing the rituals that are required at the Esagila. So the Esagila certainly seems to be functioning right the way up into the Roman period. But basically it is, so Trajan, the Roman emperor at the beginning of the second century, who invades and briefly conquers Mesopotamia, he goes to Babylon and he offers sacrifice to Alexander there in the place where Alexander is said is said to have died so there's clearly still enough of the infrastructure of babylon there for people to work out exactly where everything is

but but but by this point it's becoming what jeremiah had foretold it is becoming a dwelling place for dragons and astonishment and then hissing it's been deserted by the time it's starting to become that yeah right yeah and do we know before we start talking about the image of babylon and its kind of cultural afterlife, do we know at what point it basically became an archaeological site? As in, I mean, I don't mean in the 19th century or something. I mean, at what point it was no longer inhabited and it was basically dead?

Very difficult to say, but probably, I mean, probably by 1st or 2nd centuries AD. Okay, as early as that. So there's obviously never a possibility of the Arabs, you know, rebuilding it or something. It's mentioned in the Quran as the home of two angels called Harut and Marut who teach sorcery. Right. But that's probably drawing on biblical traditions of Babylon as the great center of sorcery. But that's probably drawing on biblical traditions of Babylon as the great center

of sorcery. Certainly by the time of the Arab conquest, it's long, long been abandoned. So basically what happens is that as we said before, because it's not built of stone but of clay and mud,

it kind of melts and becomes a kind of sludge. And people do remain settled on what had been one of the royal palaces outside Babylon itself. And that gets called Babel, so right the way up into the modern period. So there is, to that extent, a kind of living continuity. But otherwise, the very site itself gets forgotten. And by time that european archaeologists are turning so actually in the middle ages there are jews who come because they want to see the site and they want to see the site not so much because of nebuchadnezzar but because um lots of jews have stayed in babylonia so even though cyrus allows them to go back and rebuild the temple and live in Jerusalem and everything,

lots of them do stay in Babylonia and it becomes the great center of Jewish scholarship. So this is where the Talmud comes to be written. And it's known as the Babylonian Talmud, the Talmud that is written in Babylonia. So it's a place that visiting rabbis are very interested in. So we have records of them coming in the Middle Ages and kind of rootling around and trying to work out where places have been. But it's not until the 19th century and European archaeologists that they're really able to start kind of pinning down

exactly where the site was. But Babylon lives on, obviously, very vividly in the Western imagination, in the imagination of Christendom. Once you start digging into the whore of Babylon, there's immense fun to be had there because of course, yeah, from Luther onwards, the whore of Babylon was equated with the Catholic church.

And there's lots of Protestant propaganda showing the whore of Babylon with the kind of papal tiara. The, I think people like the, the Mormons, the seventh day Adventists picked up on this later on and obviously in rastafarianism babylon is equated really with the kind of white the antithesis yeah it's the antithesis of zion it is the it is it is corruption it is power it is european colonization the legacy

of slavery it is the police it's authority it's it's all the sort of man yes the man exactly but that what's so interesting about that is am i right in thinking that reflects at the time of the book of revelation was written that reflects an antipathy to rome in particular that babylon there is rome yeah absolutely yes absolutely um so tell tell me, is that a common metaphor, basically, at the time, do you think, for people to, would people have referred to Babylon as Rome? Yeah, because it's, so St. John is drawing on the language of Jeremiah writing about Babylon. So we had all that stuff about, you know, Jeremiah talks about the Babylon as a golden making um the nations mad with its wine and you have almost word for word in in book of revelation for all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her the whore of babylon her fornication and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with

her and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies so babylon at this point is a you know a great pile of mud. This is being written in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple by the Romans. It's written, the year of the four emperors has happened. Rome has been set back on its foundations, but it has looked briefly as though the empire might fall to pieces. The temple of Jupiter in Rome has been burned. So the Romans themselves have lived with a kind of apocalyptic sense that things might fall to pieces. And the book of Revelation is describing a vision of the fall of Rome and Rome as the archetype of power. So it's

everything that we've been talking about in the context of Babylon, that it's obscene sexual practices, it's incredible wealth. So the thing about the merchants, I mean, it's a very, very economically literate piece of writing, the book of Revelation. It absolutely understands that it's trade routes and tribute that feeds Rome, that feeds Babylon, that without these Babylon will be nothing, that it's not self-sustaining. And it describes how it's the object of kind of universal lust and desire that people come from around the world to the city because it is so stupefying and beautiful and amazing and overwhelming and impressive. And that's why it's a whore. It seduces you. And that's why it's a whore. Yeah. It seduces you. And, and that,

that's why the chain of connection is Babylon, the Babylon written about by Jeremiah and Daniel. Yeah. Then becomes the, the Babylon that is Rome in the book of revelation. But the power of that idea of the great imperial city that is oppressive, but will fall. You can absolutely see the appeal of that is oppressive but will fall, you can absolutely see the appeal of that to, say, to Rastafarianism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the anti-imperialism

that today people in the West take for granted, the ultimate roots of that lie in the books of Jeremiah and Revelation. I was just thinking, Tom, we did our 9-11 podcast, the attack on New York. The idea of, I mean, isn't that how Islamists might think of New York? A city of great vice, a city of luxury, of power, but it will fall to attack it, to bring down the symbols of power? Yeah. So in the Quran, there's lots of descriptions of great cities. I mean, the Quran does not go in for the naming of geographical places that the Bible does,

but it's evident that a lot of these kind of images of cities, it says, that get destroyed by God and fall is drawing on that kind of biblical imagery. And as I said, Babylon itself gets named in the Quran. But I think in the West specifically, the idea of the anti-imperial, the idea that imperial capitals must fall and this is good, it's inconceivable without that biblical inheritance. But I mean, Rastafarianism is consciously rooted in it but also tom that image that you so often see you see in blockbuster films you see it in all kinds of sort of um cultural products that seems to me drawn directly from belshazzar's feast i mean you've seen it a thousand times in films without thinking about it of the of the the

cutting between the film the the the footage of the the rich and famous at some party enjoying a nemesis you know being upon them as sort of the fall of gotham city kind of thing well that's very about that's very book of daniel isn't it well so it's griffiths isn't it i mean intolerance that we we talked about in the 1922 yeah episode that i mean he literally rebuilds babylon yes i mean he goes out into the desert and rebuilds it yeah but for that and and um you know actually saddam hussein does as well so saddam hussein kind of tries to rebuild babylon and yeah we had a couple of questions about saddam hussein actually you know to what extent do do the legends of babylon how much are they part of iraqi identity today are they part of iraqi? I'm not massively convinced they are, but maybe I'm wrong.

Well, no, they are. So they were promoted by Saddam in his more secular stage because Babylon is something that all Iraqis can feel a sense of identity with. So Sunni and Shia and Christians and Yazidis and Jews and everybody can kind of have a sense of it in the past. And there's an obvious kind of model for a Mesopotamian, you know, an Iraqi strongman in the figure of Nebuchadnezzar. So when Saddam, you know, kind of did his rebuilding of Babylon,

because there's nothing really to see in Babylon. People turn up and there's, you know, a load of dust. That's me with all archaeological sites. So Saddam wanteddam wanted you know to provide something that was slightly more impressive and so a lot of the kind of the mud bricks are stamped you know just as nebuchadnezzar had had his name stamped on the mud bricks saddam does exactly the same um and and one of the reasons why the islamic state when they then move into northern iraq why they demolished the Assyrian monuments is because they want to get rid of anything that provides Iraqis with a reminder of the pre-Islamic past. So for the Islamic State and for a lot of devout Muslims, national identity is false. It's a distraction from the identity you should have as a Muslim.

And particularly an identification with a past that is babylonian is kind of shocking yeah um so that's kind of what's going on i mean of course the the americans um they also played their part in in in a further destruction of the further fall of babylon because having um after the iraq war having occupied iraq they then built a huge tank park on the site of Babylon. I mean, the heart of the archaeological site. And so the remains of the Great Processional Way that joined the Ishtar Gate to the Great Ziggurat, they were kind of driving heavy vehicles down it.

It's all, you know, all the mud things have cracked. I mean, it's unbelievable. Think of all those buried cuneiform tablets, Tom, crushed under the wheels of the... There's a terrible metaphor there, isn't there? Yeah, so Babylon has fallen again. Think of all those buried cuneiform tablets, Tom, crushed under the wheels of the... There's a terrible metaphor there, isn't there? Yeah, so Babylon has fallen again. Well, do you know what?

When I was a student in Oxford in the 90s, there used to be... I used to walk by the library. There was graffiti on the wall, Babylon must fall. But that was obviously reflecting the Rastafarianism and the reggae. Because obviously Bob Marley, the kind of reggae, has preserved the image of Babylon as hubristic, corrupt, luxurious, oppressive. At a time when, you know, knowledge of the Bible among the public at large is probably less than any point since, you know, the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

Yes, I think that's absolutely true. Which raises our last question, Tom, because I think you've done an absolutely masterful job and i know you've carried well i was about to say 80 but it's probably about 98 of the load of these podcasts so tom he dave walters asks i'll cut his question down he asks very simply where did bony m rank in the pantheon of historians well the um so it comes so by the rivers of babylon um it comes from one of the psalms yeah uh and it describes the um the exiles weeping uh you know the rivers i guess it's the canals and the euphrates um and i think i think that idea that there is a kind of dignity in exile is, you know, a dignity in defeat has been culturally incredibly, incredibly important. Ever since, you know, I mean, in a way, the greatest victory over Babylon is that Babylon is now dust and the bible is still red yeah and there is a manifestation there of the kind of the core biblical teaching that you know the future isn't always with the

strong that perhaps the weak will will overcome it but what there isn't in in the boney M song, it doesn't quote what is the final line of that psalm, which is one of the most terrifying in the whole of the Bible. So you have, O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us know you you have destroyed our temples your temples will be destroyed yes and then the very last line of that psalm happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones so you can kind of see why bony m didn't put that line well you can also see it doesn't i mean certain reticence and including it in church services and so on to this day um but but i mean but but i think that you know that that that that verse perhaps more than any other really takes you back to the to the to just what was at stake i mean just the terrifying quality

of the of the world that you know sixth century babylon was ruling it was one that was so frightening um and it's it's glamorous and it's beautiful and it's stunning. And the fantasy of it haunts the imaginings to this day. But that predatory quality is also so frightening. Well, okay. That's a perfect note on which to end. Tom, we've got some great predatory quality coming up next week because next week we will be talking about the Vikings in the East.

Of course, the foundation of the states of Russia and Ukraine. So a very topical subject. And we'll also be talking about smuggling. And Tom will be doing some excellent smuggling voices. So no pressure, Tom. We will see you all next week from both of us. Goodbye. Goodbye.

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