You're Dead to Me - The Ancient Babylonians

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Host Greg Jenner is joined by historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid and comedian Kae Kurd in Ancient Mesopotamia as they explore the Babylonian civiliisation. If your knowledge of Babylon doesn’t extend beyond the Boney M. song then this is the episode for you. We reveal all sorts of fascinating facts that connect you to a people who existed 4000 years ago – from the way we communicate to a maths system which we still use to tell the time.Produced by Cornelius Mendez Script by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse Research by Amy Grant and Lloyd RobertsA production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might have also heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

but that one's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we partner up wisdom and wisecracking for a cheery rummage in the distant past. And today we are packing our cuneiform tablets and a trusty copy of Astrology for Dummies as we journey back 4,000 years to learn all about the Babylonian civilization of ancient Mesopotamia. And to help me tell fascinating facts from historical hooey, I'm joined by two very special

guests. In History Corner, she's a fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, specializing in Assyriology and the history of science, medicine and technology in the ancient Middle East. It's Dr Moody Al-Rashid. Hi, Moody. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner, one of the UK's fastest rising comedy stars. You may have seen his brilliant YouTube special, Curd Your Enthusiasm, or you may have seen him on TV shows like Live at the Apollo, Don't Hate the Players,

Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club and the Tezo Clock Show. It's the marvellous Kay Curd. Hey, Kay, how are you? I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me. This has been a lifelong dream of mine to be on here. Lifelong dream since March. Kay, I mean, I know you as a brilliant stand-up, but you were almost going into medicine, is that right? Yeah, so I got an offer from a medical school

and I just didn't get the grades basically that's what happened like in hindsight thank god because i did a degree in biomed and realized like six months in that it was not what i wanted to do with my life right yeah so i found comedy and here i am and what about history at school were you into your history or were you much more of a science guy i loved history do you know what i should have probably done humanities i remember when i was in year seven i got 100 in my history exam at the end of the year and i was just so gassed and then um i remember my form shooter in year eight he was like well that doesn't mean anything because the previous head of history was

terrible and i was like all right great thanks well that's that's a really great way to build up a kid's self-esteem and what do you know about ancient Mesopotamia? I know you are of Kurdish heritage. So is this something that's part of your family history? I know about Hammurabi. Is that how you pronounce it? The proper pronunciation. Yeah.

And am I right? The first sort of schooling was done under them as well. Aramaic languages all come from that sort of period i think so a lot of uh the languages that you see spoken around that region right now sort of right derived from that but yeah not much really well the end of this podcast hopefully you're going to know a lot more because we've got a brilliant teacher for you in dr moody so what do you know right it's time to crack on then with the first segment, which is called the So What Do You Know?

And this is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subjects. And I'm guessing, yeah, you don't know much, do you? The ancient Mesopotamian civilization is sometimes referred to as the cradle of civilization, and it's given us all sorts of useful things. You might have heard of King Gilgamesh, who's one of the lead characters

in perhaps one of the oldest ever stories written down by humans. It's also a great restaurant. And that's definitely what they were looking for as well. They were like, you know what? We're going to write down

this story and in 4,000 years time, the food's going to be amazing. You might also know about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Or maybe you just fancy a Lady Gaga track, Babylon. Or maybe if you're a bit older, you know, the Boney M track, Rivers of Babylon. Or maybe you've played as the King of Babylon in the classic Civilization video games.

But it's not just Babylon, is it? There's more to that. So let's find out what we should know about ancient Babylonia, ancient Mesopotamia. Can I jump in with one of the coolest facts about Babylon? There was actually a woman called Lady Gaga in Babylon sometime between 2000 and 1800 BC. And we have a letter recording her death. That's amazing. It was a Lady Gaga.

Who was the letter to? A lady called Data. So Star Trek fans are happy. Lady Gaga fans are happy. I feel like a lot of people are pleased now. I thought it was to Alejandro. So we've got Lady Gaga already exists. That's exciting. Can you tell us more about just sort of the general introduction to Mesopotamia? What do we mean by that word? Sure. So Mesopotamia, I think it's important to remember, refers to a

region. It means the land between two rivers, referring to the Tigris River and the Euphrates River. And instead of referring to like a particular culture or civilization, it refers to the place. And it covers the region that is now Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, and even parts of Turkey. And the important bit is that although not a culture, they did have one thing in common, which was cuneiform writing. In terms of that part of the world, we tend to start with the Sumerians as kind of the great early civilization. But we, in today's podcast, we're ignoring them. We don't have time for them. So it's Sumerians, then it's the Akkadians, and then it's the Babylonians. That's right. Yeah. The Babylonians appear in the record around 2000 BC, speaking the same language as the Akkadians before them. And the last sort of independent Babylonian king, whose Nabonidus falls in the 6th century BCE to the Persians when they arrive. So 1500 years of history, not bad. Okay, so you've mentioned cuneiform. Okay, I'm assuming you don't read cuneiform. I mean, it's quite tricky. First of all, what the hell is cuneiform? Fair question. Before i put my foot in it i need

to know what canary form is yes yeah i mean it's it's not on the uk curriculum really when you're 10 years old um moody i mean it's can we say it's the joint oldest written language it's even uh okay to say that it's the oldest um writing system known um you you will fight with egyptologists about this for for the next thousand years. But yeah, the first proto-cuneiform texts come from around 3400 BCE in southern Mesopotamia, a city called Uruk. And so cuneiform is a type of writing, okay? They are basically clay tablets. They look like manky dog biscuits with bite marks in them. So yeah, so it's impressed into clay, which was hugely abundant in Mesopotamia at the time,

just because of the geography of the area. And it was a reed stylus that they would use to impress the signs in. And the word comes from the Latin cuneus, which means wedge, or for the wedge shape of the writing. So was this the PC versus Mac of the time? Pretty much, I'd say. Or maybe early cuneiform was sort of PC

because it was traced into clay, which is a little bit cumbersome. And then Mac sort of takes over with the pressing. It's a little faster and stylized. Okay. And so from this early system of writing, we get literature, but really it's basically an accountancy system

early on, isn't it? It's about working out who owns what and how much tax you have to pay. Basically, yeah. So, I mean, it's not very romantic, but writing was invented as an administrative tool because they sort of worked out how to do irrigation very well. So, you know, as a result of that, they had a lot of food to keep track of and they needed a way to do that. So initially it was done with little clay tokens, and then eventually the main medium became tablets that they drew the stuff they were recording, like a jug for beer, and then a little kind of fronds for barley, or fronds is probably the wrong word. I'm not even sure what that word means. But anyway, to keep track of what was

coming into the temple and what was then being distributed out to the population. So basically writing is accountancy. It's incredible how much it's evolved, isn't it? Like writing was just seen as a useful thing in order to like help society and now people use it to abuse their favorite celebs. We've come a long way. We have the very famous library of Nineveh and nineveh was a city in

northern iraq i suppose or even in in what is now kurdish lands i suppose the nineveh plains yeah have you been i haven't been there no but i have been to around that area but i haven't been to nineveh itself no this is an area of the world where incredible learning and knowledge is happening the library of Nineveh has something like 28,000 of these clay tablets that archaeologists have found, which is an amazing number. Yeah, so the library at Nineveh, it's a bit later than the period that we're talking about, but the kinds of texts that you find there are already appearing in the period that we are talking about. So it is still interesting to raise it as an example. It might be 28,000 texts,

but it's 40,000 tablets and fragments as well that come because most of the stuff we work with is in a sort of abysmal condition and you have to sit there like Tetris and try to fit it all together. But you have all kinds of texts attested in that collection, which I'm going to follow Eleanor Robson in saying that it was a collection that was created twice. First in the ancient world by Ashurbanipal in the 7th century BC, and then again in the British Museum by early excavators and archaeologists who sort of imagined it as this unified library, although it's a little bit more complicated than that.

But the texts they have, we have letters to and from the King to scholars, some of which are hilarious. We have omens, other scientific texts, including medical texts, astronomical texts, works of literature. It's a really rich and interesting collection. But again, of the same kind of stuff that you find a thousand years earlier in Babylonia and elsewhere. And we also have complaint letters of someone going, dear sir, I was appalled at the service I got. What, on wax? They'd actually put it onto a wax tablet.

Into clay, yeah. Into clay, yeah. My word. Do you know how much effort is required? Like, how annoyed must he have been to have been like, you know what, I'm going to make a complaint. Listen, you've got to applaud the level of determination for that. 40,000 tablets, though.

That's incredible. That's almost as much as you get at Glastonbury. I'm sure you're talking about ibuprofen, aren't you? Yeah, absolutely. We do have this huge resource that allows us to know these things about these ancient people. And in today's episode, we're going to try and jump around and get to know them a bit more. So we've started with the library. Mesopotamia was the birthplace in some ways of mathematics as well. And we have early geometry, I suppose, evidence of pre-Pythagoras, what's called triples,

which is kind of a squared plus b squared equals c squared or stuff like that. It's not quite trigonometry, but it's on the way, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. They were grappling with geometry well before Pythagoras, which were again used as a kind of practical tool to help with calculations in everyday context. So for example, math was taught in schools to help kids learn how to eventually do things like predict the yield of a particular portion of cropland or calculate interest on a loan.

Really fun stuff like that. Sorry, children were doing this this children were learning how to do this that's incredible because like interest on a loan like it's not something that i know most adults don't know how like this in this day and age don't know how to calculate that sort of stuff or even what it means they have to count you know solve math problems like you know when you go to the grocery store you buy like six boxes of corn flakes and eight boxes of this and then what do you have at the end and you have to add it up and it's an absolutely ridiculous scenario so they had some stuff like that as well not too different from our word problems today that's a mad indictment into what how far our schooling systems come it's

not very far we're still using the same sort of questions that they were using even though we've got like ipads and stuff now yeah so essentially we've gone backwards while they were like really advanced with it we're just like we're still on photosynthesis like for 10 years while they were like learning wow it's like i just want to learn how to do my taxes but no exactly yeah i still don't know how to do them that's why i'm and they also had an extremely interesting numerical placement system called the sexagesimal system, which sounds deeply erotic. It isn't, but it was basically it allowed them to do quite complicated mathematics. And then number system was based on the power of 60 because we tend to be interested in tens. We like decimal stuff. We like 10, 100, 1000, a million.

That's how we kind of work. But they worked in 12. Yeah, it was it was a 60 base system instead of a number 10 base system. The reason for this is because it creates numbers that are far more divisible than just 10. And it's actually also a place notation system rather than just a way of writing numbers down. Sorry to cut you off though. Is that why we've got like 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour? It's absolutely right. Yeah. Smashed it. Smashed it.

Come on. But isn't that amazing that, you know, we're using a mathematical system to tell the time today that was invented 4,000 years ago? It's always bugged me. It's always bugged me because I was just like, why do we use 60 minutes in an hour? And I never understood it. But now this makes absolute sense. Well, during the French Revolution in 1793,

they changed it up and they invented 10-day weeks and there were 100 minutes in an hour and it was chaos. They tried it for about a year and a half and it made no sense. And 18 months became 14 months and they were like, what is happening? And they stopped and abandoned it. So we went back to the Babylonian system. It's much easier but moody you were saying about the kind of the placement system so they use uh symbols that combine sort of like tally marks to express

numbers within that system and this is called uh the fancy word is a positional notation system it basically allowed them uh to express huge numbers as well as tiny numbers like fractions and they also created these tables like tables of reciprocals or multiplication tables or this list of Pythagorean triples, among other things to help with those calculations and any practical tasks associated with them. It was a very well-developed and useful mathematical system that they could apply to a variety of everyday things, and eventually to much more sophisticated things like astronomical calculations.

So they were nerds. They knew what they were doing. Math was taught as part of the scribal curriculum that included different members of the population, including girls and women in some periods. So when someone was learning how to become a scribe, they first learned the basics, you know, how to impress a sign into clay. And you have these absolutely adorable tablets of just like a single wedge over and over and over again. And there are like fingerprint marks and the clay, the shape of the tablet is a complete mess. And it's just it's so sweet because it's just, you know, evidence of a child that you don't really get children in the material or textual record.

That's lovely. And then they move on to lists of words. And then from there, they start doing, you know, proverbs and aspects of Sumerian literature. And then we get also in those stages, math and how to do the things that you need to do when you're a scribe. Amazing. That's them as math nerds and writing nerds. Let's talk about them as engineering slash horticultural nerds. Because Is let's talk about them as engineering slash horticultural nerds because i mean the hanging gardens of babylon is one of the things that people will even if they don't know what it is they'll be like well i've heard of that

okay i'm guessing you know the phrase at least probably yeah i know the phrase i've heard of worse phrases as well about babylon but well yeah i mean babylon has a bad rep doesn't it yeah yeah yeah i mean i remember one episode at EastEnders once, it's like, you are a whore of Babylon. I was like, what's this got to do with anything, perhaps? So, Moody, is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, what is it, just a few hanging baskets and a cheeky gnome? Or are we talking massive engineering projects?

Or is it executions? Oh, yeah. Is that where people get hanged? What is the Hanging Gardens, do we think? And is it in the right place? Well, actually, that's not completely off base because we now think that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually in Nineveh.

And there are palace reliefs from Nineveh showing disembodied heads hanging from trees. I know my people. I know my people. That's what I mean. That's why there's so much oil there it's all those dead bodies but the Hanging Gardens so the reason they may have ended up

in Babylon in historical record is a little bit convoluted it might be because the standard latitude that was relied upon by later astronomers to calculate the longest day was known as being in Babylon. But actually, the latitude is further north in Nineveh or Nimrud area of Assyria. But

yeah, we have really detailed descriptions of gardens from Nineveh by King Sinatra, who's the grandfather of Ashurbanipal, who we hear a lot about and whose library we were talking about earlier. And he describes these kind of cylindrical things made of bronze that are shaped like spiraled tree trunks of a particular kind of date palm. And those probably would have been used to draw water from a lower level to a higher level. That's why notably Stephanie Dowley has argued that on the basis of textual evidence, it makes more sense to put these gardens that are on multiple levels in Nineveh rather than in Babylon, which is a very well excavated city where no evidence of such gardens has been found. And like the Taj Mahal, it's said that the gardens were built for the king's wife. Is that

a romantic myth or do we think that's true? So that's, I think, Barassus, the Greek historian, that's true so that's i think barassus the greek historian says that nebuchadnezzar the second built the gardens in babylon for his medean wife because she missed the kind of hilly landscapes of her home so it's a very romantic backstory but we sort of have to ask ourselves are we going to trust local sources from the time period or much later foreign sources the lengths that men would go to though back in the day it's just like what did you do for valentine's he built me something yeah i mean it's just whereas now you're lucky to get a text back especially during this pandemic but you're saying you wouldn't go out and build an entire garden for a loved one okay make the mortgage on that just sounds wild i can't afford a one-bedroom flat in London,

let alone build her a garden. I might rent you an allotment. We can grow tomatoes together or something. So the Hang Guard of Babylon is the ultimate romantic gesture and considerably impressive compared to the average one of the foot rub and a choccy biscuit, which is what I think most men would give their wives. We're now going to talk about medicine. The Babylonian medical system is really quite

impressive because they had a really comprehensive healthcare system. They've got doctors, they've got a regulator. Moody, can we start, I guess, with some general stuff about the medical treatments? If you feel poorly, you wake up and go, oh, I've got a horrible alergy. Who do you go to? Do you go to a priest or do you go to a doctor? You go to a doctor, but there are different types of medical professionals. In Herodotus, he sort of famously describes that in Babylon, which would be again in the following century, if a person was sick, they would just sort of plant themselves on the sidewalk

and hope to God that somebody with similar symptoms at some point would pass them by and tell them what they did to get better. But it was a lot more sophisticated and detailed than that. I don't feel very well. I'll just lie in the street until someone else finds me. Can you imagine just laying outside Argos, like waiting for someone to just feel like, oh, you've got a cold, my friend, come. Come here. Drink juice. So there were mainly two types of medical professionals. There was the asu, which is an Akkadian word that we translate as physician, not unproblematically. And then there's the ashipu that we translate as exorcist, again, not unproblematically. And the reason I add those

little kind of caveats is because they wouldn't have been seen as any less medical than the other. Medical problems occur in a world where supernatural and natural are both part of the natural world. So let's say you get bitten by a snake. They would want to treat the snake bite, of course, and they would recognize, okay, a snake bit you and we're going to give you these herbs or whatever to help you with that wound. But they also would recognize a kind of more remote cause why did the snake bite you did you piss off some god or goddess did a demon send the snake your way and so that was the ashifu's job was to determine that invisible cause and treat that cause while the asu treated the snake

bite you've basically got one guy going eat this rub it with some ointment you'll feel better and another guy going right which god did you annoy with some ointment, you'll feel better. And another guy going, right, which God did you annoy? But some of these medicines are pretty good. I mean, some of this stuff we know works. You know, there's quite a lot of research being done into ancient Babylonian medicine, ancient Egyptian, and some of it genuinely is effective. It really, really helps. Yeah, I mean, I found not pissing off ghosts really helps.

I mean, one remedy that probably wasn't that helpful. Kay, do you want to guess what the ancient Babylonian cure was for grinding your teeth in your sleep? They just pull out your teeth. I guess that would work. Just be like, get rid of it. That's fine. You don't need them anymore. That's pretty extreme.

This was also pretty extreme as a cure. Quite simple, but basically all you needed to do was get hold of a human skull, and then for a week you had to lick it and kiss it seven times each night uh and then your teeth would feel better because you would have obviously exercised the ghost of the dead family member who was haunting you so oh incredible straightforward lick a skull lick a skull yeah they're not really lying around though in it like do Like, do you see where I'm coming from? You can't find a skull from anywhere. Like, where do you go to find one?

Maybe the Hanging Gardens. That's probably where it was. It was their version of like, boots. You just go there and it's like, oh yeah, can I have a skull please? But I mean,

there is a logic to it. You know, if your teeth are problematic, I guess a skull has teeth in it. You're being too nice. I can't find logic in that, bruv. We have to understand the mindset of this world, don't we, Moody? These are people trying to understand what is illness and trying to figure out what's the best way to get better.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when you get sick, it's terrible and you're uncomfortable or when someone you love gets sick. So you'll sort of do anything to feel better or to help someone feel better. So even if a lot of these incantations may not have actually done anything, the placebo effect is still very powerful and it would have been reassuring to be able to seek medical help for certain things. What was the average life expectancy? That's a good question.

So a lot of people died in infancy, but if you made it past a certain point, then you lived a sort of normal life expectancy. So what, to about 60, 65? Something like that, yeah. But once you get past that threshold, it's smooth sailing, baby. Six years old, here we go. Going to go jet skiing.

Yeah, exactly. Your sixth birthday, you're like, right, I made it. I can do anything I want now. But we also have a kind of health regulatory service in that if a doctor is perceived to have done harm or accidentally mangled a patient while doing a procedure they can be punished yeah so in in Hammurabi's collection of laws it's still very interesting to find medical malpractice in it and veterinary malpractice as well actually let's say you's say you're a doctor in 1800 BCE and you're performing surgery on somebody's head

and you accidentally blind them. Depending on who they are, you face some sort of punishment. So if you accidentally blind someone of the awilu class, which also just translates as man, your hand gets cut off. But if you blind a slave, you have to pay silver equivalent to half of the slave's value. Sounds fair. Yeah. But it's interesting that all the kind of punishments are graded in this kind of in a parallel way where it depends on who you're hurting, the extent to which you will then be punished. So the eye for an eye, there is a provision

in Hammurabi's law code that says, if a man shall blind the eye of another man, they shall blind his eye. But again, the word translated as man is awilum. But if you blind the eye of a mushkenum, which is a different kind of social class, you pay 60 shekels of silver. And similarly with a slave, you again pay half the value of the slave. Let's talk about gods, because the Babylonians are polytheistic. They have lots of gods. Does that mean there's a hierarchy to the gods? Are there some really good ones?

Everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's the best god. And are there some really rubbish ones who are like, oh, god of stationary? So there kind of is a god of stationary and a goddess of stationary. So there's Nabu, who's a god of writing, and Nisaba, who's the goddess of writing and grain. But they're kind of important. So there are the great gods, so the god of the sky, Anu, and then there's the head of the pantheon in most periods, who's Enlil, and then you have the mischievous god Ea, who's constantly trying to help people, rescue people from the flood, for example, most famously.

And you have Ishtar, the goddess who descends to the underworld and somehow makes it back. And by somehow, I mean, she gets her husband to replace her because he was basically cheating on her. So you have the great gods, but then you have the kind of lesser gods who do a wide variety of different things, but are still hugely important to specific parts of everyday life. But it's an enormous pantheon. It changes who's the most important god also changes from period to period. So starting around the time of Hammurabi, we keep coming back to him because he's so important, but you start to see Marduk becoming a more important god, and he eventually rises to the top of the pantheon to replace Enlil in

Babylonia. And Marduk and Ishtar are two gods who get represented as planets as well. So Ishtar is Venus and Marduk is Jupiter. That's right yeah and actually each planet has a god or goddess associated with it. So for example Mars is associated with Nergal who's a war god and Ishtar is actually, I would say, the most important goddess in the pantheon. That's the only one I've heard of. Another great restaurant, probably. I mean, I've certainly been to Ishtar. Had a very nice meal. So Ishtar is the goddess of both love and war. Is that right?

Yes. So some have put it poetically in saying that she delights as much in sex as in bloodshed. So she's a very powerful goddess and she sort of is invoked by the Assyrian army when they go into battle. But she's also prayed to by people who are trying to get other people to love them. Or if someone is suffering from something like erectile dysfunction, they would pray to Ishtar again. Seeing that advert in a service station. Are you having trouble? Pray to Ishtar. Ishtar is here.

There's an entire set of texts called the Shaziga incantations, which translates literally to the lifting of the heart, where the heart is a euphemism for penis. And they're all sort of for Ishtar. God, it really was a horny part of the world, wasn't it? The Babylonians were clearly fans of Little Mix because they did some black magic. They had love potions. They had magic to try and get people to fall in love or to fancy you. How did that work? Yeah, well, we have a lot of incantations. You have people who want someone to love them,

then you have ones that are kind of dialogues where one person clearly is not interested and another person is just so desperate for this person to love them. You have fairly graphic ones. So a urinating vulva is referred to more than once in some of these. I don't know why you're urinating one. But yes, some of them do border on creepy and sort of overly intense, the sort of person that just won't leave you alone on the Tinder app or something like that. Even 4,000 years ago, there were sort of creepy men kind of going, why don't you love me? I've sent you a thousand dick pics. I've carved one in. I've carved one into wax for you. There you go. Look at it. But also there's another type of magic which is really important, which is divination,

which is where you're trying to predict the future, which is super important because, you know, we all care about, you know, are we going to have a good year next year? But for the Babylonians, they take this really seriously. And divination is something you go to a specialist and you ask them to predict the future. So how does it work, Moody? I'll start by saying there's a lot of different kinds of divination, some more affordable than others. And unfortunately, the more affordable ones like smoke and oil divination, where it's not that expensive to buy a bit of oil or to light something on fire. We don't have a lot of

written records of those. But the more expensive ones we do have, and that would be something more like liver divination or just divination from the entrails of an animal. A fancy word for that is ecstasy. A diviner would train for years and years and years to learn how to read the signs that would be contained in a liver. And it had a very elaborate ritual associated with it. So they would whisper the question that the client was asking into the ear of the sheep before slaughtering it. And then the answer would be in that various parts of the liver would have been years of training to be able to interpret what different marks on these different parts of the liver meant.

And each mark is associated with like a positive or a negative value. And you tally those up to come up with a yes or no response to the question that was initially posed imagine training for six years to realize what you've learned is all just a bunch of mumbo jumbo it's just but this is hardcore science to them i mean they presumably they understand this as a system well mind you i felt the same after my degree so you know it's not far the nice thing also about the tablets for these liver predictions is that the tablets are shaped like livers. So they describe what they are, which I love the idea of that.

I think that all history books about Henry VIII should be in the shape of Henry VIII. Can you imagine that marketing meeting? Okay, okay, guys, guys. The predictions will make it in the shape of a liver. How does that sound? Right still? That'd be great though, wouldn't it? And then, of course, as well as predicting through divination of the livers,

there's also astrology. We get a huge amount of the astrological understanding of the zodiac and so on from the Babylonian world. What does the zodiac mean to the Babylonians? And then how does it turn into astronomy? Because I know that there is that phase where they start to go, oh, hang on, the skies are predictable as well. Yeah. So actually, one of my colleagues and friends, his name is Willis Monroe, has coined a word that I think

is super useful for ancient Babylonia and Assyria, which is astronomology, which just, you know what, let's just mix them together because they're mixed together for like the entirety of the time that we have these texts. And I think the reason that works together because they're mixed together for like the entirety of the time that we have these texts. And I think the reason that works is because they are making these observations from a very, very early period. So they are doing some form of astronomy. But the reason initially they're doing it is to kind of correlate them to things happening on Earth. of planets, the phases of the moon, appearance of eclipses, all of these regularly occurring things that they observed over and over again in a lifetime and across multiple lifetimes have meaning in that they are messages sent by the gods.

So another metaphor used to describe stuff in the sky is the heavenly writing, because the stars, the planets, these are all considered to be things that the gods and goddesses write in the sky to tell us about stuff that's going to happen on earth. Even back then, people were blaming their bad day on Mercury being in retrograde. Basically, yes. The loveliest thing about what happened when an eclipse was coming up, they were genuinely worried. So they put together a fantastic ritual involving the king. Kay, do you want to have a guess what they did with the king? When an eclipse was sighted, they went, uh-oh, they grabbed the king.

What did they do with him? Did they put him in a bunker or something? It's not far off. Like Trump when he was hiding in that bunker. They're just like, get out of here. They're coming after you. The gods are angry with what you've been doing. That's half right

because they absolutely did put him in a safe space but they needed someone to absorb the the bad juju the punishment that was coming so they swapped the king out for a commoner and they brought in a substitute backup king oh so so like saddam hussein used to do that with these lookalikes in it yeah like yeah because he had like about 10 lookalikes, didn't he? Yeah. Because he had about 10 lookalikes and he'd go out wherever while he was hiding. So yeah, I could see that. I mean, it's like the movie Trading Places. It's like Con Air or Face Off or something.

Yeah, exactly. The king was put into a sort of safe space for a month or so. The commoner was treated as the king. He was given all the riches and all the kind of lavish lifestyle of the king. But what happened after a month, Moody? He was killed just to make sure that the bad omen was totally dealt with.

And then the king would be brought back. But that is great, though, because can you imagine, yeah, you've lived your whole life like terribly. And then for a month you've lived like a king. And you're like, you know what, I'm ready to go now. life like terribly and then for a month you've lived like a king and you're like you know what i'm ready to go now man because he would have probably gone through a lot more mental health issues if he'd have to go back to his normal life imagine like like five people are at your beck and call and then you have to go back to putting barley sacks on your back you take that deal then would you if we offered you a month as a billionaire would you say yeah go on then if you

gave me jeff bezos's fortune for a month and then said afterwards you die, I'll take it. Do you know how much you could do with all that power and money for a month? Listen, it's absolutely incredible. Moody, do we know if the commoner knew what was coming? I think they did. Yeah, I think it was. That's what I'm saying, they were happy. They were happy, man. So the small print was like, we've got an ordinary bloke plucked off the street, given a one month sweet deal and then dead. But what would his life have been like? Because, you know, presumably houses, we think they're mud brick built.

They're quite small. They're going to have a few cushions inside. They might have a little bit of furniture. They're going to have family members living with them. So life is comfortable enough. But the cities are huge, aren't they? And when we talk about Babylon as a city, it was the biggest city on the planet at the time. Yeah. And the first one in BC, it was, I think, the biggest city. It was still very big in the

second millennium BC. And there were other major cities with enormous populations in the sort of tens of thousands of people. But yes, I mean, houses would have been probably single story. I think in the city of Ur, there was some speculation that houses had two stories because they had staircases. But I think more recently, it's been suggested that those staircases just went to a roof. Nice. Some houses would have had toilets running water. Indoor toilets. Indoor toilets.

That's impressive. Because even in Britain, till like the 60s they had toilets outside in it it's i mean the victorians were quite far behind the babylonians in some ways don't imagine sort of like a tap and a flush but it did drain it did drain uh away or at least they had more like a port-a-loo yeah and they had like seepage drains to circles uh around a cylinder that goes deep down into the ground. And then the waste just seeps out into the... Yeah, so like festival toilets. Festival toilets, yeah.

Bit of compost on it, you're fine, it's nice. Yeah, exactly. Just don't go in there for two hours and it's fine. You know, we've talked about how similar they are to us. We know they're big pet lovers. Kay, do you want to guess what their favourite pet was? I can't see it being a dog. You've gone the wrong way. It absolutely was a dog. Is it? Yeah, they were dog lovers. I mean, Moody, I know you're a huge dog lover as well. But how do we

know the Babylonians were big dog fans? From the old Babylonian periods or 2000 BC, there are these little plaques that are mass produced from a mould. And they show all kinds of scenes. So they show goddesses and gods, they show sports matches, erotic scenes, breastfeeding, but they also show dogs. So you have some that are just the dog with a collar, sort of sitting, being a really good dog. You also have a bitch with her litter of puppies, a man walking a dog.

We know that they kept dogs. I don't know whether they would have been on their sofas, you know, like my dogs are. Oh, there you go. There you go. There we go. The proof of a dog. This is amazing that it started barking.

Has your dog heard the word dog and gone, yeah, I'm a dog. I'm a dog. I'm going to get on this podcast. I've got things to say. You're a dog. Yeah, exactly.

And there's also proverbs as well, aren't there, Moody? I mean, the one I like is in the city with no dogs, the fox is the boss, which I think is a great proverb. The slightly ruder one is, the dog licks its shriveled penis with its tongue.

Is that a proverb? How is that like a sort of wise piece of advice? We call them proverbs, but they were actually just like short statements copied down by students in, again, in scribal school. They were tweets. They were tweets, yeah, statements copied down by students in, again, in scribal school. There were tweets. There were tweets, yeah, to learn Sumerian. But sometimes they contain popular wisdom.

Other times they're just about a dog licking its shriveled penis. So there's a wide variety of them. Sure, why not? I mean, when I learned French, I had to learn the monkey is on the branch. And I guess the dog licks its shriveled penis with its tongue is equally interesting. Makes it memorable. I mean, if you're learning Sum sumerian and they buried figurines of guard dogs as well don't they they seem to have the idea of guard dogs as protectors of the family

of the home uh protecting against evil medicine or against ghosts you know dogs are they're beloved dogs have had it easy in the animal kingdom for years can you imagine all the other animals for thousands of years going why do they get to go inside? Why do they get all the treats? They just eat us, but hey, they get to sit on a sofa and chill with them. That's true. The sheep are like, oh, I see. You eat my livers, do you? That dog.

So we've talked about what the dogs are eating. What would Kay be eating if he was living back in ancient Babylonia? Because we do have recipes, don't we? We know what they were cooking, we know what they were eating. Can we hear about the veg options and then the very much not veg options? Do they account for lactose intolerance? Not really.

There are these recipe tablets that are currently held in the Yale Babylonian collection. They give us recipes for things like stews or pies and they have vegetarian stews. And these tablets make distinctions between meat or meatless, something that would have been served in certain contexts. There's a stew, I think it's called pashrutim, which means unwinding.

The first line is, meat is not used. And it goes on to describe a couple of different herbs some onions garlic and all this is mixed together and then you crumble pounded bread i can imagine for like a commoner meat was probably hard to come by regularly that you wouldn't be eating meat three times a day or whatever so there probably would have been a lot more veg options wouldn't there like actual sort of meat from cattle would have been uh pricier than say if you just go to the tigress and fish or kill a bird or buy a bird that's been killed by someone else but then there's a huge variety of vegetables you know depending on what part of mesopotamia

that would have been available to that goes go into these recipes i can imagine even the people of that era going look healthy eating is cheap instead of like, you know, go to the Tigris, go and get a fish or buy a bird off of another man. It's all about education, guys. Live for one shekel a week. And we know they also had blood broth as well. I mean, that's certainly not a veg option. But also what I love in your notes here is the arcadian word for cake was cuckoo which is kind of similar to cake one of my favorite little kind of i guess they're called false friends or

whatever coincidences um but while we're on the subject of cooking terminology may i please share my favorite acadian fact of all time the word for to burn which isn't used for cooking but i'm still gonna go with it is kababu so kebabs i, it wouldn't have been a great song for Usher if it was called kababu, but I mean. And we do also have a kind of comedy joke menu. Moody, do you want to read that for us? They're very colorful descriptions. Month of Kissimu, what is your food? You shall eat donkey dung on bitter garlic and chaff in spoiled milk.

Month of Tebetu, what is your food? You shall eat egg of a goose from the poultry house, And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the production notes for I'm a Celebrity. We haven't got kangaroo testicles, but we have got dog poop and the excrement of dust flies. Just Ant and Dick going, dog flies? So, I mean, is this just people just joking around? What's that? Is that a satire? Yeah, it's just I think it's called the Infernal Kitchen. I mean, that's not the Babylonian title, but that's what we call it today to kind of signal that it's a it's a work of humor that combines some of the elements of actual cuisine,

you know, mixing things together. Garlic, egg of a goose is not that bad, really gross stuff that, you know, makes for a comedy menu. And in terms of just a general entertainment, they didn't have Xboxes back then, but they like board games. They played music on lyres and flutes and harps. They loved dancing. We have sort of visual scenes of dancing in big sort of swirling circle patterns, which is quite fun. But they're also huge beer drinkers. Beer in the ancient Mesopotamian world isn't just a nice refreshing drink. It's food it's it's a life blood of society and it's not the same as our beer because firstly it's ale but also it's thick like porridge and you have to drink it with a straw okay is that something you'd do in a bar

or are you like no not for me i don't drink so i mean either yeah i don't drink and i've never understood the fascination with beer so Because it doesn't look nice. I don't know. People get bloated and belchy with it. But this is super important in their society, Moody. And we know of the hymn to Ninkazi, who's the goddess of beer. So we have a drinking song from 4,000 years ago. No wonder they needed so many incantations for erectile dysfunction.

Stop drinking beer, mate mate you'll be fine brewers droop isn't it yeah so moody why is beer so important is it is it the fact that it's easy to make or is it that it's nutritious or why beer why not wine it is easy to make from the ingredients that are available like barley was very easy to grow and to produce and farm, and the brewers who made it, including someone called Cushim. So that's like one of the earliest names written in history is a beer brewer. Some of the earliest signs are about beer. And it would have been pretty calorie dense. It would have stored easily, it would have probably been cleaner than some of the water that was available, so it would have hydrated you. It wouldn't have been associated necessarily with just getting drunk. They probably also gave it to younger people as well. And we have visual depictions

of people drinking it with a straw, including on those old Babylonian plaques I mentioned earlier of erotic scenes where one person is leaning forward drinking beer out of a straw and the other person is engaging in sexual intercourse with them from behind else to describe this um wow i've never seen that in a queen so there would have been sort of a thick layer on top that you had to kind of poke through to get to the actual liquid are we still talking about the bit let's talk about uh fashion and and hygiene i'm looking at k right now and you're a handsome man you've got a nicely groomed beard you've got quite short cropped hair is that a babylonian look moody would k fit in or is his beard too short i think the beard might be a bit too short i'm afraid oh no i often wonder would i fit fit into Babylonian society so this is a good

you don't drink the beer so immediately they'll be like who's this weirdo who's this weirdo so longer beards for the men we also know in terms of beauty we have cosmetics we have knowledge of women wearing cosmetics men perhaps as well we know of unguents

and moisturisers different eye shades of coloration is beauty purely for the rich or do we get a sense that maybe ordinary people also beautify themselves as far as i know perfume for example would have been pretty expensive it is really complicated to make some things never change yeah it's true it's true but they had tweezers obviously the mirrors would have been polished bronze so you could check yourself out you know you could before you put your glow up on, then you look yourself in the mirror and go, yeah, I look pretty hot.

I'm going out partying. But this is probably a high status thing. You're looking amazing. And you've managed to snare yourself, someone glamorous and beautiful on the dance floor. And it's going to lead to a marriage. So soon? Yeah, I mean, you meet them on a Friday, you marry them on a Monday. Is that true, Moody?

You know, do we know about marriage in the Babylonian world? Is it a formal legal process or do you just kind of like, yeah, we're living together? Yeah, both. So in the law collection, there are references to people who have been living together already and what their marriage status would be and what do you do with their stuff if they break up, that sort of thing. But the people did get married and there are marriage documents. So there might have been a special reason these were written down. Maybe people wanted to include a special

clause about what to do if they wanted to get a divorce or what to do with a dowry or that sort of thing. A prenup. Yeah, exactly. A prenup. So this is a society that allows for divorce. But it's also a society where female infidelity could be punished with death. In some ways, it's quite progressive and quite open. And in some ways, it's still quite patriarchal as a society. Do women have as many rights as men? I would say it was more firmly patriarchal. I mean, again, we're skewed by the sources that are available. So the Middle Assyrian laws, there is an entire tablet that's just dedicated to women and them committing crimes or crimes committed against them and they are the most detailed of any other collection of laws from the ancient middle east on the point of adultery yeah

and adultery where was it committed was it committed in someone's house was it committed in the woman's house in their marriage home was it committed in the middle of the street and who saw it what are the evidentiary kind of constraints to proving it uh it's it's very detailed committing adultery back then must have been such a hard thing to do like how'd you meet like here i mean it's easier on instagram or whatever like you see somebody else but back then like you couldn't even contact there was no phone there was no letters you'd actually have to see somebody and go do you fancy cheating on your husband with me i think it's easier then i think there's no evidence left

behind there's no text there's no emails there's... There's the sign of a cheater. Look at him. Presumably, there's a lot of mingling. There's marketplaces, there must be bars. It's obviously a very sophisticated, complicated society. It's huge, massive cities, which means presumably lots of farmland outside it, growing food to feed everyone in there. How does the economy work? Presumably, there are the poor, there are enslaved people, there are the rich. Depends on the period and on the place, right? So economy is constrained by environmental factors as well as political factors and a whole host of other things. But yes, there was absolutely slave labor. It was somewhat capitalist. I think, again, this is a

kind of modern concept. It's hard to import onto the ancient world, but there were the rich and the less well-off and then the less free. And there were different grades of slave labor. So I think it's more useful to think of it as being on a spectrum. Not every slave was treated poorly. They didn't have mobility in terms of the kind of job they were doing, but they could still have a family. they could still make money separately and have business enterprises. This is not me defending it. But I mean, again, in different periods and different places, it was slightly different. So again, if we're talking about the second millennium BCE, further north in the Assyrian Empire, you have this vast trading network with Anatolia, where people are taking huge business risks, they're even smuggling stuff to try to avoid taxes in the hems of their clothing and taking secret back roads to avoid patrols. So there's a black market as well. There's dodgy people trying to smuggle stuff into Turkey

under their dress and in their trousers. A bottle of Jack Daniels in their bra or something. Is this for personal use? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's personal use. All 17 bottles. The nuance window! Is this for personal use? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's personal use.

All 17 bottles. The Nuance Window! And that brings us nicely to the Nuance Window. This is where Kay and I go silent for a couple of minutes and we allow our expert, Dr Moody, to have two uninterrupted minutes of telling us something that we really need to know. We've already heard about love potions,

but you're going to tell us about Babylonian heartbreak and depression. So two minutes on the clock, Moody, the nuance window, please. People from ancient Mesopotamia were really not all that different from us. They worried about paying bills. They struggled to fall asleep. They sang lullabies to their crying babies. They baked bread. They played with puppies and they looked at the stars and wanted people to love them. But they also got sad and anxious. There's a phrase in medical texts from the first millennium BCE that translates literally to breaking of the heart. Symptom descriptions tacked on to very elaborate therapies describe a person who lies awake at night, afraid, who feels their limbs grow weak inexplicably, who feel panicky, get vertigo, and feel down. When the Noah figure in the Babylonian flood story, whose name is Atrachasis, realizes that he has to leave

all of his fellow citizens and friends behind to die in the flood, he vomits, for his heart was broken. An ancient Assyrian scholar named Nabu Tabni Utsur writes to the king that he is, quote, dying of a broken heart because the king stopped paying him. He repeats, heartbreak has seized me. Worried that he's fallen out of favor, he begs the king to help revive his heart. Heartbreak, in other words, is a term that captures the experience of depression or anxiety, or both, depending on the context. There are other descriptions in medical texts that may sound pretty familiar to us. So a person who's depressed doesn't want to eat anything or feel sick when they do. They constantly forget stuff. They might wander around or pace nervously. They struggle to sleep. They have nightmares

or cry out. There is an even an illness in a diagnostic text that's 40 tablets long called lovesickness that finds a patient feeling really sad, sighing all the time, feeling discomfort after eating, and even talking to themselves. Treatments for heartbreak range from drinking a mixture of herbs steeped in beer to wearing a leather bag around your neck filled with insects, minerals, medical plants, and human bone. One even tells the patient to take a brick from the threshold of their house, a place presumably where evil or danger can collect, and burn it. All these medical texts take these symptoms seriously and prescribe treatments for them. Depression and anxiety are, in other words, medical issues deserving of therapy.

This is easy to forget for the ancient world because it's so far away in time that we think they can't possibly be similar to us. Mental illness is not new. far away in time that we think they can't possibly be similar to us. Mental illness is not new. It's not some modern invention of avocado toast munching millennials or tiktokers. It's not an indulgence or a fabrication. It's real. It's human. It's ancient. So much of what we find in cuneiform texts is a reminder of this shared humanity. But to me, the descriptions of mental symptoms and illness are some of the most powerful. So thank you for letting me talk about it for two minutes. Thank you very much. Kay, what do you think about that?

Basically, we've been telling men to open up for about 4,000 years and we still can't do it. So what do you know now? So it's time now for the quickfire quiz. It's called the So What Do You Know Now? And we're going to find out what Kay has remembered from our conversation. He's shaking his head. There was a lot to process, man. I mean, you have basically been bombarded with an entire civilization.

Yeah. So it's quite a lot. It's quite a lot. All right. So I'm putting 60 seconds on the clock. We've got 10 questions. Question one. What does the word Mesopotamia mean? In between two rivers. It's quite a lot. All right. So I'm putting 60 seconds on the clock. We've got 10 questions. Question one. What does the word Mesopotamia mean?

In between two rivers. It is. Yeah, absolutely. The Tigris and Euphrates. Question two. Holding at least 28,000 clay tablets, possibly 40,000, in which city was the world's oldest library? Nineveh. His Nineveh.

Look at this. Straight in. Question three. Which pet would the ancient Mesopotamians most likely have? Dogs. It is dogs. Question four. Name one of the things divinamians most likely have? Dogs. It is dogs. Question 4. Name one of the things diviners would use to tell the future.

Liver. It was a sheep liver. Question 5. Ninkazi was the goddess of which tasty porridge-like beverage, drunk with a straw? Beer. It was beer. It's doing very well. Question 6. What is the name of the symbolic writing system used in the ancient Near East? Cuneiform. Cuneiform is right.

Question seven. King Nebuchadnezzar apparently built which ancient wonder of the world for his homesick wife? It was those... I forgot what they're called, but it was those phallic-like objects, wasn't it? I was talking about age of empires. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, yes. There you go.

Question eight. How does the Mesopotamian sexagesimal place value system help us keep time today? It's done in 60s rather than 10s. That's right. Question nine.

An eclipse triggered which emergency ritual? You'd get a commoner to play the king. Question 10. The Babylonians were pantheistic.

The god Marduk was associated with Jupiter but the goddess of war and love Ishtar was associated with which planet? Venus. It is Venus. Nine out of ten.

Really good. Really good. I was listening. Come on, guys. You were listening. Really impressive. And obviously, Dr. Moody taught you well. So, I mean, that's a very strong score and a tricky episode

because we really threw you in the deep end there 4,000 years ago. You guys are great at your jobs that's that's what i will say right you were able to explain it very very uh concisely to me so thank you guys well i hope you've both had fun you've certainly aced the uh ancient mesopotamian episode in my book slash clay tablet and listeners if you're in the mood to get some more ancient cultures in your life why not check out the aztecs episode with dr caroline dodds penock and joel dommett or if you want to go back to the near east but a bit more recent you can listen to the saladin episode with maria shahata and professor jonathan phillips and remember if you've had a laugh and learned some stuff please do share the podcast with your friends or leave a review online and make sure to

subscribe to you're dead to me on bbc sound so you never miss an episode all that remains for me now is to say a huge thank you to my guests in uh in history corner we've had the magnificent dr moody al-rashid from the university of oxford thank you moody thank you for having me it's been a pleasure and in comedy corner we've had the incomparable k curd thank you k thank you for having me this has been amazing and to you lovely, join me next time as we take another plunge into the ponds of the past with a different pair

of precocious pals. That was hard to say. But now I'm off to go and lick a human skull to make sure my teeth don't grind at night. Bye! You're Dead to Me

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