The Rise & Fall of Babylon

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0:32This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

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2:18That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hey, it's Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball cat litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over.

2:55Be guest ready with Arm and Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon. You're standing in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. You're watching in horror as the unstoppable war machine of King Nebuchadnezzar smashes the city to pieces, reducing the sacred first temple to ash. According to the weeping prophet Jeremiah, this is a catastrophe, divine punishment sent by God for the sins of the Judeans. From this trauma, biblical writers forge an enduring myth, Babylon, home of Nebuchadnezzar, as the ultimate city of sin. A cursed place, a caricature of human arrogance, decadence, decay.

3:51But beneath that myth lies a far grander reality. The tale of history's first true megacity. It's got a bad press. Babylon was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis of dazzling blue glazed brick, of mighty canals carved through the desert, soaring temples that rivaled the engineering feats of empires that came many centuries after it. This is Babylon, the ancient blueprint for the modern world. Joining us today is Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, professor in ancient history at Cardiff University. He's author of Babylon, the mother of all cities. And he's going to help me strip away centuries of myth and tell us about this real, gritty, vibrant, important story of Babylon and its rulers.

4:44Enjoy.

4:49Lloyd, thank you for coming on.

4:51Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: You're very welcome. It's good to be here. First, I think geography, do we need to get geography sorted out first? Where is this place? Babylon, right in the centre of modern-day Iraq. So it's about 50 miles north of Baghdad, essentially. And is that Mesopotamia? What are some of the terms that we'll have heard? Yeah, so you will have heard of Mesopotamia, a Greek term meaning between the rivers. So the rivers, of course, are the Euphrates and the Tigris. Huge rivers. Enormous, with this huge floodplain in between. And Babylon is actually built on the edge of the Euphrates. In fact, the Euphrates ran through the city centre.

5:25Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So there's kind of like an island of Babylon as well. And the whole landscape was littered with canals. So it's like a kind of spaghetti junction of ancient world. The other thing you'll hear is Fertile Crescent. That's another thing as well. So that talks about this huge swathe of land which went from the coast of Syria and the Levant right the way down through Iraq to the Persian Gulf, which was made fertile because of these great two rivers. And so wonderful soil, benign climate. Yeah, harsh, harsh desert climate. But as long as you're close to the water, it's manageable. The rivers are a bit of a nightmare.

6:05Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: They move around a lot. They do move around. Untamed snakes. Absolutely, they really do. And that's why I think the Babylonians tried to kind of tame the rivers by seeing them as deities. If you think of the way the Ganges is for many Hindus today. So the Babylonians thought the same thing about the Tigris and the Euphrates. So they offered to it. They personalised it. They pray that it will do its job and not harm them is one of the things you get. But the other thing that the Tigris and Euphrates gave to Babylonia is mud. And mud was essential for everything. The whole of Babylon was built on mud bricks, essentially.

6:39Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And, of course, even the writing tablets in which they wrote their cuneiform documents was mud as well. So I think, you know, the kind of the gift, if you think about the gift of the Nile was supposed to be grain. The gift of the Euphrates was definitely mud. and the Babylonians utilised it. One of the best things they could do. And really nice. So the mud's all, the river floods a bit, the minute you put it in the sun, it bakes hard as rocks. Absolutely, absolutely. So you've got this strange... And you know, and the thing is, many times when we find documents like these cuneiform tablets, think of them about the size of a sort of computer mouse that would fit really nicely into the palm of the hand.

7:14Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: When they get baked in the sun, they go hard. But if they're double baked in, say, a fire, and let's face it, Many of the locations that we found have been set on fire because of invasion and so forth over the centuries. They go rock hard. And so, I mean, they're virtually unbreakable, you know. They're going to be around a long time after we're gone, that's for sure. Long time after my email inbox. Yes, exactly. And isn't it a fascinating thing, Steve, you know, the great, these early civilizations, Nile, Indus, China, these rivers, big sorts of freshwater. That's what you need. Absolutely. And in that part you've got a useful crops, there's a good suite of things you can grow there.

7:58Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Oh, there's masses of things. Indigenous. Masses. And it's done on kind of like a state scale, but also on a household scale as well, because virtually every peasant is allotted a bit of land. So you must think of the whole of Babylonia as being divided into kind of like allotments all over the place. And it's rich in everything they could possibly want, every kind of vegetable, legume you could think of, every sort of herb. And then, of course, the richness of all the fruits as well. So, I mean, they were really pretty much self-dependent. You know, they could produce everything they wanted. And plus the rivers then also gave them fresh water, shellfish and fresh water fish, all of that as well.

8:37Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So, I mean, it was incredible for them. We hear about cities and civilisations, don't we, in this part of the world? And I'm so glad you're here because I obviously always get the chronology wrong. But there's the er. The Ur is the early one. So Ur is the kind of first kind of great urban centre. That's way down south nowadays, down the south of Iraq. In antiquity, so about 4 ,000 years ago, it was actually on the sea. But, of course, the land has encroached, you know, silted up over the millennia. So it's far from the sea now, but it was actually a seaport originally. So that was the first kind of great walled city, I suppose.

9:12Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And then from that we get places like Uruk and then Sipar, Nippur, And Babylon is something of a latecomer to the kind of urban centres of Mesopotamia. I suppose it really kind of starts coming alive about 1900 BCE, something like that, when we get our first cuneiform reports about this nascent city. But by 200 years later, it was ruling the roost. It dominated the rest of Mesopotamia. And by ruling the roost, that's interesting. So these cities, I was about to ask, do they all emerge like our Greek city-state system later on? Or does one emerge, conquer everyone else, and build sort of empires?

9:52Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: It's a little bit of both, actually. So these cities kind of pop up roughly at the same time in the south and a little bit later further north. And then they go through the process of conquest. And what we're finding, rather like kind of, you know, British medieval history, there are dynastic alliances between all of these city-states, marriage alliances, all of this kind of thing. So there's this whole interconnected web of kings and princes and priestesses all around at the same time. But all of them keen, basically, to be top dog in the area. And that's what Babylon does so well. And why? So what is there something that Babylon's doing?

10:33Does it have a little competitive advantage or something?

10:35Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: What's Babylon doing that sees it rise to prominence? It, first of all, acquiesces to other powers around it. and it shows loyalty to the late kings of Ur, for instance, the last dynasty of Ur. The Babylonians, just coming into being, very loyal to them. They pay their taxes. And because of that, the kings of Ur allow the Babylonians some kind of laissez-faire. They're allowed to have their own governors. Bad mistake. Because, yeah, of course, once you've got a governor's household, then you've got a little dynasty starting, and so these people start to take power for themselves. And as they see the center of Ur going into a little bit of decline and then a sharp decline, so they've already got a system of government set up for themselves.

11:19Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And so that's how it really begins. But really, it all kicks off when a group of non-Mesopotamians come into the area. These are called the Amorites. They were nomadic tribes. They came from around the Syria area, came into Mesopotamia. In our early cuneiform documents, they're often looked down on, despised, as barbarians, sheep farmers and wanderers, who are these rather unclean and questionable people. But over a 200-year period, a lot of these Amorite leaders, these tribal chiefs, actually become kind of urbanized. They start moving into the centers. And it's out of this group of Amorites that actually our first kings of Babylon really emerge.

12:14Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So it's really fascinating. As often happens, you know, the outsiders become the insiders. And that's really what you get in Babylon. And, of course, the first dynasty of Babylon, what we call the old period or the old Babylonian period, is ruled by a family. and the highlight of the whole dynasty is, of course, Hammurabi, I'm sure some people will have heard of, who has gone down in history as being the first lawgiver, a man who was an incredible military strategist, a good soldier, a man with a ferocious temper, but a keen, keen eye for politics as well. So we see under Hammurabi, Babylon suddenly dominating the political, geographic, social, cultural and religious sphere of the whole of Mesopotamia.

13:05Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And at its height, about 1750 BCE, there was no other state to touch it, really. Virtually every other state had been conquered by Hammurabi and was now in its orbit. And why are you able to speak so beautifully and eloquently about his character, his personality? What are our sources here? Honestly, the sources for my area of study are so rich because we have all of these cuneiform texts. And these preserve everything from wills, house sales, marriage negotiations and dowry settlements, bills for funerals, laundry lists, love songs, poems, epic literature, you name it, it's all there. And one of the great things we have about old Babylonian documentation like this is we have a lot of personal correspondence.

14:00Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So back in the 1930s in Syria at a place called Mari, which was a very big political centre at the time, archaeologists discovered a royal archive. And in there were all of these tablets just waiting to be decoded. Incredible. They're all written to a king called Zimri Lim. And we seem to have correspondence from all over the ancient world coming to him, you know. So we get a really good sense of his character, of course we do. But because a lot of the documentation comes back and forth between Zimri Lim's ambassadors in Babylon and the court in Mari, we learn a lot about Hammurabi as well. And what comes over from them, first of all, he's a mover and shaker.

14:46Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So he's a player as well, a double dealer. So he will quite happily make an alliance with somebody, go so far down the path with it and then drop them. which is you know with the knowledge of the rest of history I'm you know love to say I'll surprise but then the other things we hear is that he has this most terrible temper and this kind of incapacity really to to be patient for anything so at one point we told that a group of diplomats from Mari have asked the king for some new cloaks to wear because it was kind of a custom in antiquity for when diplomats arrived, they were feasted, they were given gifts, because distances were quite long.

15:31Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And very often they were given favours by the king of things like personal items, dress, that kind of thing. And anyway, the ambassadors from Mari kind of kick up a bit of a fuss and they say, no cloaks here, you know, it's not what we're used to. And rather than just accepting that, we have this letter written back by one of these diplomats to his master, Zimri Lim, saying, the king went absolutely mad at us he said who are we to demand anything of Hammurabi you know you should go back to your master with no shoes on your feet he says you know that's the kind of people you are so he he really was a touchy character when you're describing that so beautifully when you read those sources from as early in human history as we have that detail that level of detail source it's very rare isn't it that far back we certainly don't i don't feel we have to talk about that about egypt for example it's no no and that's because because of the nature of the of the beast really you know i mean the source is that is the tablet and the tablet is very often the real words of individuals you know some scribe has been dashing down and and because they survive and of course you know that doesn't happen to papyrus or it doesn't happen to leather and it certainly doesn't happen to paper and so forth you know so that's why in in near eastern studies we're very lucky with our source materials and just from a personal level when you read all that do you find yourself thinking goodness me humans beings have hardly changed over the last three and a half thousand years or do you think oh these people are different it'll go two ways actually sometimes you know you it it's a stark kind of seismic shift that you're looking at you know you're looking into this vast chasm between us and them but other times that chasm i mean just completely folds in you know we are one and the same people there's a beautiful almost little throwaway line in one of the documents actually that a queen writes to zimri limb in mari he's away on warfare and while he's been away his youngest daughter has died and the queen writes to her scribe saying look you need to tell the king about this but let's wait until he's here because he needs to hear this from me.

17:44Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: I mean, you know, that's just now, isn't it? That's real, you know, that's how we are, you know. So we are lucky enough to know quite a lot about Hammurabi. What else? The law code, you mentioned that. Why is that so significant? Is it one, again, that we like to talk about firsts in your area? Yeah, so it really is one of the firsts. Not quite the first. We can go back about 150 years to find our first laws. but I suppose Hammurabi's laws have the most, have a longevity about them I suppose more than anything and first of all he also sets them up in a very kind of impactful way so if you go to the Louvre Museum in Paris today you'll see this huge black basalt obelisk and sitting on the top is a picture of Hammurabi himself in front of his god and the god is Shamash who is the sun god and Hammurabi sort of raises his hand in a gesture of reverence and Shamash is wearing a bull's crown, a bull's horn crown and he's holding a rope which is a measuring tape because Shamash as the sun can go around the world, of course, when he takes his measuring tape around the world and because of his ability to see all the world, he is the god of justice because he sees everything, he hears everything instinctively, he knows what is right and wrong.

19:03Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: and the Babylonians believed that their kings were appointed by Shamash to do that job for him. So Near Eastern kings had to be warriors, they had to be shepherds of their people, but also more than anything I think they had to be kings of justice. So Hammurabi takes this very seriously. So he sets up this basalt stele and it's huge and it's covered with over 300 laws written in the most exquisite cuneiform script or chiselled in. And it's written in a very kind of archaic language as well, a deliberate kind of like, you know, harking back to older times as well. Even at the time. Even at the time there was ancient history going on then, you know.

19:47Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So it's the equivalent of kind of like, you know, King James Bible language, even for the Babylonians of Hammurabi's time. and it it tells us a lot about of course babylonian society and some of the problems they face because we always think well laws are created to stop certain things happening okay and if they're happening too regularly then something needs to be done about it what we don't get frustratingly is any knowledge of how much these laws really impacted on people's lives so they might have been more like a wish list you know but anyway they're there and we recognize something in them straight away so we would label them as lex talionis which essentially is the idea of an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth so that's the basis of all babylonian law and unsurprisingly we find the same ideas in the hebrew bible in the old testament in leviticus numbers deuteronomy as well and there's very little doubt in my mind that later hebrews incorporated some of Hammurabi's thinking into their laws as well.

21:00Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So the kind of thing we get would be something like, if a man fights with another man in the street, and the opponent loses an eye, then the man who has hurt him will lose an eye also. Okay, so quite literally like that. Now, there are little caveats in it. So, for instance, if a man beats another man and the man breaks his arm, so the other man will have his arm broken. If a man beats a slave whose arm gets broken, the man shall play the slave's owner some money. So the slave gets nothing out of it at all, but there's monetary compensation because that slave can't do the work that he's intended to do for a certain amount of time.

21:59Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So it goes like that. There's one set of laws which are about builders, which I really like. so it says if a builder builds a wall and after two months that wall falls down the builder is responsible for the rebuilding of that wall at his cost as well which is nice you know that's liberating so we have lots of lots of that kind of thing but you know these laws drill down to everything and sometimes sometimes we can see them at work so some of the laws talk about women's rights and women's properties and as you can imagine Babylon was a very patriarchal society and women didn't have many rights but a widow could have rights and there are a group of women who are quite remarkable they are called nadi tu priestesses and they kind of work like nuns really in the temple of Marduk in Babylon so they cannot have children obviously they have to be chased but these women are allowed to adopt other women, younger novices, as their daughters and pass on property to them.

23:07Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And we get one of these cases, in fact, coming up in a series of documents where a nun has passed on her wealth and her house to a novice who claims to be her adopted daughter But the nun's two brothers contest this in court and we see how the system works. So witnesses are brought in who can say, yes, yes, the nun did adopt this girl. And also the girl is able to show the document, of course, the cuneiform document where her adopted mother had given her this property as well. So the two men have their case dismissed and they're thrown out of court. So we do see occasionally a bit of functioning of it.

23:51Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: But it's fascinating stuff. And all aspects of life are covered there. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially it has a handle.

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24:45This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

25:18Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Terms and More at AppleCard.com. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance.

25:52Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST.

26:31That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball cat litter. It delivers long-lasting odour control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over.

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27:17Is there a sense, I mean, we're not going to go on Magna Carta, but I'm guessing Hammy Raba doesn't put any limits on his own power, but is he sort of, is it pretty weighted towards the aristocracy, the elites, or the protections? Essentially, yes.

27:33Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So we have kind of like three classes that come out in the text, and they're very difficult to translate, actually. But one of them I've translated as kind of if a lord or if a senior, you know, does something such, or if the wife of a senior. And then there's if a Babylonian, which I reckon means if a freed man, and then there's a slave. So that's the way it works. and the way in which the law works in favour of them will vary according to their social status. As for the king himself, I mean, he doesn't, you know, he doesn't come over with any particular rights or privileges in it. You know, he doesn't claim anything for himself.

28:12Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And that, I think, says quite a lot about how the Babylonians thought about their kings. So unlike, you know, the Egyptian pharaohs, Hammurabi and his lot were never considered to be living gods. They were, at best, I would say, viceroys of the gods. They're appointed there. But there's no guarantee even that their elder son would be favoured by a god, for instance. Of course, the Babylonians can put everything down to the favour or non-favour of the gods. Diseases, successes, invasions, or triumphs all go down to the Babylonian gods. There are some interesting things, however, in this concept of what constitutes a god-king for the Mesopotamians, because we have quite a lot of what we call theophoric names in Babylonia.

29:01Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So a theophoric name means where the name of a king or a god is placed in front of your own name. So Christopher is a good example for that for us in the West. so we have names that translate as Hammurabi is my god which suggests at least for that man who took on that name and decided to keep that name at least he must have thought higher of Hammurabi than maybe somebody else you know so I think there's actually a quite a fluid idea of what constitutes a living god in Babylon completely unlike Egypt when you know where things are just set theologically so and i think that says quite a lot about the babylonian mindset anyway they're quite quite a an expansive thinking people you know they think well beyond their borders so so to give a good example of that you know their greatest piece of literature is the epic of gilgamesh and that whole kind of boy's own adventure story is all about going beyond the city walls into the world that's out there you know what what bizarre and terrifying things are around us and then even more the quest to find immortality takes Gilgamesh to the underworld and and you know to meet the heroes of the dead and all that kind of thing so you can I think you see in the Babylonian mind this real inquisitiveness that wants to think about the world of its in its broader ways and I suppose that they don't have a joke they are at the crossroads of the world There are north, south, east, west.

30:34There are trade routes. There are peoples. There are invaders.

30:37Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: It's a busy old neighborhood. Everyone came through them. And I think if you walk down the streets of Babylon of a night, you would just hear, as you would in the center of any great metropolis today, multiple languages being spoken all around you. It must have been terribly exciting. In a way that Egypt feels a little bit more geographically removed. Precisely, removed. And indeed defended, and there may be advantages and disadvantages to that. But also the Egyptians had no real desire to explore either. They thought the Nile Valley was everything. The Babylonians don't think like that at all.

31:07Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: I think it is because they see the world coming through them, then they're a lot more sort of open to it. Now, militarily, what does that mean? Are we fighting our neighbours a lot? If we don't launch preemptive attacks, are we likely to be invaded? What does that mean? What does it mean to be a king? So it means that you're always on the lookout for opportunists elsewhere. Because you yourself were an opportunist once and you've managed to get to the top and now it's dog eat dog. So I think Hammurabi and his successors were constantly looking out for rival kings more locally. So places like Isin and Kish, quite big cities nearby in Mesopotamia.

31:47Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: But also, more problematically, major rivals like the kings of Elam, the Elamite kings, which were based in southwestern Iran. today at the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. And they would come in on these major campaigns into Babylonia and swipe through the place. In fact, that wonderful stele of Hammurabi, I described in the Louvre, was actually found in Susa in Elam. It was stolen and put up there, absolutely. And then later on, past Hammurabi's time, as we get into about 1000 through to 800 BCE, the threat comes increasingly from the north, And that's with the Assyrians, of course, as the Assyrian Empire grows in strength, takes over where the Hittites and the Mitanians had once been.

32:37Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So we see there's this incredible rivalry that goes on between Babylon and Assyria. And the rivalry, I think, is based on culture, first of all. The Assyrians never got over the fact that the Babylonians did it first. You know, the Babylonians created the first literature. The Babylonians did the first arithmetic, the first stargazing. Everything originates in Babylon. And so the Assyrians, so close to them, really. We're talking about the area around northern Iraq, around Mosul. That's the kind of area of Ashurwood and so forth. They always saw themselves as kind of second rate. It was that kind of game that went on between England and France.

33:25Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: I was going to say, unfortunately, it sounds to me exactly like Britain and France. Precisely like that. Always a bit jealous. Always this jealousy there, you know. And so what do they do? Well, when the Assyrians manage, you know, they really are at their height in the 800s, 700s BCE, they storm into Babylonia and take Babylon. And first of all, they kind of settle themselves into it and they think, you know, we will be Babylonian kings. We will act as a Babylonian king. But then when the Babylonians don't accept the Assyrian king there and rebel against it, that's when they turn all of that kind of built-up tension on the Babylonian peoples.

34:03Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So King Sennacherib of Assyria, he's quite remarkable. He completely tears down the city, the great ziggurat temples, the walls, and the most incredible thing, he breaks all the canals open. So the whole city centre is flooded. And what's he doing with that? Well, it's very symbolic. he takes Babylon back to before creation when they were just the waters of chaos and then after that, after he dies his son comes to the throne, Esarhaddon and he's an absolute dyed-in-the-wool babbler-phile and so he restores the temples again lovingly puts them back and in fact for the rest of Assyrian history the kings of Assyria suffer this terrible guilt complex about what they did to Babylon, you know?

34:53Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: How could we ever do that? You know, who are we to do that? Because that kind of answers someone's next question, which is why is Babylon just another one of these waypoints, these political entities on this great big, this great journey from the ancient past to the present? But no, Babylon meant something different. These Assyrians, they're not celebrating Ur and these others. So something's going on in Babylon. You mentioned the Enlightenment. You mentioned this sort of scientific and literary. Yeah, absolutely. So it's the Babylonians who give us the first conception of proper astronomy and astrology.

35:28So can I ask why? What's going on there?

35:31Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Just something in the water. Yeah, something there, something inquisitive. I mean, you know, divination and looking for signs are always there. But the Babylonians just refine it. More than an art, it becomes a proper science for them, you know. So one of the things that we're blessed with in Near Eastern studies, and it cuts into classical studies in things like, you know, histories of Alexander the Great, for instance, is that we have all of these astronomical diaries. Where we can pinpoint, because they are so accurate, the times of eclipses, the times of new moons. And if we have a document with a historical event attached to it, to an eclipse, we can be absolutely specific.

36:14Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: specific so we know exactly the date of the battle of Gaugumela, the date of the battle of Kunaxa because the Babylonian scribes are recording it. So you go into your university common room with your fellow profs and you can be more certain about events thousands of years ago than your Anglo-Saxon colleagues are about the year 500. By far, by far, by far. It's incredible, isn't it? It really can. We can be that specific about it. Okay, so and where we now all think of in a very stupid way. I blinkedly think of ancient Greece being the wellspring of all this science. Babylon is way ahead of the game.

36:52Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Way ahead of the game. And I think the more we look at the ancient world in a global context, the more we are understanding, of course, this kind of Eurocentric thing is a fallacy. It cannot hold for much longer, surely. You know, that's not to take away what the Greeks and the Romans and other European civilizations did. But let's also acknowledge, you know, that there was a hub of culture that was going on in the Middle East. You know, long before there was Rome or Athens or Alexandria, there was Babylon doing everything. I'm just thinking, I mean, in some ways, like the Greeks, like the Egyptians, Babylon does that rarest of things.

37:33And like sometimes Chinese civilizations, it creates a brand, a civilization that's so enduring that after it's been military defeat and conquered, its conquerors are more likely to want to conform.

37:44Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Exactly. That's quite rare. They become Babylonian, right? Yeah, that's fascinating. So Alexander wanted to make his empire, the centre of his empire, Babylon. His general, Sir Lucas, and his family, they still do the rites and rituals to the old Babylonian gods, you know, thousands of years after they were first done. So there's always something, I think, you know, I always think of culture as being like a kind of like a gas that comes up from the earth. You know, if there's a fissure, then this gas will come up thick and strong and smelling, you know, densely. But there's going to be another gas elsewhere coming up through the earth and somewhere else and somewhere else.

38:20Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And these gases will all eventually merge. And I always find those points where the gases converge to be the most fascinating ones, you know, because hybrid cultures will emerge. And that's what you see with Babylon. The strongest gas comes out this way and it goes in all directions. And anybody who comes in contact with that particular thick gas is going to be influenced by Babylon. So that's why you'll see the Achaemenid Persians are besotted with Babylon. The Seleucids still are. The peoples of the Levant are completely Babylonianized. Egypt is different, as we said before. They repel, they kind of push against that kind of thing, but they can't do without it much.

39:02Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And then the north, of course, we've got Assyria and all of that gas. it also spreads over to that gnarled outpost of empire that we call ancient Greece as well, you know. And there it also took its hold as well. So if you just look at Greek art and Greek mythology, just think of the crossovers we have with Mesopotamian art and Mesopotamian mythology in the pre-Homeric and Homeric periods, you know. Sphinxes, sirens, bull-headed men or men-headed bulls. all of this is a world that's exchanging a kind of common currency really and we need to just be open to that as they were. What are we talking, so in the straightforward Babylon period before this Assyrian invasion, how big would the city have been?

39:49What's your guess, how many people do you think would have been?

39:51Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Okay, so probably about, so in the old Babylonian period probably about 20 ,000 people, something like that, which is a good size But in the imperial period, so here we're talking like 700 to 600 BC. So the Assyrians are gone now, okay. And Babylon has returned in all its glory. Okay. And has, in effect, inherited what the Assyrians left behind. So now they've got an empire in the Levant, in Syria, in the north, because, of course, they've got all of Assyria now also. So in this period we call the Neo-Babylonian period, we have two great conqueror kings, Nabupolasa, who was born in southern Iraq, and then his son, who is trained up to be a military man and crown prince, Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar II.

40:40Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And between them, really, they raise Babylon to the height of its greatness. So the city walls under Nebuchadnezzar II measure 12 miles in circumference, for instance. so we're now talking of a population probably about 50 ,000 people in fact it's huge it was the only metropolis in the world at that time you know Thebes in Egypt kind of came a rough second but nowhere like nowhere like the size of Babylon so it was the it was the the city to end all cities really. And quite planned how would it have felt if I was there? No not really no because Because, you know, just like our old cities in Britain, I was in New York last week, you know, and a higgledy-piggledy maze of streets, isn't it, you know?

41:34Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: London is exactly the same, of course, you know. So Babylon's essential structure hadn't changed over many, many centuries in spite of the defeats and the floods and all of this kind of thing. So, you know, the roads were, sometimes they were very, very wide-knit roads, but they would end at somebody's front door, you know, with no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. And other roads were just, you find, doubling back on yourself, so there was kind of no urban planning. But when Nebuchadnezzar comes to the throne, he wants to create something very special in Babylon. And so he builds a monumental processional way which crosses over a bridge over the Euphrates and into the city centre.

42:15Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And he surrounds it with gates. The most famous one, I suppose, is called the Ishtar Gate, which is now in Berlin, of course. And it's all made out of blue glazed brick, like lapis lazuli colour, and covered with these raised relief bricks of bulls and mashushu dragons and lions. And they're staggering. And there was gate after gate after gate going into the centre of Babylon. In fact, Babylon itself, Babil in Babylonian, means city of gates. So Nebuchadnezzar makes this real happen, you know. So this monumental processional way, these huge gates, And they all go to the centre of Babylon, to this enormous temple called the Eshagila, which was the ziggurat of the god Marduk.

43:07Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So why do all of this? It's because Nebuchadnezzar was really keen to activate a sense of Babylonian pride again, after all the Assyrian occupations and so forth. And one of the things he really wanted to bring back to his people was the dominance of the New Year festival. This had been the most important religious festival of the Babylonian calendar. It had disappeared under the Syrians and now he brings it back. So in March every year, the kings would celebrate the primacy of their god Marduk, who they saw as the absolute creator god. They built this huge ziggurat for him and at the top of the ziggurat, in his holy of holies, the statue of the god resided.

43:50Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And every year at New Year, the king would process down this huge ceremonial avenue, covered on either side with images of lions, the representation of the goddess Ishtar. And he'd get into the Holy of Holies, and there, in front of the high priest, he would have to remove his crown, remove his ceremonial garments, kneel in front of the statue, while the priest whacked him around the head, gave him a good blow. And the idea was this was supposed to bring tears to the eyes of the king to show his humility in front of the gods and remind everybody he is not a god. He is just the avatar of God, if you like.

44:31Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And then when that was done, processions of gods being carried on palaquins from all over Babylon and Babylonia would enter into that processional avenue. And then there would be seven days of rejoicing. This was the one time when the ordinary Babylonian got to see their gods being carried through the streets and even maybe got a glimpse of their king as well. So Babylon, the architecture of Neo-Babylonia, responds to the needs of the ceremonial, the religious and ritual life of the state. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

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47:10Why does Babylon not exist later on? What happens?

47:15Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Well, you know, it continues to exist for another 400 years after Nebuchadnezzar's death. So, as you say, Alexander the Great goes there. Absolutely. The Persians are there. Alexander's there. The Seleucids are there. Yes. The Seleucids are there up until the middle of the 2nd century BC. And it's still a cultural hub. You know, it's still a centre. But of course, the Seleucids, being a Greek-speaking dynasty, they are being pulled back constantly towards the Mediterranean. And when they begin to create their new capitals, Seleucia, Antioch, on the coast of the Levant, well, you know, the intelligentsia, the priests, they follow the court.

47:54Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And really, Babylon becomes a shell of its former self. and then I suppose once the Hellenistic kingdoms die and the Parthians come in and have no real affinity with the Babylonian tradition at all so it's left to kind of be abandoned and the last time we really hear of it in ancient history I mean there are two occasions we know that in 132 CE is the last datable piece of cuneiform and once that's gone that's it the language is forgotten until we relearn it in the middle or the end of the 19th century it's lost and then the other thing we have is the emperor Trajan goes on his Mesopotamian campaign briefly conquers all that bit goes down the Euphrates and says to some of his men isn't there a place called Babylon around here and they say we've heard of that let's go and have a look and they are so disappointed they just see this pile of brick and he moves a couple of sherds of pottery around and says, you know, so much for Babylon.

49:03Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And that's it. It kind of disappears. The only thing keeping it alive then is the reputation it's garnered in the Bible, of course. And that's a very difficult reputation because it presents Babylon as the mother of all cities, yes, but also the mother of harlots, you know the place of the apocalypse all of this and that of course arises from two things first of all it's the jewish memory of babylon so the jews were exiled into babylon under nebuchadnezzar the second he conquers jerusalem completely destroys it destroys the temple of yahweh takes even the gold and silver of the temple back to babylon with him with him go all the elite of the Jewish royal family, the priests, the scribes, also lots of workers.

49:55Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And they are set up in Babylon, and they are encouraged by both the king, but also by some Jewish intellectuals, like the prophet Jeremiah, to put down roots, you know, prosper in Babylon. Now, we know, of course, from the Hebrew Bible, that it was a time of trauma for the Jews, you know, famously Psalm 137, by the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept. You know, how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? So we have this idea of torment. But also the Babylonian captivity was a moment of renaissance for the Jews as well, because it's in Babylonian captivity that the Hebrew Bible actually really gets written.

50:43Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: You know, so the stories of Genesis, the patriarchal stories, the stories of Exodus, Moses and the Exodus, because they were living in Exodus themselves. You know, they were writing their kind of myths and legends and folk stories from the north of Israel, from Judah in the south. All of this was being pulled together for the first time. And you can really see the footprint of Babylon in all of that. So first of all, you know, in Genesis, we have stories like the Tower of Babel, which, of course, is the great ziggurat of Marduk. That's what they're talking about there. And then you get stories of Adam and Eve, paradise.

51:20Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Well, of course, paradise gardens were a Babylonian Persian invention, you know, of these kind of things. So you can see the Babylonian stamp going on to the Bible. what we didn't realize though until comparatively recently is that many of the jews who came as prisoners to babylon settled there and lived there for centuries now we knew that in the middle ages there was the writing of the babylonian talmud so this is kind of like the commentary on the hebrew bible by jewish rabbis so we knew there'd always been a big group of of jews who stayed in Babylon. They never went back to the Holy Land.

52:01Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: But now we've got documentation from the time of Nebuchadnezzar stating that there was a large group of Jewish exiles living in a place just outside of the city centre called Al Yehuda, which means something like Jewish town or something like that. And they're all carrying Jewish names, Yahoo something or other. We even get the name Netanyahu in this Babylonian documents. Again, more clay documents. And these documents are showing us that a lot of these Jews settled down in Babylon. They had families there. They opened very successful businesses. They married Babylonian women, which means that their children were bilingual, all of this.

52:41Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And they stayed there. They never went home. So, you know, there's There's one version of the Babylonian exile which is all about trauma and wretchedness and what comes out of that. And then there's another success story in the Babylonian exile as well. And that's the one we don't often think about, but it's all there. So that's why the reputation of the legacy of Babylon has been coloured by some of the biblical, perhaps not the stories, but some of the interpretation. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like actually the legacy of Babylon is far more important. It's a legacy for all mankind. Well, this is the thing, isn't it?

53:17Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: And I think that's why I've included it in my new book, for instance, because it is part of the story. The mythos is as great as the history. We have to recognise it. And I think the biggest leap we have to take is actually what happened in early Christianity with Babylon because in the last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, which most people think they know, but people don't really, you know, and everybody thinks of the omen and stuff like that. And, you know, it has got all those kind of end of time things within it. But there Babylon is used by the Christian writer. He's called John the Divine, whoever he was, as a stand in for Rome, of course.

53:58Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: So all the sins of the Romans, you know, and this kind of the persecution that the Christians are under are attributed to the sins of Babylon because Rome has become the new Babylon. And therefore, you know, the whore of Babylon who sits on the beast with the seven heads, that's the seven hills of Rome and so forth. You know, the Antichrist could be Nero, could be Domitian. But certainly Revelation is written in that era, in that sphere of Roman imperialism. But it's Babylon that they go back to, you know, as the ultimate mother of harlots kind of thing. It's a great example of how winners don't write the history books.

54:38That's exactly it. Still, you're doing good work, but most of us think about Babylon through the lens of that. Well, I mean, if you think about it,

54:47Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: it's a very, very persuasive image. So, I mean, Dickens talks about London as a new Babylon in the 19th century with its poverty and its child labour. In Jamaica in the 1930s, in the Rastafarian movement, of course, The British Empire is the new Babylon, of course, whereas Ethiopia, Africa is seen as the new Zion. This is an image which gets reutilized all the time. Very recently, Lady Gaga has produced a song called Babylon, which is all about the sins, the iniquities of living today. Trying to make a living, trying to be true to yourself when we're all living in a new Babylon now. It's an age-old thing.

55:33Whereas, in fact, you're rebranding Babylon, and we should be thinking of it in the way that we think about those, that sort of Greek enlightenment. Absolutely. It sounds like it gives us a vast amount of what we now count of as sort of civilisation.

55:47Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Enormously, enormously. How we live together. Absolutely. And I think an enlightenment is exactly what it was. We just don't think of it in that terms, but that's what I would say Babylon is all about. It's all about free thinking, about being as open as you possibly can be to the world you live in and to engage with the world around you. They weren't afraid of the world around them. You know, they had no real hostilities to other people. They squabbled enough amongst themselves, but they were not terrified of strangers. And they really do have a truly international, multicultural society, which is surely something to aspire to.

56:24Well, fantastic. Lloyd LeBron Jones, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. You're very welcome. Fantastic. I'm now a Babylon fan.

56:30Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Good.

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