Don’t worry, be Babylonian

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2:30Do you wake up in the middle of the night, worrying? If so, you are definitely not alone. But if you want to manage the anxieties of modern life, perhaps you could take a leaf out of the books of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

3:07In this episode I'm chatting to Dr Selina Wisnom, an expert on ancient Assyria and Babylonia, an author of the book The Library of Ancient Wisdom. She reveals what we can learn from the peoples of the Near East about managing anxiety. So Shalina, just drop us in, who are the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians? We are talking about what is now modern day Iraq, and the Assyrians are in the north of Iraq and the Babylonians are in the south. And Babylon is a great cultural centre of the Near East. So this is a place which had been a centre of religion, literature, scholarship, you know, where the top intellectuals of their day are working.

3:46It was incredibly important, incredibly splendid city as well. Very culturally rich and very economically prosperous too. And we're looking at a time period of anything from 2000 BC up until the first century AD. Okay, long time. And roughly speaking, how do we know what they thought about things? Did they leave us a lot of sources? Yes, they wrote on clay tablets, which are amazingly durable. They don't decay in the ground, so they survive there. They just sit there waiting to be dug up by archaeologists. And in fact, even if you burn down a library full of them, then it just hardens the clay and preserves them even better.

4:22So we have about half a million sources from Mesopotamia as a whole, Mesopotamia just being ancient Iraq, essentially. What was the process of its rediscovery? Well, it was rediscovered in the 19th century AD by Victorian adventurers who were out in the Middle East. And the French and the British both start digging at Nineveh around the same time in the 1840s. And the French initially don't find anything and they give up and they go somewhere else. They do strike gold at another Assyrian city, Korsabad, but they think it's Nineveh, but actually it's not. And meanwhile, the British continue digging at Nineveh and Austin Henry Layard is the person who was in charge of that.

5:03And he had a local assistant as well, Hormuz Rassam. And they stumbled across the palaces of the Assyrian kings. They first find the palace of a king called Sennacherib. He would have been really famous at that time because he was mentioned in the Bible. There's an episode where he besieges Jerusalem. He was the subject of a poem by Lord Byron called The Destruction of Sennacherib. So when we actually found his palace, which he called Palace Without Rival, it was really something. It's a moment where people started to see, we can actually see what's behind these stories that have come down from other sources.

5:39It was like discovering a world that had been mythical previously and was now becoming real. So the first things they find are Sennacherib's palace, and they find a chamber full of cuneiform tablets. They get to it by tunnelling along the walls. They find a wall, and then they start digging and follow it, and they find the outlines of the palace that way. And then they come across this doorway with gods wearing fish cloaks either side of it, and inside is this huge heap of records. And that's when they know they'd stumbled upon something really important. Yeah, amazing, amazing story. Haven't got time to go into too much detail on that or on the difficulties of reading this stuff.

6:18But tell us a little bit about what it's like to work with these sources today. Because a lot of them are in the British Museum, is that right? Yes, that's right. Yeah, 33 ,000 tablets from this library sitting in the British Museum. So I assume that you're in there having a look at them on regular occasions. What's that like? It's incredibly exciting because you know that you're one of very few people in the world who have looked at these things. And also to be able to hold the documents in your own hands is something really quite special. It's a direct connection with the past. And the three-dimensional nature of the script is also really fun.

6:54Because what you're doing is you're reading the shadows because it's pressed into the clay, these signs. So you have to tilt them in the light. And as you turn it in your hand, more and more of it is revealed. and it makes such a difference to get a really good look at the tablet itself. How hard is it to make head or tail of them? Well, that depends. Thankfully the ones in the library are written in what we call typewriter cuneiform sometimes because they're very, very neat. The scribes have done a nice job at copying them out legibly for us. That's not always the case. I imagine that there is still a whole world of stuff in these tablets which has not been looked at.

7:31how much is left unstudied what might we find if we get some more seriologists looking at them oh who knows yeah that's the great joy of it you just don't know what will come out of the ground next recently they found the library personal library of a diviner in the city of Nineveh which we're eagerly awaiting publication of we are still finding new bits of existing text so because they're written on clay tablets if it falls off the shelf and it breaks into lots of different pieces. You might not find all of the pieces, which means that some of the lines are missing. But equally, you know, you might dig around in a box in a museum over there and find a missing piece and it's all coming back.

8:10So that's one of the things that makes this so exciting. We're getting new texts, we're getting new bits of text that we already, we thought we knew, and then suddenly a missing piece comes and might change everything about how we interpret it. So it's a field that's changing all the time and we're constantly learning new things. Okay. So do we know, can we tell from all that, whether they were big worriers or not? Well, they worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. Right. But this is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale. Yeah. Because what they do is they lament to the gods in the temples every single day.

8:49So they have people whose job it is to sing in front of the gods four times a day, these very, very long litanies bewailing all of the potential things that could go wrong to the city, about how the enemy could invade, they could tear down the walls, they could completely decimate the sanctuaries of the gods to the point where there's just pigeons in the rafters and nobody is there and everyone is dead and dying. But they're doing this when nothing of the sort has actually happened at all. The temple is still standing, the person is singing, you know, in a very, very nice, well-kept temple. It's all about what could happen, but which they hope will never come to pass.

9:29Okay. So this is industrial scale worry and catastrophizing about what could happen. Absolutely. Why were they so worried about what might happen? Well, it's actually a kind of preemptive tactic to stop these things from happening. It's the very opposite. You know, we might say, oh, don't worry, it might never happen. For them, it's worry as much as possible so that it doesn't happen. And the idea is that if you make it clear to the gods that you know that they could do all of these terrible things to you, then they won't feel the need to do it because they don't need to get your attention because you've already, you know, they've got your attention.

10:04They know that you know that they could do this, so it's all fine and they don't have to do anything. So that's the overriding principle behind it. But at the same time, it is catastrophizing, but it's also giving catastrophizing its place because they've delegated this to specific people whose job it is to do the worrying for you. And that's not actually that different from what the NHS suggests that we do. You know, NHS CBT will tell you if you really can't stop worrying, just designate a specific time every day, call it worry time, to go and do your worrying for 20 minutes and then don't think about it again.

10:42And this is essentially what the babylonians are doing on a national scale they're saying okay we will employ these people to worry at these particular times of day and delegate it all to them and contain it and that will take care of everything then we don't need to worry yeah and these people they were um what were their name they were doing lamentations were they called lamenters that sounds about harry potter yeah yeah yeah well kalou is the babylonian word we translate as lamenter lamenter. So they were literally pouring out their worries to the gods. Did it make them feel better? Can we get a sense about whether it helped them?

11:17Well, that we can only guess. But I do like the concept of delegating your worrying to somebody else or something else. And that's something that I have, in fact, inadvertently tried myself. So, you know, the one night I was very worried about something. It's late at night. Nobody's awake. I call a friend in America because they are awake in America and he can't actually talk at the time, but he says to me, don't worry, I will hold your worries until morning. And it actually worked. I was like, okay, fine. You know, I don't have to think about this until tomorrow. He'll worry on my behalf. He'll take care of them.

11:52And then in the morning I can deal with it. And it worked. I got back to sleep. So it does work as a concept. Yeah. Did he recognize he was being Babylonian? I don't think he did. No, no. But he's an asteriologist though. So maybe, maybe. Perhaps. So it's coming through. So could you specifically pay someone to take away a specific worry? Or was this kind of a national thing that you could only really lead if you were a king or a high priest? That is a specifically national thing. But on the other hand, if you look at prayers that ordinary people would make to the gods, it's full of the same kind of stuff.

12:25There is a lot of preemptive worrying going on, you know, trying to say to the gods, oh, I'm sorry if I did this, I'm sorry if I did that, I'm sorry if I did the other, which again is quite relatable, I think. I think a lot of the time we might feel like we've done something to upset somebody but not be totally sure what it is. They have that on a cosmic scale as well. It's as if, you know, the whole universe might be angry with you. But then they have ways to address it, right? They have these prayers, they have these rituals, they might go to the exorcist to help them go through this very elaborate procedure where they give voice to all of that.

12:57And they express it. And that's something we see a lot in Babylonian culture. They don't really hold back. You know, if they're upset, they will say. They will even say so to the kings. We've got these great letters from Assyria in the north where scholars who are in trouble will just like utterly pour out their woes to the king, complain at great length. They'll say how devastated they are, how they're really, really depressed. There doesn't seem to be any cultural stigma around that, which is very interesting. And in fact, even the king of Assyria himself has left us a text where he's lamenting about how miserable he is.

13:28He says, I did absolutely everything right. I did everything that was expected of me. I've worshipped the gods. I've renovated the sanctuaries. I even did what my father told me to do in putting my brothers into important positions. And yet still, everything is going wrong. Why am I constantly depressed and I'm ill and experiencing all of these losses and everything? It's a really human moment. Even the king of Assyria is admitting to feeling rubbish. Something we can all relate to. Absolutely. So do you think they actually recognised depression as a kind of a medical thing, or is that reading far too much into it?

13:58Oh, they did. Yeah, yeah. Actually, there is a technical term for depression in the medical text, and they have treatments for it as well. Definitely something that they recognised and had a lot of approaches to dealing with. Am I right in thinking that they actually, they kind of named suffering? Yeah. How did that work? What did they do? There are amazing poems from this culture which describe people who are suffering in great, great detail. I mean, there's one which is often being compared with the biblical book of Job, we call the Babylonian poem of the righteous sufferer, where it is one of these things, he just doesn't know what he's done wrong.

14:33You know, everything imaginable is going wrong in his life. You know, his family have abandoned him. He's sick with every kind of ailment he can imagine. None of the diviners can figure out what's wrong with him. And it just goes on and on and on, you know, like all this litany of things. I mean, so much so that it has been suggested that maybe this is used to train health professionals in Mesopotamia because the vocabulary it uses is suffused with all the language of the medical texts and the magical texts that would have been used to counter all of this stuff. and in fact you know the lament of Ashurbanipal has also been suggested by another scholar that might be based on that or alluding to that even because it was such an important part of their tradition to express these these feelings when everything went wrong for them.

15:19Okay we talked about how they sort of they catastrophized and they worried and tried to stop things happening in the future which hadn't yet happened but if you have done something wrong you might rightfully be worrying about that. What was their attitude to apologising and did that help them to sort of weave through that? Well, this is another thing I love, which is that there is actually no word for sorry in the Babylonian language. But the way they make an apology is actually to be more direct about it than that. And it's a more full and more deep kind of apology, I think, where they describe what they've done wrong.

15:54They describe what they've done wrong and they say how they feel about it. So they might say, you know, I feel great regret, blah, blah, blah. But that's actually a much more powerful thing because we've created a kind of short shortcut with the word sorry. You know, you can easily say sorry and not mean it. It's much harder to actually describe the consequences of your actions and not twig that you've done something really bad. And it's also more effective for the person who's listening to it because they feel, okay, it's actually acknowledging what's happened and they're seeing that you are sorry about it.

16:25So it's really a kind of, well, showing rather than telling, as we might also say from another perspective. Yeah. Okay, to wrap up, I just wonder, you've kind of alluded to it a bit in one of your earlier answers, but I'm not sure whether it was deliberate or not. But you've spent your career looking at these cuneiform tablets and thinking about it. So you're suffused in the culture of these people. I just wonder how far that sort of leads you in your daily life, if at all. Do you think about the sort of mindset that these people thousands of years ago had and the way they reacted to situations?

17:02And does it, do you think, ever make you stop and think, actually, I'm reacting in a certain way because I'm quite cognizant of these ancient cultures? Well, I definitely, I spend a lot of time thinking about why they think the way they do. That's something that really interests me. And that's really what my book is all about. It's trying to reconstruct that mindset. it's very hard for us to get into when we live in a post-enlightenment age when all of this stuff seems very weird to us but I think it's a very important thing to do it's also a kind of act of historical empathy I would say to try to understand people who think so completely differently from us there's plenty of reason to use that in the modern world as well so that's why I think it's worth doing as to whether or not my daily life today is shaped by that I don't know who knows maybe subconsciously um we'll see okay last thing if i asked you to summarize how to worry like a babylonian what would you say i'd say delegate it to somebody else limit your catastrophizing to very short periods um at specific times and if it really gets too much then you know just ask someone else to worry on your behalf and give it over to them and forget all about it okay and if anyone listening is inspired to think i'd like i'd like to work out how to read a cuneiform script how do you start with that?

18:24What do you do? How do you start? Well, come to the University of Leicester and study with me, clearly. Well, there are books, you know, there's a Teach Yourself Babylonian book that you can buy. Yeah. Martin Worthington, that's a good place to start. And it's not easy, but it's a great challenge. And it's a very rewarding challenge. So it's definitely something worth doing. There are all sorts of ways that you can ask the God specific questions. If it's something you really want to know the answer to, like, you know, my mother is ill, is she going to live or is she going to die? Or, you know, will this business venture be successful?

18:59You could put a question directly to the gods by sacrificing a sheep. One of the weirdest of all Assyrian practices from our point of view, but one of the most important to them, because it gives them that chance to directly approach the gods. And they believe that the gods will write the answer to your question on the entrails of the sheep at the moment you ask the question. And then the specialist divider will open it up, take a look at what's inside. And they have a very, very sophisticated and complex way of decoding what that answer will be. And they can tell you yes or no. So you must have had a fair bit of power being an influential figure if you were one of those diviners, one of those people who could work out whatever the God was trying to say, you know, some sort of channel of intercession, I guess.

19:43Yeah, it would have been a very special position to have. But at the same time, they really do seem to be very sincere in trying to get the right answer. There's no sense, for instance, that they might be just telling the king what he wants to hear or trying to manipulate him towards a specific answer. It's one of the forms of Babylonian divination that is actually, you could even say peer-reviewed, because it's got to be checked by someone else. There's never just one person in the royal court anyway who's doing this. There's going to be someone else there who's writing down the results and who'll be checking what they're doing.

20:15For really, really important questions, you might have up to 11 different people who are all there checking that it's right. And the way the whole system operates is designed to try to be as objective as possible. There are so many different variables, so many different, you know, things to look at. And it's very, very precise the way the texts are worded. That was Selina Wisnom, the Library of Ancient Wisdom. Her book is out now. And if you want to know more about ancient Assyria, you'll find another podcast interview with her on the subject on the main History Extra feed, along with other Assyrian conversations with experts such as Moody Al-Rasid and Paul Collins.

20:53Thanks for listening.

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