The Bible Made Babylon a City of Sin. It Was Actually the First Enlightenment Metropolis
Babylon's bad name comes from Jewish exile memory and Revelation's coded attack on Rome — its real identity was a cosmopolitan city of 50,000 whose astronomy ran ahead of Greece.
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Babylon's site was a victory of mud
Babylon sits in what is now Iraq, about fifty miles north of Baghdad, on the Euphrates, with the river running through the middle of the city. Lloyd says the gift of the Nile was grain, but the gift of the Euphrates was mud: the whole city was built of mud brick, and so were the tablets the cuneiform was written on. A tablet hardens as it dries, and if it is then burned — as many sites were, by invaders — it hardens like stone, practically indestructible. That is why Near Eastern studies are luckier than Egyptian studies: papyrus, leather and paper all perish, but clay tablets survive, and they survive as the words of the people themselves.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesBabylon started as a loyal subject, then turned on its masters
Babylon was a latecomer among Mesopotamian cities, appearing in cuneiform records only around 1900 BC. Its path to power: first it swore loyalty to the last dynasty of Ur and paid its taxes on time, in exchange for self-rule and its own governor. Once you have a governor's palace you have a petty dynasty, and by the time Ur declined Babylon already had a government apparatus ready to go. The real detonator was the Amorites — pastoral tribes from the Syrian region, dismissed in early texts as barbarians and shepherds. Over two centuries these tribal chiefs urbanised, and the kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon came out of their ranks. Outsiders became insiders.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesHammurabi was a bad-tempered man, and the archives prove it
In the 1930s royal archives were found at Mari in Syria: masses of tablets written to King Zimri-Lim, and the correspondence between diplomats and court lets scholars reconstruct Hammurabi's character. He was a player and a double-dealer, capable of allying with someone for a long way and then dropping them; he was ferociously bad-tempered and had no patience. In one letter a Mari diplomat complains he did not receive the customary new cloak, and Hammurabi explodes: who are you to make demands of Hammurabi, you should go back to your master barefoot. Lloyd says this is why Near Eastern material is so good — the tablets often carry the actual words of specific individuals.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesThe law code was for the gods to read, not for judges to use
Hammurabi's code is not the earliest — you can push back about 150 years — but it was carved on a huge black basalt stele, now in the Louvre: at the top Hammurabi stands before the sun god Shamash, who wears a horned crown and holds a rope and measuring rod, because he can travel the whole world and see everything, and is therefore the god of justice. The stele carries more than three hundred laws, written in a deliberately archaic language that Lloyd says was the equivalent of King James Bible English. The core is lex talionis, an eye for an eye, applied by social rank: injure a free man and you owe an eye, injure a slave and you owe only his owner money. Lloyd cautions that we do not know how much these clauses affected daily life; it may be closer to a wish list.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesThe Assyrians tore down the city and flooded it, then felt guilty for centuries
Lloyd compares the Babylon-Assyria rivalry to England and France: the Assyrians never got over the fact that Babylon did it all first — the first literature, the earliest arithmetic, the earliest astronomical observation all came from Babylon, and the Assyrians felt second-rate. At its height Assyria stormed into Babylon intending to rule as Babylonian-style kings, but the Babylonians resisted, so Sennacherib razed the city, tearing down temples and walls, and his cruellest move was to dig open all the canals and flood the city centre — symbolically pushing Babylon back to the waters and chaos before creation. After his death his son Esarhaddon was a committed pro-Babylonian who rebuilt the temples, and from then on Assyrian kings carried a sense of guilt toward Babylon.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesBabylonian astronomical diaries pin events down to the day
The Babylonians turned divination and stargazing from a craft into a science, leaving masses of astronomical diaries that record the timing of eclipses and new moons precisely. Because the records are accurate enough, any text that ties a historical event to an eclipse can be dated exactly — the dates of the Battle of Gaugamela and the Battle of Cunaxa were fixed from the records of Babylonian scribes. Lloyd says you can be more certain about what happened thousands of years ago than colleagues studying Anglo-Saxon England. He uses this to push back against Eurocentrism: before Rome, Athens or Alexandria, the Middle East already had a cultural hub doing all of this.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesAt the New Year festival the priest struck the king's head
Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt the processional way, crossing the bridge over the Euphrates into the city centre, flanked by the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate with its bulls, lions and mashushu dragons. He did this to reactivate Babylonian pride after the Assyrian occupation, and the heart of it was restoring the New Year festival. Every March the king walked the processional way to the Marduk ziggurat, and in the holy of holies, before the high priest, he took off his crown, stripped off his robes and knelt before the god's image, and the priest struck his head hard, to make him weep as a show of humility and to remind everyone that he was not a god but only the god's representative. Then the divine images were carried into the city and the whole city celebrated for seven days — the only time in the year ordinary people could see the images and the king.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesExile was not only trauma; it was also a success story
Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and deported the Jewish elite, priests, scribes and large numbers of craftsmen to Babylon. Lloyd says the Hebrew Bible was really compiled during the Babylonian captivity — Genesis, the patriarchal stories, Exodus were all gathered then, because the exiles were themselves living in an exodus situation. The Tower of Babel in Genesis is Marduk's great tower, and Eden comes from the Babylonian-Persian garden tradition. And tablets from Nebuchadnezzar's reign deciphered in recent years show that outside the city centre there was a place called Al-Yehuda — the Jewish town — where large numbers of Jewish exiles lived, using Jewish names (even a Netanyahu), running successful businesses, marrying Babylonian women, raising bilingual children, and many never went home. So there is a trauma version of exile and a success version.
— Lloyd Llewellyn-JonesIn their own words · checked verbatim
If you think about the gift of the Nile was supposed to be grain. The gift of the Euphrates was definitely mud.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones4:07
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.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones14:32
long before there was Rome or Athens or Alexandria, there was Babylon doing everything.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones32:11
I always think of culture as being like a kind of like a gas that comes up from the earth.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones33:12
And they are so disappointed they just see this pile of bricks. And he sort of moves a couple of sherds of pottery around and says, you know, so much for Babylon.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones42:41
It's a great example of how winners don't write the history books on this occasion.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones47:56
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.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones49:59
Figures
| Distance from Babylon to Baghdad | about 50 miles | 2:04 |
| First appearance of Babylon in cuneiform records | around 1900 BC | 6:13 |
| Peak year of Babylon under Hammurabi | around 1750 BC | 10:20 |
| Number of laws on Hammurabi's stele | more than 300 | 16:37 |
| Circuit of the city walls under Nebuchadnezzar II | 12 miles | 35:17 |
| Last datable cuneiform text | AD 132 | 41:34 |
Glossary
- cuneiform
- Writing pressed into clay tablets with a reed stylus; once fired, the tablets are extremely durable.
- lex talionis
- The legal principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; the foundation of Babylonian law.
- ziggurat
- A multi-tiered stepped temple in Mesopotamia, with the god's dwelling at the top.
- theophoric name
- A naming practice that embeds a god's or king's name in a personal name, as in "Hammurabi is my god".
- Amorites
- Pastoral tribes from the Syrian region; the kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon came from among them.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in the ancient Near East, the origins of religious texts, or how civilisational narratives get rewritten by later hands. Good for the commute.
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