The Rise & Fall of Babylon

Dan Snow's History Hit

This episode of Dan Snow's History Hit explores the true legacy of Babylon, challenging its long-standing reputation as a city of sin by rev

Key takeaways

• Babylon was not a city of sin but a sophisticated megacity with advanced infrastructure like canals, mud-brick architecture, and a thriving economy.
• The biblical portrayal of Babylon as a cursed city stems from religious narratives rather than historical fact, particularly the exile of the Jews.

Main topics

• The historical reality of ancient Babylon
• Biblical myths vs. archaeological evidence

Notable quotes

"Babylon was the ultimate city of sin, a cursed place, a caricature of human arrogance, decadence, decay." – Biblical portrayal.

Conclusion

Babylon was not the symbol of moral decay it's often portrayed as, but rather an

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 1 (0:29) 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 forged an enduring myth, Babylon, home of Nebuchadnezzar, as the ultimate city of sin, a cursed place, a caricature of human arrogance, decadence, decay. But 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. Enjoy. Speaker 3 (2:16) Lloyd, Speaker 1 (2:17) thank you Speaker 3 (2:17) very much for Speaker 1 (2:17) coming on. You're Speaker 3 (2:18) very welcome. It's good to be here. Speaker 1 (2:19) First, I think geography. Do we need to get geography sorted out first? Where is this place? Babylon. Speaker 3 (2:24) Right in the centre of modern-day Iraq. So it's about 50 miles north of Baghdad, essentially. Speaker 1 (2:30) And is... Is that Mesopotamia? What are some of the terms that we'll have heard? Yeah, so Speaker 3 (2:35) 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. So there's kind of like an island of Babylon as well. Speaker 2 (2:55) And Speaker 3 (2:55) 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. Speaker 1 (3:20) And so wonderful soil, benign climate. Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:24) harsh, harsh. Desert climate, but as long as you're close to the water, it's manageable. Speaker 1 (3:30) The rivers are a bit of a nightmare. They move around a lot. They do move around. Untamed snakes. Speaker 3 (3:34) 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 like the way the Ganges is for many Hindus today. So the Babylonians thought the same thing about the Tigris and 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. 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. Speaker 1 (4:23) 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 rock. Absolutely, absolutely. So you've got this Speaker 3 (4:29) 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 Speaker 2 (4:37) sort of computer mouse that would fit really Speaker 3 (4:39) nicely Speaker 2 (4:39) into the palm of the hand. When they get baked in the sun, they go hard. But if Speaker 3 (4:44) they're double baked in, say, a fire, and let's face it, many of the locations that we found Speaker 2 (4:50) have been set on fire because of invasion and so forth over the centuries, they go rock hard. And Speaker 3 (4:55) so, I mean, they're virtually unbreakable, you know. They're Speaker 1 (4:58) going Speaker 3 (4:58) to be around a long time after we're gone, that's for sure. Speaker 1 (5:00) Long time after my email inbox. Exactly. I'm pretty sure. And isn't it fascinating to think, see, you know, the great, these early civilizations, Nile, Indus, China. Speaker 1 (5:12) These rivers, big source of fresh water. That's what you need. Absolutely. And they've got, in that part, you've got a useful crops. There's a good suite of things you can grow there. Oh, there's masses of things. Indigenous. Masses. Speaker 3 (5:27) 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, you know. 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... freshwater fish, all of that as well. So, I mean, it was incredible for them. Speaker 1 (6:05) We hear about cities and civilisations, don't we, in this part of the world. I'm so glad you're here because I obviously always get the chronology wrong, but there's the Ur. Speaker 3 (6:14) 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, was actually on the sea. Speaker 1 (6:29) But Speaker 3 (6:29) of course, the land is 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. 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. Speaker 1 (7:08) And by ruling the roost, that's interesting. So these cities, I was about to ask, do they... Do they all emerge like our Greek city-state system later on? Or does one emerge, conquer everyone else, and build sort of empires? It's a little bit of Speaker 3 (7:19) both, actually. So these cities kind of pop up Speaker 1 (7:22) roughly Speaker 3 (7:23) 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, Speaker 1 (7:57) so what is there something that Babylon's doing? Does it have a little competitive advantage? Is something, what's Babylon doing that sees it rise to prominence? It, first of all, Speaker 3 (8:07) 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. Speaker 2 (8:30) Bad mistake. Speaker 3 (8:30) Because, yeah, of course, once you've got a governor's household, you know, then you've got a little dynasty starting. And so these people start to take power for themselves. And as they see the centre 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. 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... 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. 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. 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. Speaker 1 (10:44) And why are you able to speak so beautifully and eloquently about his character, his personality? What are our sources here? Speaker 3 (10:49) 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. Speaker 3 (11:28) 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. So he's Speaker 1 (12:14) a Speaker 3 (12:14) 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, you know, which is, you know... With Speaker 1 (12:25) the knowledge of the rest of history, I'd