Life and Death in Ancient Babylon

The Ancients

This episode of The Ancients explores the gritty and fascinating realities of daily life in Bronze Age Babylon during the era of Hammurabi. H

Key takeaways

• Cuneiform texts provide intimate historical data ranging from laundry lists and shopping lists to wedding contracts.
• The Babylonian diet was highly seasonal and included staples like beer, as well as insects such as locusts and scionts.

Main topics

• Old Babylonian Period
• Cuneiform Evidence

Notable quotes

Life for Babylon's people was far from easy.

Conclusion

The episode provides a vivid, humanizing look at an ancient civilizati

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 2 (0:55) The home of the great ziggurat, the temple of Marduk, the royal palace and thousands of mud brick houses spread out in all directions either side of the Euphrates River, downtown Babylon. Speaker 2 (1:13) Life for Babylon's people was far from easy. Disease was rife. Survival past the age of 30 was unlikely. And yet, they saw themselves living at the heart of the world. So how can we presume this? Well, we're very fortunate to have a wealth of astonishing texts survive. Elegies, songs, poems and incantations that give us amazing insights into Babylonian society almost 4,000 years ago. From toilet demons to winding streets overridden with garbage and rabid dogs. From the joys of marriage to the perils of childbirth to the pleasures of the taverns and so much more. Welcome to the Ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes your host and this is your guide to life in Bronze Age Babylon. Our guest is a returning fan favourite, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff and the author of Babylon, the Mother of All Cities. Speaker 2 (2:18) Lloyd, can't get rid of you. It is a pleasure to have you back on the show. Well, thank you for that rather veiled compliment. I'm Speaker 3 (2:27) grateful to be back. Thank you very much. You're one of our fan Speaker 2 (2:30) favourites and you're one of my favourites as well. And it's always such a pleasure having you on Speaker 3 (2:33) the Speaker 2 (2:33) show. Thank you very much. We've done everything. But recently we have done a few episodes on Babylon. And this time we get to explore daily life in Babylon, which is quite the topic, isn't it? Speaker 3 (2:43) I think it really is. There was a trend about 30 years ago when lots of books came out with the title, you know, Daily Life in Ancient Athens or Daily Life in Rome, and they've kind of disappeared from the bookshelves a bit, which is a great shame because I think, you know, what we call social history, cultural history, is something that people really respond to. It's, you know, about how we live. And how we die, you know, how we operate as family units, how we just basically negotiate our way through this crazy journey called life. And I think that Babylon in particular is so worthy of that look because of the sources that we have. And what Speaker 2 (3:23) are these types of sources that we have? Speaker 3 (3:25) Well, the cuneiform evidence from Babylonia is just so rich and so abundant. In a way, we have the kinds of sources that... my friends who deal with ancient Greek and Roman history would kill for. We have personal letters, laundry lists, hymns, titles of love songs. We have contracts, wedding contracts, housing contracts. Everything is there, really from the great educational steps that the Babylonians made in mathematics and astrology. down to the humblest kind of shopping lists. Speaker 2 (4:05) It is the richest pickings, really. We're going to delve into so much of that. And in particular, lots of this evidence survives from this period more than 3,000 years ago. That's known as Old Babylon or the First Babylonian. Speaker 1 (4:17) Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:17) the Old Speaker 3 (4:18) Babylonian period is what we're dealing about here. So I suppose you might be familiar with it if we said this was the period of Hammurabi. for instance. So let's think around about the time 1770, 1750, something like that, BCE obviously. So yeah, this is the kind of formative age of the Babylonian world when Hammurabi is busy giving us his laws, when Babylon has risen to become really a superpower in the Mesopotamian region, has really dominated and sort of seen itself rise to a great commercial and intellectual centre as well. So it's the first great age of Babylon. Do we know just how big Babylon was at this time? It's hard to be precise because unfortunately our archaeology of Babylon is really poorly known. And that's because of the fact that Babylon itself, of course, rose on the banks of the Euphrates River. And that means that the water table beneath Babylon is very, very high. So while we've been able to access what we call Neo-Babylon, which is very late, 600s BCE, Hammurabi's Babylon has all but been washed away. It's not there. So even though in the early 1900s, German excavators went to Babylon to try to get down to those trenches, they just couldn't find anything. But we can make good comparisons. with better surviving archaeology from Babylon's sister cities like Nippur and Sippar, which are very close to Babylon. So we can get an idea of the street layouts and so forth from that. Plus, of course, then we have all of this fantastic literary material which talks about the life in Babylon. So that's the great redeemer there. And Speaker 2 (6:09) we're going to draw on all of that. First of all, I like to kind of almost put ourselves in the shoes of a traveller, of someone who was approaching Babylon at that time. So the approach to Babylon, what should we be picturing? Should we be thinking first of all of verdant countryside, of fields and gardens and everything as we were approaching this great city? Speaker 3 (6:31) Yes, I think there's a feel of that about it. I think most people would have approached Babylon, of course, via the river Euphrates. That was the main road of the day. So if you were floating down towards Babylon, you would have seen irrigation canals absolutely everywhere. We now know that the whole of central Mesopotamia essentially was this kind of landscape interlocked, intersected with dozens and dozens, let's say hundreds of man-made irrigation channels drawing water from the rather temperamental Tigris. It tended to flood, and this was a way of controlling the world. And of course, all of this water is needed for farmsteads and for irrigation within the cities itself. Babylon itself, incidentally, looked more like Venice than, say, modern-day Baghdad. It was completely intersected with canals. It was la serenissima in many respects. It must have been really beautiful. So as you approached... the city and you would have seen in the distance its huge white walls dominating the horizon. You would have passed through numerous fields, farmsteads. It's difficult to know where the suburbs began and ended really in Babylon. It was all a bit of a sprawl out there. But lots of this were either royal land being tilled by farmers or else were private donations, private lands. that were being utilised. So there would have been everything. The Babylonians were very self-sufficient. They grew all their own vegetables and all their own fruits, of course, you know. So there would have been date palms everywhere and there would have been, you know, hedgerows. I mean, it would have been quite incredible, a lot of communal Speaker 2 (8:12) labour going into the landscape. I mean, this is what I wanted to ask. I mean, was this landscape also very much the breadbasket of Babylon at that time where they sourced all of their food from? Speaker 3 (8:22) Yeah, completely. They didn't really need to look anywhere else for those, for the basics. you know, everything else needed to come in. So stone, wood really needed to come in. I can't imagine that, you know, wood, for instance, you know, it had to be bought from the mountains of Turkey or from the Zagros or from, you know, if you wanted really fine wood from Lebanon. I can't imagine the cost of kindling in Babylon. To make all of those glazed bricks must have been a real expense for the Babylonians. But on day-to-day stuff, you know, all the food. they needed was there, or the beer they needed could be produced from it as well. So yes, living in this uptown world was very self-sufficient. Come Speaker 2 (9:03) on, Lloyd, let's talk about the food. What types of food were they eating? Speaker 3 (9:07) Basically, the Babylonians would eat anything. If it moved, there was a chance that they would eat it. They really did. I mean, you know, food... Meat is scarce in antiquity, so you did eat anything. And we have a lot of Babylonian recipes still surviving. A lot of them are actually contained in some tablets which are kept in Yale University. And some students there have actually had a go at recreating these things. Unfortunately for us, the tablets kind of read sort of like, you know, Elamite stew, take meat, one leek, some peas. This is what it is. What's missing, of course, is any idea of how you prepare those ingredients, any cooking time, what you do with them. So our knowledge of the actual dishes themselves are a little bit incomplete. But really, they enjoyed their food. They enjoyed their beer. And of course, one thing we should say about the beer in Babylon was that it was also part of their diet. So rather than drinking the unclean water, of the Euphrates or these irrigation canals, you know, with dead sheep floating in them and so forth. They opted to drink beer instead. And this beer, the alcohol content varied a great deal. So for instance, you could have a low alcohol content beer, which actually was more like porridge than beer. And this was a really great way to get in your calories, essentially. The other thing they tried to do as well was to put fresh... produce forward, you know, so a seasonal diet and a seasonal variation was clearly needed. And of course was, was practical. There's a fantastic kind of caricature of a cookbook about kind of oat cuisine, you know, what, what do you get at certain times of the year? So it says something like, you know, in the month of Kismlu, what is your food? Ah, then you will eat. donkey dung and bitter garlic and gone-off milk. It's a parody of like, you know what, and then it says, you know, we're in the month of Shabbat too, what do you eat then? Oh, we will eat piping hot bread and the buttocks of a donkey stuffed with fly shit. It's things like that they say, these really great things. So it just parodies the kind of desire for oat cuisine in Babylon among its wealthy. Speaker 2 (11:31) Did they eat insects, though, as well? Yes, Speaker 3 (11:33) yes. Speaker 2 (11:33) So if they saw a scorpion or something like that, they'd be like, oh, that's scary, but that could also be dinner. They Speaker 3 (11:37) ate happily Manchurian scorpions, and the best thing of all was locusts. I mean, actually, we have reliefs. These are Assyrian reliefs, I must admit, of men carrying skewers full of scorpions. A couple of years ago, I was in Cambodia, and I tried locusts for the first time. And you know what? They were gorgeous. Flash fried in some honey. I was eating them like popcorn by the end. They're very nutritious and they were delicious. Yeah. So they ate everything. Really, really. I mean, you know, foxes, bears, anything they would eat. The only thing I can't find are dogs. I don't find dogs on the menu, but I find pigs aplenty. Yes. Which are often linked together in the Babylonian mind, the dog Speaker 2 (12:17) and the pig, Speaker 3 (12:18) kind Speaker 2 (12:18) of trash eaters, you know, vermin. Well, we'll get to that in exploring kind of the streets of Babylon and the smells and yeah, the rubbish and so on in a moment. But before we get to that, let's say we've entered into old Babylon, Hammurabi's Babylon. And before we go to kind of down the particular winding streets and the residential areas, there are those bigger buildings that you would inevitably see towering over the landscape, wouldn't you? Right in the centre. Speaker 3 (12:41) Yeah. So the most important. building, I suppose, and the one that you couldn't fail to see was the Great Ziggurat. So that's the magnificent temple that was dedicated to the god Marduk, who was the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon. Now, we don't really know what it looked like because there are no descriptions from this period. But judging by other ziggurats that we see in Ur and Uruk, which are still standing, It must have been a series of platforms at least four, if not five or six stories high with the shrine of the god right on the top. It probably wasn't built of glazed bricks. We think of Babylon and we think of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, you know, with all of its glory. But I don't think it was quite like that. It was probably actually plain mud brick, but perhaps with relief bricks. to give it some kind of interest. The Babylonians were brilliant brickmakers. I mean, they were renowned around the ancient world for it. And they could create bricks which had elements of animals in them, gods, goddesses. So I think the facade was probably more like that, with these steep staircases which took you up. And somewhere in that area, there would also have been a palace for Nebuchadnezzar as well, probably sitting on the side of the Euphrates somewhere. So while our evidence for the actual buildings are meagre, we know that at least there would have been a residence for the king and there would have been a residence for the god. Speaker 2 (14:15) I love this mention that you do include in your book that it was almost like the Babylonian dream to work in one of these great buildings in the centre of Babylon. Absolutely. I mean, what could any Babylonian ask for? other than Speaker 3 (14:27) to serve his God