The Babylonian World

Gwendolyn Leick, Gwendolyn Leick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134261277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The Babylonian World presents an extensive, up-to-date and lavishly illustrated history of the ancient state Babylonia and its 'holy city', Babylon.

Historicized by the New Testament as a centre of decadence and corruption, Babylon and its surrounding region was in fact a rich and complex civilization, responsible for the invention of the dictionary and laying the foundations of modern science. This book explores all key aspects of the development of this ancient culture, including the ecology of the region and its famously productive agriculture, its political and economic standing, its religious practices, and the achievements of its intelligentsia.

Comprehensive and accessible, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone studying the period.

Chapter One Introduction

Gwendolyn Leick

DOI: 10.4324/9780203946237-1

In the book of Genesis (XI, 9) the etymology of ‘Babel’ is given as ‘confusion’, the result of divine intervention in order to punish a people for their wish ‘to make a name for themselves’ by building ‘a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven’. Language or indeed the proliferation of languages, urbanism (it is the first mention of a city in the Bible), monumental architecture and historical memory, are thus all associated with the toponym ‘Babel’. In the later Biblical books a great deal more will be said about Babylon and its kings who waged war against Judah. While in these accounts, the Babylonians, just like other powerful and repressive nations of the Ancient Near East, were to be doomed to destruction and annihilation, the Biblical writings did keep their memory alive until the post-Enlightenment explorers brought back tangible evidence of ancient writings, monuments and cities.

For the last century and a half, the Babylonians have once more become part of our modernity. Cuneiform documents are relatively robust and they survived the sacking of cities; having been buried in the sand for millennia they now constitute an ever growing data bank comprising many thousands of tablets. The current state of affairs in Iraq, however, has a serious impact on scholarship; witness the destruction of sites by looters and military activities, the dispersal of material without established context and the loss of unpublished artefacts from Iraqi museum collections. Scientifically conducted archaeological excavations have almost ceased. Academic life in Iraqi departments has suffered from the destruction of libraries and facilities. The trauma of displacement will echo across the Assyriological world for some time but it is also affected by developments in the academic world in general. Considerable economic pressure on universities to follow the ‘market’ jeopardizes ‘minority subjects’ such as Assyriology and this has led to the closure of several departments and has restricted research funding. On the other hand Assyriology has spread around the world, with institutes in China, Japan, Latin America and South Africa, and the current volume documents the continuing vitality of the subject and the commitment of scholars from all continents to keep connected to the Babylonian world.

Babylonia: Part Of Mesopotamia

Babylonia can be defined geographically as the southern half of Mesopotamia, beginning where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates approach each other, forming a strip of land like a pinched waist. At the very south lie the marshes and, beyond, the waters of the Persian Gulf. The northern half of Mesopotamia was known as Assyria. Most of the Assyrian cities were situated along the Tigris, those of Babylonia along the Euphrates, a major trade route in itself, or on the intermediary canals. The Zagros mountains form a natural border to the east, as does the great Arabian desert to the west. The climate is hotter and drier in southern Mesopotamia; agriculture is only possible through irrigation and the landscape is marked by a dense network of canals, levees and dams. The date palm flourishes only south of Baghdad and their graceful fronds marked the Babylonian skyline for millennia.

Babylonian history is embedded within the longue durée of Mesopotamian history but closely associated with the eponymous city of Babylon. Lying on the Euphrates, some ninety kilometres south of Baghdad, the city was founded sometime in the third millennium: the Akkadian king Shar-kali-sharri provides the first historical mention, a reference to its temples. Babylon was thus perhaps always a holy city; the etymology of a possibly non-Semitic original name was interpreted by cuneiform scholars as bab-il, ‘gate of the god’. During the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2000 BC, it was a provincial capital and some hundred years later, after the disintegration of the Ur empire, it became the seat of a small kingdom founded by the Amorite chief, Sumu-abum. His grandson Hammurabi managed to unite all of southern Mesopotamia, as well as much of the middle Euphrates region. Although this First Dynasty of Babylon could not hold all these lands together for long, its rulers brought a degree of cultural and administrative uniformity to Babylonia which is documented by abundant textual sources. The city of Babylon, as the seat of kingship, was lavishly endowed with temples and palaces. So splendid did the city become that it attracted the cupidity of a far distant ruler, the Hittite king Mursili, who swept down the Euphrates to attack the city and plunder its riches.

The Amorite chiefs who had founded the First Dynasty were part of a Semitic people who had migrated into Mesopotamia from the west in search of pasture and new strategies for survival. Those who adopted the settled and urban way of life became acculturated to the ‘Babylonian’ ways, which can be seen clearly in personal names which reflect an acceptance of the established religious practices. Their language (‘Old Babylonian’) replaced the previously spoken Sumerian, and only the most learned of scholars were familiar with written Sumerian.

The assimilative powers of Babylonian culture became again apparent when another group of immigrants, this time arriving from the east, and known as the Kassites, took political control. Their first kings still bore outlandish Kassite names, the later ones adopted ‘good Babylonian’ names and titles. They continued to exercise their duties towards Babylonian gods and their temples and though they built a new capital, Babylon remained the ceremonial and religious centre of the country which came to be known as ‘Karduniash’. The Kassite kings established the first properly unified state system in Babylonia and during their long reign (almost 500 years) Babylonian civilization crystallized: it was a relatively stable period in which much wealth was generated through trade in luxury goods and a strong rural agricultural base. In the mid-second millennium, Babylonian became the international language of diplomacy, utilized by the court scribes of all major powers: the Egyptians, Hittites, Mitanni, as well in various Levantine states. Unlike most of the major players at the time, Babylonia avoided getting drawn into military conflicts. However, the wave of disruption and violence that affected especially the western part of the Ancient Near East in the thirteenth century eventually triggered massive displacements of populations which destabilized Babylonia too. The end of the second millennium is poorly documented, one short-lived dynasty followed another, as various tribal groupings fought for control of the main cities.

Babylonia’s fate in the first millennium was initially determined by the rise of Assyria as the most powerful state in the region. While Assyrian monarchs acknowledged the religious and scholarly status of Babylonia, it did not stop them from imposing direct rule which was to last for nearly two centuries and which was fiercely resisted. A coalition with the neighbours in the east, first Elam and then the Medes, strengthened Babylonian efforts to end Assyrian domination which succeeded in 612 with the fall of Nineveh. Under the rule of military leaders, such as Nebukadrezzar II, Babylonia claimed a good portion of Assyria’s wealth, boosted by the conquest of the old enemy’s dependencies. The money was ploughed into making Babylon the most fabulous of cities, with its massive ramparts, dazzling ceremonial streets, the towering ziggurat and vast temple complexes. Babylonian learning reached its zenith at this period, especially in astronomy and mathematics. The end of Babylonian political independence, caused by the integration of the country into the Persian empire brought little change to Babylonian society and business. Though no longer a centre of political power, Babylon, as well as many other of the ancient Mesopotamian cities, retained its religious and cultural importance. It was only when the balance of influence decidedly shifted to the west in the long Hellenistic aftermath of Alexander’s conquests that Mesopotamia became marginal, a march between the east, dominated by Persian kings, and the west, under the rule of Rome.

The Present Volume

We can only experience the remote past in a tentative and fragmentary way and through the lens of our contemporary patterns of thought. How we think about history always reflects our current preoccupations. The Babylonian world seen through the eyes of the leading specialists in the field at the beginning of the third millennium AD brings into focus areas of concern typical for our time: ecology, productivity, power relations, economics, epistemology, scientific paradigms, complexity. The general division of the volume proceeds from the general ‘hard facts’ — geography, ecology, material culture, to the ‘software’ provided primarily by cuneiform tablets, our richest source of information and, at a time when archaeological research in Iraq continues to be practically impossible, the only current opportunity for new insights. The majority of the articles are based on primary epigraphic research.

Some subjects invite a longer perspective of time and more of an overview than others where the focus is more narrowly defined. I did not wish to enforce a common approach and manner of writing, in order to allow for variation of voices and accents and attitudes. There are overlaps and occasionally the same subject is treated several times but with different perspectives; this helps to give a flavour of the contemporary debates and issues. Some authors interpreted their topic in a manner that conveyed their ‘take’ on the subject within an academic discourse, others were more interested in providing an account of facts and data. The ‘Babylonian’ framework was also interpreted in different ways. Some scholars have participated who normally are more at home in the pre-Babylonian era; their contributions are justified on the grounds that Babylonian technology or administrative practices followed traditions that were established at an earlier phase of Mesopotamian history. There are also chapters by specialists in other areas of the Ancient Near East who were invited to reflect on the relationship between ‘their’ cultures and the Babylonians. Such shifting viewpoints, from far and near, from below and beyond, from the periphery to the centre, provide a greater diversity of angles onto the ‘Babylonian World’, a kaleidoscopic rather than panoramic show, which might make us see patterns and bright fragments and so reveal aspects of the ‘lost world’ in unexpected ways, without the inherent delusion of the magisterial omniscience of an encyclopedia.

Part I introduces the land and techniques of working the land, the preconditions for the emergence of Mesopotamian civilization. The understanding that this civilization was a primarily urban one is based on the fact that the surviving written documents inevitably came from urban centres, the product of an urban literary culture, and that archaeological excavations generally targeted conspicuous and promisingly large mounds, remains of ancient cities. In the last twenty years, due to various factors, not least the absence of funding for long-term excavation projects and the political instability in the country, new archaeological techniques have developed. When the results of aerial and other surveys are calibrated with the textual records, especially the administrative documents that record a great variety of place names, we get a very different understanding of settlement patterns. Seth Richardson’s chapter explicitly refers to the plurality of ‘countrysides’ in the title of his contribution to emphasize the constantly shifting configuration of Mesopotamia’s rural areas. He not only corrects the outdated view of Babylonia’s primarily urban configuration but traces patterns of state involvement in rural areas and the ideological claims made by rulers in connection with the countryside across the main phases of Mesopotamian history. Lucia Mori draws on her research in a much more localized environment, the upper Euphrates valley which, though not within the ‘Babylonian heartland’, was for centuries closely connected politically and culturally with the Mesopotamian south, especially during the Old Babylonian period. The most important and richest archive of this era comes from the palace of Mari, situated in the Middle Euphrates region. The letters and documents of this collection provide detailed information on how the arable and pasture land was managed in order to make optimal use of this particular eco-sphere. Blahoslav Hruška concentrates on the alluvial plains of Babylonia, known as ‘Akkad and Sumer’ in the third millennium. He provides a survey of the agricultural techniques that were perfected during this time, to remain almost unchanged for millennia. Sumerian compositions, such as the ‘Farmer’s Almanac’ — instructions for a ploughman — as well as economic texts from large estates and temples, contain invaluable references to the vital tasks of husbandry and agriculture, on which the whole economy was reliant. A Babylonian city was always a compound of its extramural, agricultural land and pastures, with the residential and public spaces, gardens, orchards, and waterways enclosed by the city walls. The ‘countryside’, as pointed out by Richardson, for which there was no emic terminology, was the area beyond those that ‘belonged’, in one way or another, to a particular city. Heather Baker’s chapter concentrates on Babylonian cities during the first millennium BC. She discusses the infrastructure, street systems, canals, city walls, gates, temples and other monumental buildings, paying particular attention to the often neglected domain of residential quarters. She also raises the question of whether one could detect any design or planning strategy in the urban lay-out and how tradition, inheritance patterns and topography determined the use of private and public space.

Material culture is an almost inexhaustible subject; in Mesopotamia it had been the subject of scholarly scrutiny from the earliest period of writing, when the first word lists were devised which eventually classified both man-made objects (from tools to medicines) and natural phenomena (from birds and fishes to the planets).

In Part II, Harriet Crawford, when discussing the built environment of the Old Babylonian period (roughly, the first half of the second millennium BC), stresses how the configuration of buildings and streets reflects and determines social behaviour. She also takes a close look at new architectural techniques that were introduced at this time, especially in the middle Euphrates region, where ambitious projects, such as the palace of Mari, attracted attention throughout the Ancient Near East for their innovative designs. Following on from Heather Baker’s chapter, it gives an opportunity to compare to what extent the Babylonian urban environment changed and remained the same across the span of some 1,000 years.

Cylinder seals were a unique invention of Mesopotamian culture, closely associated with the emergence of a complex bureaucracy and urbanism in the late fourth millennium BC. Dominique Collon, for many years in charge of the seal collections of the British Museum, presents an overview of the Babylonian seals, their usage, materials, iconography and design. Seals not only reveal much about managerial processes and accountability in all kinds of transaction, but also about religious beliefs, notions of kingship, modes of clothing, links of trade and beliefs in the magic properties of certain minerals. Mesopotamia’s alluvial soils were famously fertile but poor in metals and minerals. Dan Potts describes how coveted exotic materials, both organic and inorganic, were imported to Babylonia, focusing primarily on the east and south-east, a main source for Mesopotamian trade across the ages. Given that, in archaeological terms, most of the Babylonian periods belong to the Bronze Age, the procurement of copper was of vital importance. Many other substances, known primarily from cuneiform texts, such as precious stones, aromatics, cloths, resins, were an integral part of the rich material culture which relied on long-distance imports by sea and land to satisfy the increasingly demanding consumers of luxury goods. Textiles, on the other hand, were a famous and highly prized export commodity. Irene Good examines the evidence, epigraphic and archaeological, for the materials, techniques and design of cloth in Mesopotamia. Though ‘fashions’ in the cut and draping of clothes seem to have changed little over the centuries, this may be an impression conveyed by conservatism in modes of visual representation. Zainab Bahrani takes key examples of public and private monuments that have encoded culturally specific messages. Bahrani evokes the notion of ‘image magic’ which endows visual representations with agency to make things happen rather than passive ‘reflection’ of reality. It shows that the Babylonian world was one in which human beings experienced themselves as part of a continuum that enmeshes the ‘supernatural’ with the mundane. Even food and drink were more than just nourishment for the body. Frances Reynold shows the huge range of cuneiform writing devoted to the subject, which ranges from ration allocations, over lexical lists of food items, to collections of highly sophisticated recipes. The important social role of ‘civilized’ food and drink is illustrated in literary compositions, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Babylonian fields and orchards produced a variety of cereals and vegetables, most importantly, the salt-tolerant barleys and protein rich pulses, while domestic and wild animals, from sheep to turtles, provided meat which benefited mainly the elite strata of society. Babylonians were beer drinkers; nutritious, made from clean water, it was a safe option in the unsanitary conditions of the cities.

Agricultural productivity was the basis of the Babylonian economy, the subject of Part III. Johannes Renger delivers a general introduction to theoretical issues raised and presents an overview of the main forms of economic organization, from the oikos economy of the forth and third millennia to the emergence of a tributary economy at the beginning of the second millennium. He shows the reciprocity and redistribution operated side by side throughout the entire history of Mesopotamia, with the first operating primarily in the ‘countryside’, while redistribution was the preferred form of operation for the large institutional establishments in the cities. Anne Goddeeris concentrates on developments during the Old Babylonian period which saw the integration of existing self-sufficient household into a patrimonial economy. Of particular consequence was the move towards privatization, as the large institutions, especially the palace, began to rely increasingly on managerial and risk-accepting input from ‘the private sector’. While these developments helped to foster entrepren-eurship and diversify the economy, they also led to unprecedented insolvency and indebtedness which the many royal decrees sought to alleviate. Frans von Koppen’s chapter follows with a closer look at some of the consequences of policies instigated by the First Dynasty of Babylon and shows how the unification of the north and south laid the basis for socio-economic conditions in Babylonia that were to endure for centuries. Michael Jursa, addressing conditions during the first millennium, shows how trends towards monetization of the economy increased, how growing urbanization and population growth intensified agricultural production. The export trade, notably of textiles, continued to bring in revenue in the form of silver. The institutional households, especially temples, were struggling to keep up with diverse and vibrant private firms. Cornelia Wunsch draws on the abundant archive material of one such family firm, the Egibi, who were active in sixth and fifth centuries BC, during a time that saw the end of Babylonian political independence and the beginning of Persian rule. The documents allow a reconstruction of the strategies and opportunities of such companies in their dealings with investors, the state and temples. The archives also document family quarrels, legal challenges and the varying fortunes of subsequent generations and thus allow an unusually detailed view into the world of the late Babylonian business elite.

Part IV assembles contributions about the Babylonian socio-political world. The Czech scholar Petr Charvát shows how Mesopotamian society was configured in the mid-third millennium BC, during the Sumerian (Early Dynastic) period. The hierarchical division structured with a ruler (king) at the top, an elite engaged in the administrative and executive tasks of government, as well as private enterprise, commoners dependent on large institutions and responsible for the provision of services and labour, and the most exploited and underprivileged — enslaved prisoners of war at that time — also persisted in the Babylonian world. Walther Sallaberger explains the workings of the two most important Babylonian institutions, the palace and the temple. Both functioned as centres of economic activities, owning and exploiting large tracts of agricultural land, and significant sectors of the population depended on them for their survival. They competed for resources but played complementary roles in society. Gebhard Selz focuses on the mechanisms that underpinned the exercise of power in Babylonia. He underlines the ideological remit of royal inscriptions that are all too often taken as ‘straight’ historical data, and the importance of the economic as well as social equilibrium that a successful ruler had to maintain. Mario Fales takes a close look at two of the most prominent ethnic groups, the Arameans and Chaldeans, during the first millennium BC and sets their social history within their particular environmental frameworks. Both joined in the efforts to eliminate Assyrian control of Babylonia, with the Chaldeans in particular bearing the brunt of Assyrian retaliation as well as reaping the rewards by assuming control of the country themselves. The Arameans seemed to have been less united and culturally defined but made a lasting impact on the whole of the Ancient Near East since their language and writing system became the most important vehicle of communication for centuries after the demise of Assyria and Babylonia. Laura Steele’s chapter concerns the role of women and gender. It draws particularly on law codes, letters and legal documents. Steele discusses the possibilities and constraints of different classes of women: of free married and eligible upper-class women, of unmarried but free women (such as widows, priestesses and ‘prostitutes’), and those who served as slaves.

The conservatism of Mesopotamian culture applies in particular to religion, which is the subject of Part V. Temples lasted for millennia, permanent landmarks of the cities. Lexical tablets from the beginning of writing testify to the antiquity of divine names. However, some deities figure ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Lebensalter
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Land And Land Use
• 2 The World Of Babylonian Countrysides
• 3 Land And Land Use The middle Euphrates valley
• 4 Agricultural Techniques
• 5 Urban Form In The First Millennium BC
• Part II: Material Culture
• 6 Architecture In The Old Babylonian Period
• 7 Babylonian Seals
• 8 Babylonian Sources Of Exotic Raw Materials
• 9 Cloth In The Babylonian World
• 10 The Babylonian Visual Image
• 11 Food And Drink In Babylonia
• Part III: Economic Life
• 12 Economy Ancient Mesopotamia A general outline
• 13 The Old Babylonian Economy
• 14 Aspects Society And Economy The Later Old Babylonian Period
• 15 The Babylonian Economy The First Millennium BC
• 16 The Egibi Family
• Part IV: Society And Politics
• 17 Social Configurations In Early Dynastic Babylonia (C. 2500–2334 BC)
• 18 The Palace And The Temple In Babylonia
• 19 Power, Economy And Social Organisation In Babylonia
• 20 Arameans And Chaldeans Environment and society
• 21 Women And Gender In Babylonia
• Part V: Religion
• 22 The Role And Function Of Goddesses In Mesopotamia
• 23 Inanna And Ishtar In The Babylonian World
• 24 The Babylonian God Marduk
• 25 Divination Culture And The Handling Of The Future
• 26 Witchcraft Literature In Mesopotamia
• Part VI: Intellectual Life Cuneiform writing and learning
• 27 Incantations Within Akkadian Medical Texts
• 28 The Writing, Sending And Reading Of Letters In The Amorite World
• 29 Mathematics, Metrology, And Professional Numeracy
• 30 Babylonian Lists Of Words And Signs
• 31 Gilgamesh And The Literary Traditions Of Ancient Mesopotamia
• 32 Mesopotamian Astral Science
• 33 Late Babylonian Intellectual Life
• Part VII: International Relations: Babylonia And The Ancient Near Eastern World
• 34 Egypt And Mesopotamia
• 35 A View From Hattusa
• 36 Relations Between Babylonia And The Levant During The Kassite Period
• 37 Looking Down The Tigris: The Interrelations Between Assyria And Babylonia
• 38 The View From Jerusalem: Biblical Responses To The Babylonian Presence
• 39 The Persian Empire
• Index
• Ages of Life