Loading summary
Transcript105 lines
- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:25]
Pets Best Insurance Services
The following ad is sponsored by Pets Best Insurance Services. Your pet is your bestie, your therapist, your professional furred match. It's easy to love them, even when they sneak your snacks. It's easy to protect them too with pet insurance coverage from Pets Best because it's all fun and games until they chew on something they shouldn't. With perfect timing, PetsBest helps protect your furry friend and your budget from this imperfect world. Get up to 90% on eligible vet bills for less than a dollar a day. Find your Perfect match@petsbest.com Pet insurance products offered and administered by Pets Best Insurance Services, LLC are underwritten by American Pet Insurance Company or independents American Insurance Company for all, visit petsbest.com policy.
- [01:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your Life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a.
- [01:51]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. How many get 30? 30. Bid to get 30.
- [01:56]
Ryan Reynolds
Get 20. 20.
- [01:56]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
20. Better get 20. 2015. 1515 15. Just 15 bucks a month. Sold.
- [02:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month.
- [02:07]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes.
- [02:10]
Edtail
Edtail.
- [02:23]
Tristan Hughes
It'S the entrance on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host and in today's episode where we're exploring the captivating story of the Tower of Bab. Famous from the Bible, the Tower of Babel features in the Book of Genesis with its story explaining how different languages came to be across the world. But as with so many famous myths from ancient times, there usually is a historical basis to them, at least some sort of historical influence. And that is the case with the Tower of Babel, because archaeology has revealed a real life influence for this tower and its story. Another great structure that dominated the skyline of ancient Babylon. A ziggurat. The Tower of Babel is a great story where archaeology and the Bible have combined with thrilling effect. Now, to explain the story of the Tower of Babel and the real influences behind this story. Well, I was delighted to welcome back Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones to the show, one of our favourite Ancients, guests of all time, a fantastic speaker. Now, this was a very special episode because it's the first one we have ever done in front of a live audience. That's right. We had a sellout crowd at the London Podcast Festival a few months ago for this event and hopefully we'll be doing more like it in the future, both across the UK and further abroad too. The us, Canada, Australia, let's see. But let's not get ahead of ourselves for now. Enjoy this special episode of the Ancients in front of a live audience as we explore the captivating story of the Tower of Babel.
- [04:08]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Lloyd, good to see you.
- [04:10]
Tristan Hughes
How are you doing?
- [04:10]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Very good, thank you very much. It's great to be here.
- [04:13]
Unknown Speaker
We've probably all heard the name Tower of Babel. It's one that of course, is linked closer to the Bible, but it's also one that has an archaeological tale to it too.
- [04:21]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's all too easy to kind of skirt over the relationship between the text of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the history and archeology of ancient Iraq. But I think with the Tower of Babel, the two do begin to align themselves. And in fact, when archaeologists first started to go to the Middle east, to Iraq, part of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century, they kind of went with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, you know, and they were determined that whatever they dug up was going to map on to the Bible. And so when early archaeologists in the 1840s, 1850s to the 70s were wandering around Iraq, obviously they could see these remains of these enormous mud brick structures that were still surviving. So almost immediately, archaeologists began to say, ah, we have discovered the Tower of Babel. And there were many contenders, in fact, in the first sort of hundred years of archaeology in that part of the world for the actual tower, I don't think it's ever really. We know what it was, but I don't think it doesn't exist any longer. So what we've got now, of course, is just the text, really, to go with, and I luckily have it here by my side.
- [05:41]
Unknown Speaker
So we're going to start. We're going to start with going through what the story is in the Old Testament of the Tower of Babel, and then we'll go into the archaeology and then the later history. So let's start. What is the story of the Tower of Babel?
- [05:52]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So it's a very brief account. It's only nine verses in the 10th chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. I'll read it to you. If you know it, please join in. Now. The whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there and said, one to the other, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down. That's an interesting one. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, look, they are one people and they have one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the earth. And from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. There ends the first lesson. So it's essentially, it's a text which recounts a kind of divide between God and humans. God, and let us come down. God and the others who are in heaven are afraid that these mortals are going to gain power over him. So he's very scared that these human beings have got the nonce to build cities to communicate ideas to one another. So will he be redundant in the long run? That's essentially the story. So he confuses them with multiple languages so that they can no longer communicate. And therefore none of these plans will ever come to fruition.
- [08:12]
Unknown Speaker
And this is a story that also, just to set the context and the background there right from the beginning, this also happens, it's very early on in the story of the Bible, at least the Bible that we have today is.
- [08:22]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
We'Re just 10 chapters in.
- [08:23]
Unknown Speaker
10 chapters?
- [08:24]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah. Two of those chapters are on the Adam and Eve story. We've got the chapters about the flood just before this. And then we're into the Tower of Babel. So this is very early on in the structure of the Hebrew Bible.
- [08:38]
Unknown Speaker
The next question is it has to be, was it real?
- [08:44]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So, couple of contenders then. As I say, I think it is real. I think whatever the tower was, there's no doubt that the Jewish Hebrew scribes were recording the presence of ziggurat. Okay, and they are dotted all across. Yes.
- [09:05]
Unknown Speaker
So what is this?
- [09:06]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So a ziggurat is essentially, it's a step pyramid. Okay. So a very broad base and another broad base on top, slightly smaller. Up, up, up, up to about maybe six or seven levels. The internal structure of a ziggurat is not like a pyramid. It's dense, it's just packed with rubble. So it's just an outside kind of staircase really. And the whole purpose was to have a shrine at the very top of the apex. This is where the God was thought to reside. And essentially what the Mesopotamians, whether the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, they all believed the same thing, that these artificial mountains, because Iraq is flat, and it's Iraq that we're largely talking about by and large, and also southwestern Iran as well, by and large, it's flat. And so these are artificial mountains. Mountains always played important roles in mythology, of course. And if you haven't got mountains around you, then you're going to build them. So it's just something in human nature, isn't it, to build up, to get closer to the heavens. So the Babylonians believed that the ziggurat was the place where heaven and earth meets. And in fact, it was the point where a God could step out of the heavens and down onto earth. So it was a divine staircase essentially for the gods to come down. And this is exactly what Yahweh, the Hebrew God, does in this reading as well. But woe betides anybody any mortal who tried to reach up to heaven that way, you know, so it's one way traffic only. Decidedly so. But these were the great cult centers of the gods throughout the Mesopotamian world. Every, every city, every town almost had its own ziggurat, which was usually dedicated to one or sometimes more gods. In Babylon, for instance, in the great city of Babylon itself, the biggest metropolis on earth, by the 7th century BCE, there were two enormous temples, great ziggurats, there One was the place where the God Marduk, who was the supreme God of the Babylonians, he took his rest and his comfort. It was like his own house, if you like. But the other one, which was built opposite that, was his state temple. It's like his office, if you like. And it was without a doubt, one of the biggest structures that the world had ever seen. Right.
- [11:40]
Tristan Hughes
Whoa.
- [11:41]
Unknown Speaker
Let's not get too far too quickly. Let's not spoil the party too much because there's a few other contenders. We got cigarettes in the meantime, because it's. It's quite interesting with the whole terms. I mean, and first, we're a little bit of a tangent, but I felt I had to say it. I mean, recently I was in Petra, I was fortunate to go to Petra. And one of the places we visited was this place known as the High Place, High Place of Sacrifice called, and it's one of the biggest mountains above Petra where they have an altar. And you see it again and again with all these different ancient cultures. They build up high because they. Their gods are above them. So, you know, kind of in words of the scholar Jody Magnus, they're kind of cooking up a barbecue. So, like, they'd be offering meat or whatever. The smell wafts up to heaven. The God sees, smells up absolutely barbecue and goes down. And, you know, you get.
- [12:23]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
In fact, there's a wonderful Babylonian text which says that, you know, when they offer sacrifice that like that the gods buzz around like flies. It says they're really that keen.
- [12:34]
Unknown Speaker
That's what they believe.
- [12:35]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
That's exactly it, yes. So it's this stairway to God and you have to build on the High Place. And if you think about the Hebrew Bible itself, where does God get seen or spoken to? Moses goes up to Mount Horeb or up to Mount Sinai or whatever. So if you're in an environment which doesn't have that natural rock formation, then you've got to build up.
- [12:54]
Unknown Speaker
Now, let's talk about these ziggurats, because it's more than just Babylon, as you've mentioned, they're all across Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, and a bit of Iran, too. Let's go back to at that time when archaeologists were going out there with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other, and they were seeing these big ziggurats and they were thinking in the back of their mind, they just can't get it out of their mind. Tower of Babel. Tower of Babel. Got to find it. Where is it? Were there any early contenders when they were Looking at these ziggurats, did they think, oh, this could potentially be that?
- [13:22]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah. The one that caught their eye was at a place called Dhur Kaligalzu, the fortress of King Kaligalzu, which was built in the Kassite period, so about the 12th century BCE and it's located about 50 miles north of Babylon. Dukaligalzu was a Babylonian new build. It was like a Milton Keynes of its day. They built it from scratch as a kind of like, you know, an offshoot of the capital. Some people have decided it's like, you know, the way in which Paris and Versailles operate. So it was a getaway for the king. And there, there was a huge ziggurat built and by the end of the 19th century, much of its inner core still remained. And it towers about Even in the 19th century, about 30 meters high out of what was possibly 60 meters high, I think. So it was a biggie in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein. Saddam rebuilt the first platform of it, in fact, with two staircases that go up. And now it's a must have venue for local weddings. So lots of brides and grooms have their pictures there. So that for a long, long time was a contender. The other one was in Iran, Choga Zambil, which is still the best preserved ziggurat in the world today. I mean, you can still, I mean, if they'd allow you climb up right to the top of it, it's incredible. But as archaeologists went deeper into Iraq and also as the archaeology itself got more sophisticated, they realized that Babylon itself has more than enough evidence for these ziggurats. And don't forget, you know, the Bible is very succinct and very precise in saying this is the tower in Babel. So Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon. Babel. So Hebrew word for Babylon and Babylon itself, Bilbil or bilbol in Akkadian means the gate of the gods. So there's an etymological precision in that. It's not a Hebrew scribe just thinking, oh, this could be anywhere. It is the tower of Babylon that he's actually talking about.
- [15:40]
Unknown Speaker
Surely they should have realized this earlier, those early archaeologists going out there.
- [15:45]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Don't forget the work on language was only slowly developing, so we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon. So we have to wait certain generations until all the pieces get put together. There's an interesting thing as well, isn't it? Because for us it's such the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledygook that comes out of it. We're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other. For us in English, you know, Babel. Babel works really well, doesn't it? Because you're babbling on about something. Okay, it means we're incoherent. You know, we don't know. But actually that has nothing to do with the naming at all. But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble, in fact. So it's all built into the Hebrew already. So they were playing with Babylon and babbling as well, which luckily in English, we've inherited.
- [16:46]
Unknown Speaker
Laurie, you're dishing out facts here. There we get you on. Well, let's then focus our chat on Babylon. And you mentioned the ziggurats and you've got another passage there. You reaching out for that forces me now to ask you, what have you reached out for?
- [17:02]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
I've reached out here for an inscription from the reign of King Nabalassa and.
- [17:10]
Unknown Speaker
Right. So who is Nabi Palace?
- [17:11]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Nabopolasse is the king who restores power to Babylon. At the beginning of the seventh century bc, Babylon was raised to the ground by the Assyrians. Nasty, wicked Assyrians. You know, the Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon. And in a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the seventh century, Nabla Palassa, Babylonian, born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty. And he begins a revitalization campaign for the city of Babylon. And he begins to glorify it. You'll probably know his son better. His son was Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar ii. And between them, Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar beautify this city on a scale that had never been seen before.
- [18:07]
Unknown Speaker
Because Babylon at that time, this is the most populated or the richest, the wealthiest. To their kings, it's the center of the world. This is the golden age of Babylon.
- [18:16]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah. And one of the reasons why the Assyrians hated it so much, because culturally it was the center of the world. Everything came out of Babylon. Mathematics, astronomy, astrology, literature, music, mythology, you name it. Babylon was the kind of the great epicenter, the great almost factory of all of these great cultural movements. And it suffered so much under the Assyrians that this new dynasty, who we call ruling over the neo Babylonian world, an empire which stretched to Iran and out into north of Egypt and also the whole of the Levant, they started to beautify it. They had no worries about money because it was flooding in from the conquered territories and also from the spoils of.
- [19:01]
Unknown Speaker
War and the conquered territories. How far are we talking?
- [19:04]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Well, we're talking right the way up to the top of Syria, right the way down to the north of Egypt and across all of the Middle east to Iran as well. Perhaps the most significant series of conquests where the conquests that took place in the Levant in what is now Israel, Palestine. So the destruction of Jerusalem, for instance, the plundering of the temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, the goods that poured into Babylon from that alone, you know, help pay for these huge, huge building works. Not only ziggurats, but also new royal palaces, new gates. The famous Ishtar Gate is created at this period. All in this very distinctive blue glazed brick.
- [19:45]
Unknown Speaker
It's part walls of Babylon.
- [19:47]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah, absolutely. The walls themselves are about 11 miles around. For instance, you could drive two sets of chariots at the top of the walls. I mean, this was huge. It was a metropolis, a true, true great city. Long before Rome, before Alexandria, there was Babylon. And right in the heart of this is the religious. You know, the religious pulse of the whole thing sits in the city center with these two temples belonging to the God Marduk. Marduk was the Babylonian God par excellence. There have been other gods who'd come and come and gone, but Marduk, he was considered to be the great wind God. He had defeated the demons at the dawn of time, Tiamat and her evil band. He was wise. He was considered to have umpteen eyes and many ears. So he saw everything, he heard everything. And he was believed to reside in his temples there. So he has two temples, one of which is called the Entem Anuki, biggest temple in Babylon. The name means the foundations of the heaven and the earth. So that really gives us a good example of Babylonian thinking on this ziggurat. It was the connecting point between our mortal existence and the existence of the gods up there. And this is where the cult of Marduk was continued. Every day a myriad of priests would be going in there to placate the God. And ancient Babylonian religion worked in that kind of way. You kind of almost made sacrifice, you made your prayers, you incensed and clothed the statues, you fed the statues with food, almost as a preemptive strike. Don't do anything bad to us because we do all these really good things for you. So it's a very important role that the priests of Babylon had to maintain this. So what we know of this great ziggurat well, first of all, we can see it in the ground. We can still see the outline of the ziggurat today. So if you go on Google Maps, you zoom in, you can still see very clearly the outline of the ziggurat. And when archaeologists discovered this, essentially. Now, of course, it's all gone, apart from the kind of bit of brickwork at the bottom. But we can measure it, and it measures 96 by 96 meters around. Huge. And said to have built up 96 meters as well.
- [22:19]
Unknown Speaker
So do you think this is the biggest.
- [22:21]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
The biggest cigarette?
- [22:22]
Unknown Speaker
This is the mother.
- [22:23]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
This is the mother load. It really is. And it's one thing that both Nebuchadnezzar and his father were building on top of a pile of rubble that had been left by the Assyrians, so that it always been a site for worship of Marduk there. But they decided to renew their efforts with it. And the Babylonians were known throughout antiquity as the master brick bakers. And they used two forms of brick. They used simple baked brick in the sun to do the foundation work, most of the stuff. But then they had a skill at doing glazed brickwork as well. So beautiful. And of course, they opt for this beautiful sort of lapis lazuli blue as an outer coating. So this ziggurat must have just shone. You must have seen it for miles and miles and miles around. It was their greatest glory, their greatest trial.
- [23:18]
Unknown Speaker
That's something we always forget about these great monuments, particularly in the Middle east and in Egypt and places like that in their full glory. It's not just the size of them, it's the brightness.
- [23:28]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Absolutely, in a way, just how they.
- [23:29]
Unknown Speaker
Just shone in the landscape.
- [23:30]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
And coming down from this ziggurat, there was a processional way again of blue brickwork with other raised brickwork, of lions lining the whole thing up. And then that went to the Ishtar Gate. So this was a monumental processional way which led to this huge ziggurat. One scene never forgotten, without any doubt.
- [24:01]
Edtail
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. We do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really. So follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
- [24:31]
Pets Best Insurance Services
The following ad is sponsored by Pets Best Insurance Services. Your pet is your bestie, your therapist, your preferred Match. It's easy to love them even when they sneak your snacks. It's easy to protect them too with pet insurance coverage from Pets Best because it's all fun and games until they chew on something they shouldn't. With perfect timing, Pets Best helps protect your furry friend and your budget from this imperfect world. Get up to 90% on eligible vet bills for less than a dollar a day. Find your Perfect match@petsbest.com Pet insurance products offered and administered by Pets Best Insurance Services, LLC are underwritten by American Pet Insurance Company or independents American Insurance Company for all terms, visit petsbest.com policy.
- [25:16]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [25:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees. Extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes.
- [25:46]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
C details.
- [25:46]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Oh my God. It's the coolest thing ever. Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? Well, check this out. It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. Seriously. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your Life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift.
- [26:27]
Unknown Speaker
And the archaeology. And this is where we kind of get piece our story together the beginning of it. Did people, do people now believe that this is the inspiration at least for the tower of. Was this the tower?
- [26:39]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Not everybody thinks that but I, I am one of those who do does think that and I think it because we've got to stretch our time a timeline a little bit to understand because.
- [26:52]
Unknown Speaker
The one thing there which is interesting. So if you say 600 B.C. 700.
- [26:56]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah. So 700 B.C. and by 600 B.C. it's, it's complete, it's finished. It's. It's there and the.
- [27:02]
Unknown Speaker
And the book of Genesis supposedly set 3000 BC which begs the question.
- [27:06]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah, how do these, you know so how can it possibly Be the ziggurat when, you know, we're talking a book of 3000 BC, but now we're at 700 BC. Well, the truth of the matter is this, of course, the Book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible. So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible. The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible, not the order in which they were written. The books of Genesis, the Book of Genesis and the others, the Exodus, story of Moses and so forth, these were all written by Jews in exile in Babylon. In the middle of the sixth century, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonians were taken en masse into captivity. Certainly, when I say en masse, all of the elite, the elite Jews. So the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual, were suddenly taken to this new city. And in fact, we know more now about the Jewish settlement in Babylon than we ever did. So back in the 1990s, we discovered a big hoard of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian, and they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one particular area just outside Babylon, which is called Al Yehud, Jew town, Jewish town. It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while many of them seem to have, you know, maintained something of the Hebrew faith, whatever that was at the time, many of them became completely Babylonianized. You know, they just. They marry Babylonian women, they take Babylonian names, or at least they take Babylonian and Hebrew names and so forth. So we see a lot of assimilation going on. So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon. Because otherwise, what we're dealing with is things like, you know, the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian exile of the Jews and how traumatic it was. And indeed, it was traumatic for them, ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God. But they actually, it seems now that some people coped a lot better than others. So some people assimilated, some people couldn't quite assimilate very easily. So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the Book of Psalms, okay, very famously, Psalm 137, by the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept. And our tormentors, the Babylonians, said to us, sing us some songs of Zion. How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land? This particular psalm, it's a Babylonian period psalm, okay? It was written during the exile. And it's all about, how can we talk about God when we are no longer in his presence? Because when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, as far as the Jews believed, God had disappeared. God was absent from their lives. So they were in this foreign place without their God anymore. Okay, so if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma. But also now we've got the Jewish texts from Babylonia saying, oh, actually some of them were all right. But it comes down to this, doesn't it? When we are. When we're far away from home and we want to remember who we are as a people, we need to start thinking about our histories. And there wasn't a written history of the Jews at this period at all. So the scribes at that period start writing a national history for themselves. So they write the story of Moses and the Exodus in the hope, of course, that they'll go home one day from Babylon and have a second exodus from captivity as well. They start writing the stories of Jacob, of Isaac, of Joseph, even, of course, the Garden of Eden. Aparadisos. That's a Persian word, the flood, of course, isn't it? That's absolutely a huge, huge thing. The story of the flood in Babylon. So essentially this kind of formative, what we might call pre history of the Israelites is formulated and set down in now what we would think of as the Holy Scripture in the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon. So all around them, the Jewish scribes who are writing this world is also incorporating, of course, their current experiences too. So, for instance, this is why God in this section of Genesis comes down from the ziggurat, because that's what Babylonian gods did. So they're picking up on these things. The idea of God's omnipotence and omniscience is something which is inherited from the God Marduk, for instance. The Hebrew God had never had those attributes before. This is all something that's been put together by these scribes who are trying to deal with both their exile, but also what's around them. And certainly the story of the Tower of Babel, the tower of Babylon, gets written into that narrative, importantly there. Because what the Jews want, of course, is for the time to come when they will be freed from this place. And the whole essence of that text in Genesis 10 is that there will be a time when they will be scattered again. People will go back to their original homes. There will be a time. And this is written, though as a proto history, as a myth, essentially, which is written into a canonical history of the Jews at that period. So I think it's important that whenever we try to read the Bible and you know, I'm a man of faith, I'm a priest, so I have to. I have had to train myself over the years to read this as a religious text with meaning and substance for me. But also as a historian, I have to look at it in also a cold kind of way and come to terms with it in those ways. Actually, when I do that, my faith is only increased. In fact, it's turned out that way, I'm glad to say. But yeah, so we have to remember that the Hebrew Bible in itself is a construction. And the Bible as we have it now, the Old Testament as we have it now doesn't really get fixed. It doesn't stop moving around until about the first century B.C. it's a very new text when it comes to antiquity.
- [33:49]
Unknown Speaker
But they're thinking about. I said they're creating these stories at the time that they're in exile in Babylon and some of them are yearning to return to that area of the world, to Jerusalem, to where they've come from. And they don't want to forget that as well, because this is over two generations, isn't it? It's a long time. And then they're looking around at one of these stories. They're looking for, you know, kind of inspiration not just from other mythical stories in Mesopotamia, like the flood story, which has its origins in Mesopotamia. They must also. They're looking around at the great monuments of Babylon, beautiful Babylon, the most incredible city in the world at this time. And then lo and behold, right at the center is this huge tower, probably unlike anything else they've ever seen in their lives before.
- [34:30]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Absolutely.
- [34:31]
Unknown Speaker
When you think of it that way, it's a strong possibility that that definitely then can influence them when they. They talk about a certain tower in, in the beginning of their. Of their. Well, of the Hebrew Bible.
- [34:41]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Absolutely. I think you've hit the nail on the head. And it's certainly my belief that's what's going on there. They are trying to deal, you know, they're dealing with a real life, what's around them. And I think that there's hostilities between the two groups of Jews who are living there, those who have assimilated well into Babylon and those who are yearning for home and don't want anything to do with Babylon. And I think part of the reaction that we have in the story of the Tower of Babel is against those who are too content to be here as well. You should be ashamed of yourselves. So it's interesting because we have two big prophetic books written at this time as well. One of them in Israel still remains in Israel, people who are still there, and the other in Babylon itself. The book of Jeremiah is written in Jerusalem. The book of Ezekiel is written in Babylon. And in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet says all the time, relax, enjoy it, enjoy it. Marry a Babylonian woman, you know, do well, make well for yourself. And he actually prophesied and said, God says, make businesses settle down here, enjoy. Back in Jerusalem, at the same period, Jeremiah is saying, woe to Babylon, May she burn, may she fall. And I think what the Hebrew scribes are doing, basically these are Jeremiah followers that they are anticipating the fall of this wicked city after all. Whereas the reality now we know is a lot more laissez faire than that.
- [36:03]
Unknown Speaker
I just love how with this story, it said we're not just looking at the biblical text, it is exploring this amazing archaeology. Because Mesopotamia is such a rich part of the world for ancient history today. I mean, it's no surprise that of ancient episodes, many on Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, the Persians, Sumerians, all of that proved amongst the most popular. Because there is just something that is so attractive about it, because we're learning more about it, not just about the everyday people, but with all those cuneiform form tablets, like, we're learning more about the everyday people, whether it's people in exile, as in our chat today, or just a person who owns a brewery or Babylon from 3,000 years ago.
- [36:40]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
And I think that's the real joy of dealing with cuneiform evidence in particular, because, all right, we're not necessarily getting literary masterworks all the time, but what we do get are personal letters from dad to the eldest son, or we get tax returns. As dull as it sounds, they are actually taxes, tax and sewers.
- [37:01]
Unknown Speaker
They're the overrated things.
- [37:04]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
The study of Mesopotamia is alive and vital and adding to our knowledge of antiquity and how to be human all the time as well. But what's fascinating about Babylon in the biblical tradition, because I suppose that's how most of us then have inherited Babylon. And as I say, the first archaeologists went out there with their spades and Bibles. I suppose that the story of Babylon doesn't just stop when the Jews go home from exile. First of all, it's important to say that many thousands of Jewish families stayed in Babylon. And the great Babylonian scholarship that developed in the late Antique period all comes from Babylon as well. So Babylon always was a huge Jewish center and remained so until the 1940s and 1950s, in fact, when after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when many of the Jews of Babylon left. But the Jewish presence in Babylon has always been enormous. And so, you know, all of the great rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible was written in Babylon over the centuries after its demise as a great center.
- [38:32]
Edtail
I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and on not just the Tudors from History hit. We do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title really. So follow not just the Tudors from history hit wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:02]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Oh, my God, it's the coolest thing ever. Hey, guys, have you heard of Goldbelly? Well, check this out. It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere, nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. Seriously. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your Life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift.
- [39:42]
Unknown Speaker
And they're eating their bread but also drinking their beer, aren't they? I just want to talk about beer. But beer is big in Babylon.
- [39:47]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Huge in Babylon.
- [39:48]
Unknown Speaker
Massive.
- [39:49]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Got a goddess for beer. You've also got a goddess for hangovers as well, which is great.
- [39:55]
Unknown Speaker
Love that I had to get that in there. Anything about beer and meso is fantastic. So it seems like this great monument, the E Menanki, this great ziggurat in Babylon, may well have influenced them when the story of the Tower of Babel. But of course, that's almost just. I mean, that's the structure itself. The whole story is about the multiple languages, isn't it? And how they kind of explain going from one language to all these different languages being created and people not being able to understand each other.
- [40:21]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
And that must have been the Jewish experience in Babylon.
- [40:24]
Unknown Speaker
So do you think that's. Is Babylon cosmopolitan?
- [40:27]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So cosmopolitan. So, you know, the Jews who came there, you know, only had their bit of Hebrew to go with. Suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek, Persian. All of this mix was Going on in Babylon, as multicultural as London is today, essentially that's what we need to try to get into our minds. And I think that was kind of unnerving. The Jewish elite, the scribes and so forth as well, they didn't feel comfortable with any of that. And I think that gets filtered into this story as.
- [41:01]
Unknown Speaker
So that altogether leads ultimately to the creation of this story. But it must have taken a bit of time to create. At the same time, it's some. So often with so many things in ancient history, we think, okay, here's one part, here's one influence, here's another influence, and bam. It must have happened straight away. But I'm guessing to then create that story, it takes a bit of time in its own right to develop, I guess.
- [41:22]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So, I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes, you know, created the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible, but certainly the story of the tower of Babylon is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE certainly, but it has a life well beyond even that because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New Testament as well. And this is where it begins to perhaps have more relevance to the modern world, you know, because this is how we kind of know it more. So, you know, the Book of Revelation. The Revelation.
- [42:07]
Unknown Speaker
Let's do this now, because this is. I don't even know how to describe this. It's. Yes, confusing. Confusing and mind blowing. The Book of Revelation.
- [42:17]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So sometime, imagine Ephesus, 90 CE. Okay, so about 90 CE, the end of the first century, in Ephesus, there's a man called John, probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on an island of Patmos. He's been exiled there, little Greek island today. But he lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus, big, big city in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are, like many of the churches of Asia Minor are surreptitiously pushing against the Roman Empire and its domination. Because essentially what the Book of Revelation is about, you know, Revelation, literally, it means the unveiling. So it's the unveiling of a truth. And the truth is, for John, is that there is only room for one empire, and that's the empire of Jesus Christ, not the empire of the Romans.
- [43:22]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, this is deep in Roman Empire.
- [43:23]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
And certainly not exactly, certainly not the Roman Empire emperor, who at this point was Domitian, who was pretty Mad on self aggrandizement and being called a God and so forth. Okay, so very subtly, in the New Testament, we find a pushback against Roman imperialism. Essentially. They have to do it subtly because of course there's every chance of persecution. And we've already seen under Nero what, you know, persecution of Christians can do. So what John and other writers like him do at the time is that they use the image of Babylon. It's re utilized from the Old Testament now, and it's used as a metaphor for Rome. So in the Book of Revelation, when we learn about the whore of Babylon, for instance, riding upon the back of the great beast, what we're dealing with there, of course is the emperor of Rome riding the empire, the Roman Empire itself. So Babylon becomes the shorthand for Rome all the way through the Book of Revelation, if you read it with that code in mind constantly. So the beast itself, Rome has seven heads, so the seven hills of Rome and so forth. And the more you read Revelation with this anti Roman imperialist thought, the more apparent it becomes. So Babylon is kind of reactivated in the Christian mind, that old Jewish paradigm of the wickedness of Babylon and everything that the tower represented is brought back into play again with Rome. And of course, Rome is therefore cast as a second Babylon. And what happens to Babylon when it falls? Eventually, you know, it disappears to dust. And this is what the Christians are saying in this unveiling of a new truth. This is what is going to happen to Rome in its turn. It's going to follow the way of Babylon too.
- [45:21]
Unknown Speaker
But they then say that directly. They have to use Babylon as clothes almost for that resistance.
- [45:27]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
They use it constant. Absolutely. Then of course, there's another afterlife to this too, because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and.
- [45:37]
Unknown Speaker
Into the early 16th century Renaissance time.
- [45:40]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah. And especially during the European Reformation, the image of Babylon is once more reactivated by the Protestant reformers. So now the second Rome, papal Rome is also cast as another Babylon as well. So the papal throne is the throne of Satan, for instance. The great whore is now the Pope and so forth. And this all comes to a head in two particular ways. This kind of utilization of Babylon in this way in Christian understanding, in the sermons of Martin Luther, but also in northern European art of this period. Because from about the 1540s up until the 1580s, there is a plethora of images, paintings, and also prints of what, what else but the Tower of Babel. It becomes the most important, one of the most important art subjects in northern European painting. And many of you will probably know that Brueghel the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Elder in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Weibel. The best known today is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
- [47:03]
Unknown Speaker
It's normally, if you Wikipedia, the Tower of Babel, that's normally the image which.
- [47:06]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Also comes up, which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because Brueghel himself trained as an artist in Rome. So when he returns home and he wants to paint this antique scene of the Tower of Babel, he has Rome in his mind straight away. So his Tower of Babel is round. It's not a square cigarette, it's round, but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really. And it's kind of unfinished. It's got a big split in it. It's full of arches to go around. And, of course. What's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum. So he sees the ruins of the Colosseum and he thinks, okay, this must be the Roman Babel. And this is what he paints. And it's really fascinating the way he does it as well, because first of all, just as in Genesis, it's a work of hubris by humans, because the scale of it is enormous. When you look at the painting, the city of Babylon, around which is his Antwerp, it's tiny, tiny, diminutive little figures, you know, vast. And it's unfinished. And even the bits that have been finished have been finished so long ago that they started to crumble, and they're being patched up while they haven't even started the beginning of the end of the top of the tower yet. So it's this constant work in progress, as it were. Man laboring away with his own vanities to build this project. And in the front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on. The King of Babylon, the King of Rome, the Pope. So all of this comes together perfectly in this visualization of what, you know, a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a defunct religion, and a wicked urban center is all about. So that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going, keeps on going.
- [49:01]
Unknown Speaker
We're talking about keeping on going. Just before we completely wrap up, shall we talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, too? Yeah. Feels a bit different, doesn't it? But there is a link here.
- [49:12]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Yeah, of course. Well, you know. Yeah. So Adam Douglas, you know, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that, you know, how do we, how can we communicate together, you know, because we're all living in a Babel world, okay, that, you know, unless you do put the hours in and learn another language. But he came up with the idea of the Babel fish. So it's a little silver fish which you can just insert in your ear and that will give you the power to understand anybody. So it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel effect. And he calls it the Babel fish, of course. And it's no coincidence, is it, you know, that, you know, language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us today.
- [49:52]
Unknown Speaker
I mean, Lloyd, this has been fantastic. We've gone from Book of Genesis, then Babylon, exploring the archeology, and then the later legacy of the whole story of the Tower of Babel. But it is interesting. I want to do this topic. One, because it's a name that we've all probably heard of and, but we don't know too much about. But two, because it is a story also of archaeology as well. And with so many things of the Bible, it's, it's fascinating whether it's King Herod, how archaeology and non biblical sources are revealing more about the real King Herod or Pontius Pilate or the story of course of Noah and the Flood and the influences from Mesopotamia. There are so many parts, you know, well known stories from the biblical account that you can, you can align or you can look to alongside archeology to make, in my opinion, make it more available to more and more people.
- [50:42]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Most definitely. And I think it's a real sad fact that we've created this very artificial divide between ancient history and biblical studies. Because the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, it is another source. It's an ancient historical source. I teach it as easily and as readily as I teach Gilgamesh or as I teach Homer. You know, it's just part of the package that I teach to my students because it's important to see this as a holistic one. And the Hebrew Bible doesn't come out of a vacuum. It is part of a Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian and later on Greco Roman world. All of it is being influenced by that. And all of the books of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, have their agendas which draw on current situations of the authors, of course.
- [51:31]
Unknown Speaker
Well, Lois, I think this has been absolutely fantastic. I think we'll draw the interview to a close here. I think lastly though, I mean Tell us a few. You've written countless books on this day of the world, Persians and Babylon. Tell us a couple of those relevant to today's chat.
- [51:47]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
So the most relevant I suppose is one that's forthcoming. So it's one I've just finished writing and it's called Babylon the great city and that's a history of Babylon from the year dot until the fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a long duray history more generally in the area. I've written on Persians, the age of the great kings, Persia of course was part of, you know, dominated Babylon for, for 300 years. And then more generally lots of stuff for the ancient.
- [52:17]
Unknown Speaker
Just once again from me, thank you so much for your time this evening and taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to come here for our first ever Ancients live show and hopefully the first of many. And Lloyd, once again, thank you so much. Dame with tight.
- [52:31]
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I'll go home now.
- [52:51]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was our special episode on the Tower of Babel in front of a live audience at the London Podcast Festival with Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for for listening to it. Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.
- [53:38]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your Life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT231.
- [54:10]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's the average number of apps used by many companies. This leads to a lot of context and tab switching that drains employee focus and costs. Your company Grammarly can help. Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to write clearly and on brand without disrupting workflow. Join 70,000 teams who save an average of $5,000 per employee per year using Grammarly go to Grammarly.com enterprise to learn more.