Tower of Babel

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Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
And in today's episode, we'll be exploring the captivating story of the Tower of Babel.

Speaker 1 Famous from the Bible, the Tower of Babel features in the book of Genesis, with with its story explaining how different languages came to be across the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that is the case with the Tower of Babel, because archaeology has revealed a real-life influence for this tower and its story.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 the time, a fantastic speaker.

Speaker 1 Now this was a very special episode because it's the first one we have ever done in front of a live audience.

Speaker 1 That's right, we had a sell-out 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.

Speaker 1 The US, Canada, Australia. Let's see.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 17 Lloyd, good to see you.

Speaker 15 How are you doing? Very good. Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.

Speaker 17 We've probably all heard the name Tower of Babel. It's one that, of course, is linked closely to the Bible, but it's also one that has an archaeological tale to it, too.

Speaker 15 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 archaeology of ancient Iraq.

Speaker 15 But I think with the Tower of Babel, the two do begin to align themselves.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So almost immediately, archaeologists began to say, ah, we have discovered the Tower of Babel.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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've luckily have it here by my side.

Speaker 17 So, we're going to start with explaining, you know, kind of 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.

Speaker 17 So, let's start. What is the story of the Tower of Babel?

Speaker 15 So, it's a very brief account. It's only nine verses in the tenth chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.
I'll read it to you. If you know it, please join in.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us

Speaker 15 go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech.

Speaker 15 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So it's essentially

Speaker 15 a text which recounts a kind of divide between God

Speaker 15 and humans, God and

Speaker 15 let us come down. God and the others who are in heaven

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So will he be redundant in the long run? That's essentially the story.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 And this is a story there, also, just to set the context and the background there right from the beginning.

Speaker 17 This also happens, it's very early on in the story of the Bible, at least the Bible that we have today.

Speaker 15 We're just ten chapters in.

Speaker 15 Two of those chapters are on the

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 The next question is, it has to be,

Speaker 17 was it real?

Speaker 15 So,

Speaker 15 a couple of contenders then, as I say.

Speaker 15 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 ziggurats.
Okay, and they are dotted all across.

Speaker 15 Yes, so what is this?

Speaker 15 So, a ziggurat is essentially it's a step pyramid.

Speaker 15 So a very broad base, then another broad base on top, slightly smaller, up, up, up, up, to about maybe six or seven levels. The internal structure

Speaker 15 of a ziggurat is not like a pyramid.

Speaker 15 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, at the apex.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 these artificial mountains, because Iraq is flat,

Speaker 15 by and large, and also southwestern Iran as well.

Speaker 15 By and large, it's flat. And so, these are artificial mountains.
Mountains always have played important roles in mythology, of course.

Speaker 15 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, you know, to get closer to the heavens.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But woe betides anybody, any mortal, who tried to reach up to heaven that way. You know, so it was one-way traffic only, decidedly so.

Speaker 15 But these were the great cult centers of the gods throughout the Mesopotamian world.

Speaker 15 Every city, every town almost, had its own ziggurat, which was usually dedicated to one or sometimes more gods.

Speaker 15 In Babylon, for instance, in the great city of Babylon itself, the biggest metropolis on earth by the 7th century BCE,

Speaker 15 there were two enormous temples, great ziggurats there.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But the other one, which was built opposite that, was his state temple. It's like his office,

Speaker 15 if you like.

Speaker 15 And it was, without a doubt, one of the biggest structures that the world had ever seen.

Speaker 17 Right, whoa,

Speaker 17 let's not get too fired too quickly.

Speaker 17 Let's not spoil the party too much, because there's a few other contenders we got for ziggurats in the meantime, because it's quite interesting with the whole term ziggurat.

Speaker 17 I mean, and first of all, a little bit of a tangent, but I felt I have to say it. I mean, recently I was in Petra.
I was fortunate enough to go to Petra.

Speaker 17 And one of the places we visited was this place known as the High Place, High Place of Sacrifice, it's called. And it's one of the biggest mountains above Petra where they have an altar.

Speaker 17 And you see it again and again with all these different ancient cultures.

Speaker 17 They build up high because they their gods are above them so you know kind of in words of uh the scholar jodie magnus they're kind of cooking up a barbecue so like they'll 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 in fact there's a there's a wonderful babylonian text which says that you know when they offer sacrifice that like that the the gods buzz around like flies.

Speaker 15 It's

Speaker 15 clearly that keen. That's what they believe.
Well, that's exactly it. So it's this stairway to God.

Speaker 15 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? You know, Moses goes up to Mount Horeb or up to Mount Sinai or whatever.

Speaker 15 So if you're in an environment which doesn't have that natural rock formation then you've got to build that.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 bit of Iran too.

Speaker 17 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 the other and they were seeing these big ziggurats and they were thinking in the back of their minds 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 yeah the one that caught their eye was at a place called Dur Khaligalzu

Speaker 15 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.
Dur Kaligalzu was a Babylonian new build.

Speaker 15 It was like a Milken Kings of its day.

Speaker 15 They built it from scratch as a kind of like,

Speaker 15 you know, an offshoot of the capital. Some people have just decided it's like the way in which Paris and Versailles operated.
So it was a getaway for the king. And there there was a huge

Speaker 15 ziggurat built. And by the end of the 19th century, much of its inner core still remained.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 Saddam rebuilt the first platform of it, in fact, with two staircases that go up. And now

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 The other one was in Iran, Chogha Zambil, which is still the best preserved ziggurat in the world today. I mean,

Speaker 15 you can still, I mean, if they'd allow you to climb upright to the top of it, it's incredible.

Speaker 15 But as archaeologists went deeper into Iraq and also as the archaeology itself got more sophisticated,

Speaker 15 they realized that Babylon itself

Speaker 15 has more than enough evidence for these ziggurats. And don't forget, forget, you know, the Bible is very succinct and very precise in saying this is the tower in Babel.

Speaker 15 So Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon, Babel. Okay, so Hebrew word for Babylon.

Speaker 15 And Babylon itself, Bilbil, or Bilbal, in Akkadian, means the gate of the gods. So there's a, you know, an etymological

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 Surely they should have realized this earlier, those early archaeologists going out there.

Speaker 15 Well, no, because, don't forget,

Speaker 15 the work on language was only slowly developing. So we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon.

Speaker 15 So we have to wait certain generations until all the pieces get put together.

Speaker 15 There's an interesting thing as well, isn't it? Because for us, it's such a, you know, the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledygook that comes out of it.

Speaker 15 You know, we're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other.

Speaker 15 For us in English, you know, babel, Babel, works really well, doesn't it? Because we're babbling on about something, okay, means we're incoherent, you know, we don't know.

Speaker 15 But actually, that has nothing to do with the naming at all.

Speaker 15 But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble, in fact.

Speaker 15 So it's all built into the Hebrew um already so they were playing with Babylon and Babylon as well which luckily in English we've inherited Laura you're dishing out facts here there's probably get you on uh well let's then focus our chat on Babylon and you mentioned the ziggurats and you've got you've got another passage there you reaching out for that forces me now to ask you what have you reached out for

Speaker 15 i've reached out here

Speaker 15 for an inscription from the reign of king Nabu Palasa. And

Speaker 17 so, who is Nabu-Palazza?

Speaker 15 Nabu Palasser is the king who restores power to Babylon at the beginning of the 7th century BC. Babylon was razed to the ground by the Assyrians, nasty, wicked Assyrians.

Speaker 15 You know, the Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon.
And

Speaker 15 in a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the

Speaker 15 7th century, Nabu-Palassar, Babylonian-born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty and he begins

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And between them, Nabu-Pulassar and Nebuchadnezzar beautify this city on a scale that had never been seen before.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Mathematics, astronomy, astrology, literature, music. mythology, you name it.

Speaker 15 Babylon was the kind of the great epicenter, the great almost factory of all of these great cultural movements.

Speaker 15 And it had 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 the north of Egypt and also the whole of the Levant, they started to beautify it.

Speaker 15 They had no

Speaker 15 worries about money because it was flooding in from the conquered territories and also from the spoils of war.

Speaker 17 And the conquered territories, how far are we talking?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Perhaps the most significant series of conquests were the conquests that took place in the Levant in what is now Israel-Palestine.

Speaker 15 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, helped pay for these huge, huge

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 It's part of the walls of Babylon. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 15 The walls themselves were about 11 miles around, for instance. You could drive two sets of chariots at the top of the walls.
I mean,

Speaker 15 this was huge. It was a metropolis, a true, true great city.
Long before Rome, before Alexandria, there was Babylon.

Speaker 15 And right in the heart of this is the religious,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 There had been other gods who had

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 He was wise, he was considered to have unclean 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

Speaker 15 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 this iggorite it was the the connecting point between our mortal existence and the existence of the gods up there.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Don't do anything bad to us because we do all these really good things for you. So it was a very important role that the priests of of Babylon had to maintain this.

Speaker 15 So what we know of this great ziggurat,

Speaker 15 well, first of all, we can see it in the ground. We can still see the outline of

Speaker 15 the ziggurat today. So if you go on

Speaker 15 Google Maps, you zoom in, you can still see very clearly the outline of the ziggurat.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 meters around huge and it was said to have built up 96 meters as well so do you think this is the biggest the biggest

Speaker 15 of all mother yeah 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.

Speaker 15 So there had always been a site for worship of Mardok there, but they decided to renew their efforts with it. And the Babylonians were known throughout antiquity as the master brick bakers.

Speaker 15 And they used two forms of brick. They used simple

Speaker 15 baked brick

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And of course, they opt for this beautiful sort of lapis lazuli blue as an outer coating. So this ziggurat

Speaker 15 must have just shone. You must have seen it from miles and miles and miles around.
It was their greatest glory,

Speaker 15 their greatest triumph.

Speaker 17 You know, it's something we always forget about these great monuments, particularly in the Middle East and in Egypt and places like that

Speaker 17 in their full glory. It's not just the size of them,

Speaker 17 it's the brightness,

Speaker 17 just how they just shone in the landscape.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So this was a monumental processional way which led to this huge ziggurat. Once seen never forgotten without any doubt.

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Speaker 17 At the archaeology, this is where we kind of get piece our story together at the beginning of it.

Speaker 17 Do people now believe that this is the inspiration, at least for the Tower of Was this the Tower of Faith?

Speaker 15 Not everybody thinks that, but

Speaker 15 I am one of those who does think that. And I think it because

Speaker 15 we've got to stretch our time, our timeline a little bit before we understand this.

Speaker 17 Because the one thing there which is interesting, so if you say 600 BC, 700 BC?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so 700 BC, and by 600 BC, it's complete, it's finished, it's there.

Speaker 17 And the book of Genesis supposedly set 3000 BC, which begs the question, yeah.

Speaker 15 So how can it possibly be the ziggurat when

Speaker 15 we're talking a book of set in 3000 BC, but now we're at 700 BC? Well the truth of the matter is this, of course.

Speaker 15 The book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,

Speaker 15 Deuteronomy, These were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible.

Speaker 15 The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible, not the order in which they were written.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 the elite Jews, so the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual, were taken to this new city.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 horde of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian.

Speaker 15 And they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one one particular area just outside Babylon, which is called Al-Yahud, Jew town, Jewish town.

Speaker 15 It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon, because otherwise

Speaker 15 what we're dealing with is things like the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian exile of the Jews and how traumatic it was.

Speaker 15 And indeed it was traumatic for them, ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the book of Psalms,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land? So this particular psalm,

Speaker 15 it's a Babylonian period psalm. 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

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma.

Speaker 15 But also now we've got the Jewish texts from Babylonia saying, oh, well, actually, some of them were all right.

Speaker 15 But it comes down to this, doesn't it?

Speaker 15 When we're far away from home and we want to remember who we are as a people,

Speaker 15 we need to start thinking about our histories. And there was no written history of the Jews at this period at all.
So the scribes of that period start writing a national history for themselves.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 They start writing the stories of Jacob, of Isaac, of Joseph, even of, of course, the Garden of Eden, a paradisos. That's a Persian word.
And the flood, of course, isn't it? That's what it is.

Speaker 15 Absolutely. Huge, huge thing.
Atahasis, the story of the flood in Babylon. So essentially, this kind of formative, what we might call prehistory.

Speaker 15 of the Israelites is formulated and set down in now what we would think of as the holy scriptures in the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon.

Speaker 15 So all around them, the Jewish scribes who are writing this world

Speaker 15 is also incorporating, of course, their current experiences too.

Speaker 15 So for instance, this is why God

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 15 omniscience is something which is inherited from the God Marduk, for instance. The Hebrew God had never had those attributes before.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And this is written, though, as a proto-history,

Speaker 15 as a myth, essentially, which is written into a canonical history of the Jews at that period.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 we have to remember that the Hebrew Bible in itself is a construction. And

Speaker 15 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 BC.

Speaker 15 It's a very new text when it comes to antiquity.

Speaker 17 But so that 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 as well, to Jerusalem, to where they've come from.

Speaker 17 And they don't want to forget that as well.

Speaker 15 Because this is over two generations.

Speaker 17 It's a long time.

Speaker 17 And then they're looking around at one of these stories they're looking for you know kind of inspiration not just from uh 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.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 When you think of it that way, it's a strong possibility that that definitely then can influence them when they talk about a certain tower in the beginning of their, of their, well, of the Hebrew Bible.

Speaker 15 Absolutely. I think you've hit the nail on the head, and it's certainly my belief that's what's going on there.

Speaker 15 They are trying to deal, you know, they're dealing with the real life, what's around them.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 relax, enjoy it, enjoy it. Marry a Babylonian woman, you know, do well, make well for yourself.
And he he actually prophesies and said, God says, make businesses, settle down here, enjoy.

Speaker 15 Back in Jerusalem, at the same period, Jeremiah is saying, woe to Babylon, may she burn, may she fall.

Speaker 15 And I think what the Hebrew scribes are doing, and basically these are Jeremiah followers, that they are anticipating the fall of this wicked city, after all.

Speaker 15 Whereas the reality now, we know, is a lot more laissez-faire than that.

Speaker 17 I just love how with this story, it's that we're not just looking at the the biblical text.

Speaker 17 It is exploring this amazing archaeology because Mesopotamia is such a rich part of the world for ancient history today.

Speaker 17 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 caner formed tablets.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 15 And I think that's the real joy of dealing with cuneiform evidence in particular, because we're, all right, we're not necessarily getting, you know, literary masterworks all the time.

Speaker 15 But what we do get are personal letters from dad to the eldest son, or we get

Speaker 15 tax returns, as dull as it sounds. They are actually fairly.
Tax is very cool. Tax and sewers, they're the overrated things of very cool.

Speaker 15 The study of Mesopotamia is alive and vital, and it's adding to our knowledge of antiquity and how to be human all the time as well.

Speaker 15 But what's fascinating about Babylon

Speaker 15 in the biblical tradition, because I suppose that's how most of us then have inherited Babylon, okay?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 First of all, it's important to say that many thousands of Jewish families stayed in Babylon. And

Speaker 15 the great

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 In fact, when you know 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.

Speaker 15 And so, you know, all of the great

Speaker 15 rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible was written in Babylon over the centuries after

Speaker 15 its demise as a great center.

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Speaker 17 And they're eating their bread, but they're also drinking their beer, aren't they? I just want to talk about beer, but beer's big in Babylon, though.

Speaker 15 Huge in Babylon. Massive.
You've got a goddess for beer.

Speaker 15 You've also got a goddess for hangovers as well, which is great.

Speaker 15 Love that. I had to get that in there.

Speaker 17 Anything about beer in Mesopotamia is fantastic.

Speaker 17 So it seems like this great monument, the Ete Menanki, this great Ziggurat in Babylon, may well have influenced them when the story of the Tower of Babel.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 15 And that must have been the Jewish experience in Babylon. So, do you think that's

Speaker 15 Babylon cosmopolitan? So, cosmopolitan.

Speaker 15 So, you know, the Jews who came there and only had their bit of Hebrew to go with, suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian,

Speaker 15 bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek,

Speaker 15 Persian, all of this mix was going on in Babylon,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 They didn't feel comfortable with any of that. And I think that gets filtered into this story as well.

Speaker 17 So that all together leads ultimately to the creation of this story. But it must have taken a bit of time to create at the same time.

Speaker 17 So often with so many things in ancient history, we think, okay, here's one past, here's one influence, here's another influence, and bam, it must have happened straight away.

Speaker 17 But I'm guessing to then create that story, it takes a bit of time in its own right to develop.

Speaker 15 I guess so. I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes, you know, created the authoritative text.

Speaker 15 of the Hebrew Bible, but certainly the story of the Tower of Babylon is found in the the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE, certainly.

Speaker 15 But it has a life well beyond even that, because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New Testament as well.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So, you know, the book of Revelation, the the Revelation.

Speaker 17 Let's do this now because this, this is, I don't even know how to describe this. It's,

Speaker 15 yes, confusing.

Speaker 17 Confusing and mind-blowing, the book of Revelation.

Speaker 15 So sometime, imagine,

Speaker 15 Ephesus,

Speaker 15 90 CE. So about 90 CE, first at the end of the first century in Ephesus, there's a man called John,

Speaker 15 probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on our island of Patmos.
He's been exiled there, a little Greek island today.

Speaker 15 But he

Speaker 15 lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus, big, big city in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are,

Speaker 15 like many of the churches of Asia Minor, are

Speaker 15 surreptitiously pushing against the Roman Empire. and its domination because essentially what the book of Revelation is about, you know, Revelation,

Speaker 15 literally,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 Because this is deep in Roman empire.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So very subtly in the New Testament, we find a pushback against Roman imperialism, essentially.

Speaker 15 They have to do it subtly because, of course, there's every chance of persecution, and we've already seen under Nero what persecution of Christians can do.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So Babylon is kind of reactivated

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And of course, Rome is therefore cast as a second Babylon. And what happens to Babylon when it falls eventually? You know,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 they daren't say that directly.

Speaker 15 They have to use Babylon as a cloak almost without resistance. They use it constantly.
Absolutely. Then, of course, there's another afterlife to this, too.

Speaker 15 Because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century...

Speaker 17 Renaissance time.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, and especially during the European Reformation,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So the papal throne is the throne of Satan, for instance. The Great Whore is now the the Pope, and so forth.
And this all comes to a head in two particular ways, this kind of utilization of

Speaker 15 Babylon in this way, in Christian understanding, in the sermon of Martin Luther, but also in

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 Bruegel the Elder, Peter Bruegel the Elder in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Babel, but the best known today is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Speaker 17 If you Wikipedia, the Tower of Babel, that's normally the image which also comes up.

Speaker 15 Which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because

Speaker 15 Bruegel himself trained as an artist in Rome.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's round, but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really.

Speaker 15 And it's kind of unfinished. it's got a big split in it, it's full of arches that go around.
And of course, what's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum.

Speaker 15 So he sees the ruins of the Colosseum and he thinks, okay, this must be the Roman Babel. And this is what he paints.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 you know,

Speaker 15 the city of Babylon around, which is his Antwerp, it's it's tiny, tiny, diminutive little figures, you know, vast.

Speaker 15 And it's unfinished.

Speaker 15 And even the bits that have been finished have been finished so long ago that they've 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.

Speaker 15 So it's constant work in progress, as it were, man laboring away with his own vanities. to build this project.

Speaker 15 And in the front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on, the king of of Babylon, the king of Rome, the pope.

Speaker 15 So all of this comes together perfectly in this visualization of what a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a defunct religion,

Speaker 15 and a wicked urban centre is all about. So that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going, keeps on going.

Speaker 17 We're talking about keeping on going just before we completely wrap up.

Speaker 17 Shall we talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2? Yeah.

Speaker 17 Feels a bit different, doesn't it? But there is a link here.

Speaker 15 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 15 There's a different link. Yeah, so Adam Douglas, you know, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that, you know,

Speaker 15 how can we communicate together, you know, because we're all living in a Babel world, okay, that, you know, unless you, you know, put the hours in and learn another language.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 You know, that language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us today.

Speaker 17 I mean, this has been fantastic. We've gone from, it's a Book of Genesis, then Babylon, exploring the archaeology, and then the later legacy of the whole story of the Tower of Babel.

Speaker 17 But it is interesting. I wanted to do this topic, one, because it's a name that we've all probably heard of, but we don't know too much about.

Speaker 17 But two, because it is a story also of archaeology as well.

Speaker 17 And with so many things of the Bible, it's fascinating whether it's King Herod, how archaeology and non-biblical sources is 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.

Speaker 17 There are so many parts, you know, well-known stories from the biblical account that

Speaker 17 you can align or you can look to alongside archaeology to make, in my opinion, make it more available to more and more people.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's an ancient historical source. I teach it as easily and as readily as I teach Gilgamesh or as I teach Homer.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It is part of a Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian, and later on Greco-Roman world. All of it is being influenced by that.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 17 Well, Lois, I think this has been absolutely fantastic. I think we'll draw the interview to a close here.

Speaker 17 I think Nasi though, I mean, tell us a few of you've written countless books on this area of the world, Persians and Babylon. Tell us a couple of those relevant to today's chat.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And that's a history of Babylon from the year dot until the fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a long durate history.

Speaker 15 More generally, in the area, I've written on Persians, the age of the great kings. Persia, of course, was part of

Speaker 15 dominated Babylon for 300 years. And then, more generally, lots of stuff from the ancient unions.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And Lloyd, once again, thank you so much, Dame Retire. Thank you.

Speaker 15 Thank you.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 I'll go home now.

Speaker 1 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 Lloyds Llewellyn-Jones.
I hope you enjoyed it.

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Speaker 1 That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

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