From the distant reaches of Sumerian mythology, we’re proud to bring you two packs of pins!
We’ve got Gilgamesh and Enkidu bro-ing it up, and a glow in the dark Taurus sent by
Ishtar herself to crash the party. They’re available for a limited time, link below!
I don’t think we talk enough about the Fall
of Babylon, and that’s coming from someone who has literally never talked about the Fall
of Babylon. Yes that sounds crazy, and yes I have been losing my mind about this for
two weeks straight – but hear me out. The Babylonian civilization literally invented
trigonometry, wrote the star charts we still use, and was home to the most legendarily
opulent architecture from the Bronze Age down through the classical period. Babylon influenced
every society in a 2,000-mile radius for hundreds of years, and continued to shape Near Eastern
culture in the millennia that followed, but Babylon itself lacks the dramatic denouement
characteristic of so many neighboring societies. For all the impact it made when it was thriving,
Babylon’s downfall is fully absent from our popular conception – and when compared
to their neighbors like Egypt, Rome, Phoenicia, and Persia, who all have cultural legacies
reaching to the modern day, Babylon has a conspicuous lack of direct successor states.
The original Bronze Age Babylonian empire ran from the 19th to 16th centuries BC, and
then one full millennium later, the classical-era Neo Babylonian Empire ruled for just shy of
a century, from 626 to 539 BC. So while we have dramatic biblical tales of Babylon raising
a tower to the heavens and getting the almighty backhand of God for their hubris, on the whole,
their downfall is murkier because it happened at several points but also in none of them.
Those Babylonians left a wily historical legacy, but I think we can pin them down. So, to figure
out when Babylon fell, how, and why that question is so fascinating, Let’s do some History.
We begin, as we always do in Mesopotamia,
with the rivers, because Babylon’s rise owes to the shifting course of the Euphrates
between roughly 2000 and 1800 BC. It was just some city before the Middle Bronze Age, but
when the river moved west, humble little Babylon found itself right on the water and controlling
the narrowest point between the Tigris and Euphrates, uniquely well-situated along the
major trade routes at a time when no single empire ruled Mesopotamia. The 3rd Dynasty
of Ur had collapsed around 2000 BC, and in the hazy centuries after, ethnic Amorites
settled all along the rivers, at places such as Babylon. Around the turn of the 1700s BC,
Babylon went big-mode during the reign of King Hammurabi, who not only conquered up
and down Mesopotamia, but set the new standard for empire in both structure and achievement.
Hammurabi went farther than any of his predecessors in centralizing power on himself, leaving
less room for outer cities and local administrators to cause trouble, while allowing far stronger
coordination between the king and the provinces. Hammurabi also made a conscious effort to
model himself as a protector of everyone in the empire, as very pointedly conveyed in
the preamble to his famous Law Code[CK1] . Babylonian law had precedence from earlier
Sumerian works, but the Code of Hammurabi set a true uniform standard of justice across
the empire: a categorized list of key laws, whose legal precedent could also guide judges
to adapt or create new laws that all still fit Hammurabi’s vision. The laws themselves
are pretty hardcore, with 1-to-1 retribution as the penalty for most crimes, eye for an
eye and all that, but it seems in practice like a calculated off-ramp from the kinds
of never-ending blood-feuds that make up 90% of world literature by volume.[CK2]
Speaking of, we have Babylon to thank for
one of the oldest written stories on earth, the Epic of Gilgamesh. The original folktales
were Sumerian from centuries earlier and mostly focused on the heroic exploits of the Great
King Gilgamesh, but Babylonian storytellers collated them into one narrative focusing
all in on the emotional drama of Gilgamesh losing his best friend Enkidu and embarking
on a doomed quest for immortality. The Babylonian version also incorporates the myth of the
great flood as key backstory, showing a literary tradition that was comfortable combining very
disparate sources into one cohesive whole. Aside from stories of kings, their mathematics
were so advanced that they were giving the Pythagorean theorem as homework a millennium
before Greeks twigged onto the idea, and they even understood contagious disease – a king
wrote that if someone is sick, don’t hang out with them, and don’t touch their s***.
The strength of their writing and overall cultural heft made their Akkadian tongue into
the diplomatic language of the near east, and their ideas traveled right along with
it.
For the 150 years after Hammurabi’s death, Babylon was the grandest and most accomplished
imperial city in the near east – but here we find their first fall in 1595 BC, as the
newcomer Hittite empire from Anatolia swept down the Euphrates, sacked the city and deposed
the dynasty, and then just went back home. I mean you know how these things happen, you
get caught up in all the excitement, don’t pay complete attention to what you’re setting
fire to, and only hours later you realize oh crap that was Babylon. In the wake of the
chaos, the Kassite people from the east swooped in to take the kingdom for themselves as the
new ruling dynasty. But tellingly, they didn’t change much. Babylon remained the capital,
Akkadian stayed the primary language, and later Assyrian conquerors had the same idea
that Babylon in itself was valuable, even after the original Babylonians were sacked
and deposed. Long before Rome, this may be the first case of a civilization outlasting
their own fall through the power of sheer vibes.[CK3] And I respect that.
By the 800s, the Assyrian empire was the major
player, but the biggest change came from ordinary people, as by this point Mesopotamia had a
second main language of Aramaic, written with an alphabet that was far easier to learn and
use than cuneiform. So when a new dynasty in Babylon asserted its independence from
Assyria in 626 and sacked their capital in 612, they had created a Neo-Babylonian empire
not on the basis of the ethnicity or language of old, but that it was the city of Babylon
at the imperial helm again. And from 605-562 BC, king Nebuchadnezzar II splashed every
ornamentation on his capital to make it worthy of that ancient mantle. According to a very
impressed but certainly exaggerating Herodotus, Babylon was an exact square, surrounded by
the river, canals, and giant brick walls, with magnificent gates and broad processional
roads, all framing massive palaces, gardens, and temples; such as Etemenanki, the great
6-layer ziggurat which directly inspired the myth of the tower of Babel. And for whatever
reason, unlike the Great Ziggurat of Ur with its proportions of squares perfectly inscribed
within a triangle, Etemenanki just doesn’t do it for me on the proportions. Aesthetically
it rules, a phenomenal feat of design and pure height, but the shapes don’t click
with me and I can’t really articulate why, proportion is just one of those indescribable
things[CK4] . But architectural diatribes aside – unlike Herodotus, Biblical sources
would likely have seen the ziggurat for themselves, as Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Judah resulted
in the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and mass deportations of Jews to Babylon.
Now, despite the spectacular restoration of Babylonian prestige and power, many of their
own citizens were also having some religion issues. King Nabonidus was engaged in what
various sources describe as religious reform or outright heresy, by reorienting the Babylonian
pantheon towards the moon god Sin, but the priesthood of their patron god Marduk was
deeply unthrilled. And nearby aspiring empires took notice – when the Achaemenid Persian
empire conquered down into Mesopotamia, king Cyrus went to great lengths to paint this
as a liberation and a restoration of Marduk to his place atop the pantheon.
At first, this narrative seemed familiar – an
outside group comes in, retains the religion, language, and core institutions, and continues
to rule from Babylon. New management, same company; Babylon “falls” but lives another
day. But Cyrus didn’t do that last part, because Babylon was one of five [CK5] capitals,
and the only one outside of their homeland in Iran. Cyrus didn’t try to turn Babylon
Persian, and he borrowed several aspects of Babylonian society, like Aramaic language
and Cuneiform writing for fancy occasions; but critically, Persia also borrowed from
their new subjects in Media, Assyria, Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt, so Babylon was only one
part of this new Achaemenid identity, only one capital, only Babylon. And that is something
they could never recover from. When Alexander the should have stayed sober toppled the Persians
and planned to make Babylon his new imperial capital, he carefully dismantled Etemenanki
with the aim of rebuilding it, but died before getting to that crucial second part, so off
went the crowning monument of a whole civilization. Sure, he had successors, but none with sympathies
to Babylon – his general Seleucus carved out an empire in the near east, but made a
new capital at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, later known as Ctesiphon to its Parthian and Sasanian
rulers. With its usefulness seemingly outlived, Babylon eroded in the centuries after as people
simply left. By the time of the Romans at the turn of the millennium, Babylon was a
ghost, slowly sinking back down into the floodplains it first rose out of 1800 years before.
“Babylon” is not a descriptive identity.
Amorites had founded the first dynasty, yet the NeoBabylonians counted several major ethnic
groups and spoke a different language. Most other states in the interim also ruled from
the ancient capital, but only this empire earns the name NeoBabylonian because they
put their city back atop the entire near eastern word. Not an empire of any one group, but
an empire of The City. Gradual change was part of the game, but every new ruler at some
level submitted themselves to the mantle of Babylon and took on its ways. Despite sacks
and deposed dynasties, Babylon never truly fell because it always had something to teach.
Had Alexander the gone from our empires but not from our hearts lived and made Babylon
his capital, we might be talking about The Greco-Babylonian empire instead of a Macedonian
one, but even still, by his day, the idea of Babylon was no longer so innately compelling
that people turned to it alone as the model and meter of civilization. Sure, they borrowed
from it, but Babylon became lost amid other influences: Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Judaic,
Anatolian, Indian – not the sole beacon of civilization in the near east, just another
of its constituent parts. So when did Babylon Fall? When the rest of the ancient world caught
up to it.
Thank you for watching! I promised far too long ago that I would cover Babylonian history,
and I’m glad to have finally made it happen. My little diversion about the proportions
of Etemenanki was originally significantly longer, but I needed to have at least SOME
restraint about architecture. Not a lot, mind you, just some. And if you like shiny things,
you can check out our new Gilgamesh pins at the link below.