Babylon, a City for the Ages: Interview with Professor Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones

0:20Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad-free. Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me. As we've traveled through the centuries and millennia here on Tides of History, there are some places to which we've returned again and again. Rome, Carthage, Constantinople, and a hundred other locations that have been the sites of essential events and processes over thousands of years. But few places have more history to them than Babylon.

0:54It was where Hammurabi ruled and promulgated laws in the center of more than one empire, a city where priests made extraordinarily detailed astronomical observations, and prosperity created one of the pre-modern world's most stunning examples of economic growth. Alexander the Great died in Babylon two centuries after his predecessor on the Persian throne, Cyrus the Great, conquered it. Babylon was a place where things happened, and we can't understand the broad course of history without giving it a central role. Today's guest has written a wonderful new book on Babylon.

1:24Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is chair in ancient history at Cardiff University, a specialist in the history of ancient Greece, Persia, and the wide world of antiquity, and the author of several books, the most recent of which is entitled Babylon, The Biography of a Metropolis. It's a book that I really enjoyed and I cannot wait to discuss. Professor Llewellyn-Jones, thank you so much for joining me today. Patrick, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. So I absolutely enjoyed the heck out of this book.

1:55And as I was telling you before we started, this is the book that I have been hoping that somebody would write on Babylon for a long time. So what drew your interest to the city? Why write this book? Well, that's kind of music to my ears, really, because in that case, it's kind of mission accomplished because that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted a kind of like a one-go place where anybody who wants to learn about the long durée of Babylon's history could go to and feel confident in the material that

2:28they're being given. Because, you know, there are lots of books on Babylon. Not all of them are as thorough as I hope the one that I've put together, because I really do try to see the long history of Babylon. And I suppose that's the draw to it, really. This is a city and a state that goes with it that just went on and on and on. And one of the things I write about in the book is we're not really dealing with a rise and

2:58fall scenario here. We're dealing with a rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall again. It just keeps coming back, you know, bigger and stronger every time. And that, I think, is something quite unique, really, for a world empire, to have a resurgence where it only gets bigger and better each time. So I was fascinated by that kind of endurance that it had, its longevity. And also, I suppose, beyond the actual history of Babylon, which in itself is fascinating, it's the depth in which

3:29Babylon has influenced later societies as well. We don't all have to be Near Eastern archaeologists and experts in cuneiform to kind of know that Babylon resonates. It's there with us, isn't it? You know, there are so many books and TV programs and films, you know, called Babylon, you know, Hollywood Babylon, all of this kind of stuff. What codes for us something about that is because of its use in the Bible, which is something I cover in the book as well. Yeah. So I'm really interested in this kind of the long duration of Babylon's history.

4:02From your perspective, why do people keep coming back there again and again? Why does it have such extraordinary durability as a political center? Well, you know, one thing we know about the ancient Near Eastern peoples generally of Mesopotamia is that when a city or a community fell, they tend to go back to that original site. And that, of course, has resulted in the archaeology of Mesopotamia having these really distinct tells. OK, so these kind of like mounds of earth, some of them many, many miles in circumference.

4:33And they are dotted all around the Mesopotamian landscape. So if you go to central Iraq today, you'll see these still. So that suggests there's a mindset that once the kind of community is established in a particular place, the people return to it, even though it might be damaged by war, by flood, by famine, by earthquake, whatever it might be, there's something about that locale which draws them back. So it seems to be in the Mesopotamian mindset, in their DNA already. I think so Babylon is part of that same picture, of course.

5:06But I think what pulls Babylon back each time is two things, really. I think, first of all, the first generation of Babylonians, you know, the first couple of hundred years, they became very proud of their city. And they believed, of course, their city was given to them by the gods, in particular the god Marduk, who kind of helped establish that city. So there's that kind of religious pull to the site. But also, I think there's the great economic pull. And that is the city's proximity to the river Euphrates.

5:37And just below Babylon, the Euphrates actually joins with the river Tigris as well. So this makes an abundance of alluvial mud, so really good farming land all the way around Babylonia. And also, of course, the great rivers of Mesopotamia, the Tigris and the Euphrates, were the kind of motorways of the ancient world as well. So for communication purposes, Babylon was perfectly situated. So I can understand, for those two reasons, why generation after generation of Babylonians wanted to remain in that particular

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7:13Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. I want to focus a little bit on the mindset. Because it seems to be something that separates Mesopotamia from so many other parts of the world. It's this persistent urban landscape, these cities that people keep coming back to over and over. And when you look at other parts of the world, look at the cities of the Indus Valley are abandoned after they're done. The major cities that early dynasties in China build as their capitals.

7:48It's a sequence of capitals rather than continuous occupation on a single site. And I'm wondering what it is about Mesopotamia that leads to such a durable, like, both mentally and physically, the urban environment is durable. Do you have a thought on that? Like, why is it? I can only reiterate, really, what I've just said. And I think that both the theology of the place, you know, as God-given lands, and also the locale is important. So if we think of the very earliest cities in Mesopotamia, so we're going back 4,000 BCE, okay, and

8:24we're going down further south in Iraq than Babylon. So we're into the cities of Ur and Uruk. And these, of course, are the great primal cities of the Near East. Let's not forget that in antiquity, they were actually coastal cities. But today, of course, alluvium mud and so forth has filled in over millennia. And so Ur and Uruk are, well, you know, inland cities now. But originally, they sat there right on the edge of the Persian Gulf, which, of course, you know, looked out

8:56to Bahrain and to all these great, wealthy, colonialist enterprises, and also to great trade routes, including to India, in fact, as well. So you can see why that was originally, you know, an area that they wanted to go to. And then I suppose as they began to tame the land around them, creating essentially a huge network of canals, which came off the great rivers, which emptied into the Persian Gulf. So they began to adapt the landscape to their way of life, which was urban.

9:28But you're right, from the very inception of Mesopotamian history, it's the city that counts. It's very, very strange. You know, most ancient societies are content to wander around. But these people want to be sedentary. They want to live in walled environments where there is a definite inside and outside. And all of their earliest mind processes, their earliest literature, deals with this dichotomy between the inside and the out. The inside civilized place and the outside wild place. So the epic of Gilgamesh, of course, is the very best example of that.

10:02You know, Gilgamesh is an urbane king. He lives in the city of Uruk. Outside of the city, of course, it is just wildness, something uncontrollable, untameable. And that seems to really resonate with the Mesopotamians throughout their whole history. And even in Babylon's history itself, when Babylon becomes sort of taken over, really, by a group of Amorites who were a nomadic people, in themselves, these Amorites become settled by the city itself. You know, they become urban, an urban society rather than retaining their nomadic backgrounds.

10:35So there is something deep, deep, deep in the Mesopotamian psyche, which prefers to live in an urban space. The sense of protection, I think, is enormous for that. Yeah, I'm just I'm so fascinated by this because there are tons of ancient societies have cities. But there's a difference between a society having cities and being a society of cities. Of cities, absolutely. And that just feels like such a profound difference that even in places where you have substantial portions of the population living in cities, it doesn't seem to be to form the basis of the mental landscape

11:12in quite the same way. No, not at all. And so what we have by, you know, by the third millennium, the turn of the third millennium, we have Mesopotamia essentially pockmarked with cities, hundreds and hundreds of cities, some of which, you know, we've never even excavated or we cannot find. You know, we know the names of them because they're preserved in cuneiform tablets, but we've never found them archaeologically. Each of these cities, we can call them city states, really, because they expand beyond the parameters very often of

11:45the city wall and incorporate, you know, several miles around the city itself. These were all warlike states. So they were forever aggressively attacking their neighbors. And with that aggression, of course, comes the need to demarcate your space even more and more and more. So there's a kind of like a chicken and an egg thing going on here. You know, what comes first, the city or warfare, warfare or the city? Well, by the time we get to Hammurabi, the Mesopotamian world is so embroiled in that process that you can't

12:20think of any other way of doing it. And what happens is essentially the stronger cities manage to take over satellite cities. So what you get in the case of Babylon, for instance, is not only Great Babylon itself, but because of its prowess in warfare, it takes over cities like Issin, Sippar, Nippur. And these all become kind of satellites of Babylon. You could almost say like, oh, I don't know, like vice regencies or something, you know, they follow Babylonian ways. They have their own identities and their own gods, but essentially

12:54they become Babylonianized. And the whole long history of Mesopotamia is essentially a power struggle for this dominance between all of these cities. I love that example so much. And I'm so glad you raised that because, you know, like when archaeologists talk about settlement hierarchies, you know, the idea that different settlements are serving a different function in the landscape. That's a case where you can literally see the lead settlement creating the settlement hierarchy underneath it, where it just maps perfectly onto the archaeological landscape. Most definitely onto the archaeological landscape, onto the literary and theological landscape, too.

13:31So, for instance, as Babylon was still in its infancy, its own chief god, Marduk, was practically unknown of in the rest of Mesopotamia. Now, this is a local deity for local people. But by the time we get to Hammurabi's reign, Marduk is being exported essentially into the cities of Nippur and Issin and Sippar as well. So, his cult is taking off. So, we can see the kind of colonization process, not only going on in bricks and mortar, but also in

14:02theological setups. And then, of course, there would have been the state system that would accompany that god as well. So, priesthoods, the bureaucracy, all of that, too. So, we can see the spread of civilization, not just in the shape of cities or how kings claim to be kings of different cities, but actually in the very heart and soul, the living, breathing center of the city as well. I'm Raza Jafri, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr.

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15:02You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran, early and at free on Audible. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating.

15:33All in one easy app, with plans now starting at $8.99, you'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. So, I want to shift gears just a little bit, because one of the things that I really enjoyed about this book, and I enjoy about your work in general, is you are taking a really broad geographic view.

16:04You're taking a really broad chronological view, and you're not letting yourself be bound by these different disciplinary boundaries, geographic boundaries. When we approach a place like Babylon from that perspective, how does that benefit us? How do we see Babylon differently? When we do the sort of widescreen approach to ancient history, okay, so think of it in, you know, those kind of mega terms, and we're not painting necessarily with the miniature brush here, but with a big, big paintbrush. Then we see how these, not just these cities, but these whole civilizations communicate with each other. One of the things I'm really fascinated by as an ancient historian, as a historian generally, are

16:40the meeting points of cultures, where things overlap, and where we can see change occurring. And I think we need that picture more and more and more in our age today. You know, the more tolerant we can be of recognizing these places, which are not black and white, but are very, very gray and murky, and have their own strength to them, the better we will be as people, I think. There was a really great Oxford-based ancient historian called Martin West, who had trained as a classicist, and he'd basically trained himself afterwards to become a Near Eastern scholar as well.

17:11And I've kind of tried to follow in his footsteps. He's been my great hero. And way, way back in the 80s, he wrote saying that if you think of culture as a kind of gas that emerges from a rock, you know, some fissure in the earth, where that gas comes out of, it's going to be thick and dense, and it's going to smell its most, of course. But imagine the world having lots and lots of these fissures all around it. So all these gases are coming out in different nodes. But over time, they spread. And while the gas may thin out, inevitably, at some point, it will meet with

17:46another gas, and it will merge, and it will form something new. And that's what culture is all about. And I think that's a tremendously exciting way to think about ancient history and history in general. But it's not all about sovereignty, the sovereignty of states at all. There's something much bigger going on in history. And very often, historians have been very reluctant to go down that path because we like things in black and white. You know, we like the history of Rome. We like the history of ancient Israel. But, of course, history doesn't work that way.

18:17It's all about these nodes of communication, these nodes of culture mixing. And I just find that so fascinating. And the possibilities are endless when you start looking at that. Well, just to continue with that kind of image for a moment, like, I absolutely love it. Because like a gas, when culture kind of billows up in these places, you can't be sure what breaths of wind are going to hit it and move it around. Where it's going to go, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, like, I was trying to explain this to someone in linguistic terms the other day, kind of how languages move around the world.

18:50I'm like, in what world would it ever make intuitive sense to you that people speak Afrikaans in South Africa? Like, unless you are kind of watching the winds and, you know, throwing some blades of grass up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, that's not the kind of process that's ever going to make any sense to you. And that's true of all culture, is the way that it moves around, the forces that impact it, the kind of swirls and patterns that it emerges into. Like, you can't be sure how that's going to work until you're actually in it investigating it.

19:24That's exactly it. And, you know, for the longest time, a kind of Eurocentric or Western approach to history has been, well, these winds are only blowing around us. You know, they're just creating a culture which is clearly within the West, but now, of course, in all directions. I think one of the really, actually, of the Indian Ocean and where the possibility of studying trade in the Indian Ocean could possibly take us. Because we're realizing, you know, for instance, Sassanian Persia has far more of a contact with places like India and even Southeast Asia than we ever thought before. And so we're opening up worlds within worlds, and that has to

20:00be a good thing, surely. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things about the new rise in studies of the Persian Empire, and Achaemenid Persia in particular, is it's like, oh, no, that's actually the center of the world. That's right. That's the place where stuff is happening. I mean, that's exactly it, yeah. Yeah, and you look at, like, it really shocked me because I was doing episodes on the Peloponnesian War. And as I was writing the final episode on it, I'm like, oh, this last stage of the conflict is best understood as a proxy war between different factions within the Persian Empire.

20:33And we think about this as being Athens and Sparta, and it's like, oh, no, they're just the guys that they were paying to do the proxy war. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And, of course, we all want to see history from where we live, that we all think of ourselves, even, you know, as our own personal individual selves, as the center of the universe. You know, it's kind of in us, isn't it? But, of course, it's not true. It's not a reality. You know, we have to see shifting lenses all of the time, and then it becomes

21:05a really interesting puzzle to put together. But that's history in general, too, is, like, you have to shift your perspective off yourself and understand, like, I am not the main character. My interests are not the main interests in all of human history. And Babylon is such a perfect encapsulation of that, that it sits at the eastern fringe of a particular worldview. And yet it is the center of so many more things than it sits at the fringe at. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. It's all to do with perception of center and periphery, isn't it?

21:36You know, that's exactly it. And I think what I like about Babylon's history as well is that over the centuries, and we're talking, you know, many, many centuries of Babylon's history, it goes from being a Mesopotamian player, a big player in the game of the city-states, to an international player in the rise of the Kassites and the wonderful Amarna letters that were discovered in Egypt, show the international exchange that Babylon is engaged in. No longer is it just a city for Mesopotamia, it's a world city. And then, of course, beyond that, when it becomes a node in the Persian Empire, it is an imperial city

22:10of unexpected and remarkable sophistication and breadth of the sweep of its culture as well. So that's something that appeals to me as well. You see Babylon playing two different audiences because the world is changing around the Babylonians. So I have a follow-up question on that. We have all of these periods of history happening in and around Babylon. Which one appeals to you most? Is there a period of time that you look at with Babylon and say, this is the one that I just, it just speaks to my soul? Well, interestingly, it is the Kassite period. So, you know, most people will never have heard of the Kassites, and

22:45that's okay by me. That's what the book is written for. The Kassites were actually, they were probably a kind of a people that came in from the Zagros Mountains to the east of Mesopotamia. So a kind of Iranian people, perhaps. They've been around, sweeping down into Mesopotamia for several centuries, even when Abirabi was there. But after the fall of old Babylonia to the Hittites, Babylon rises again after a hiatus. But this time, it's in the hands of these people called the Kassites. And I really think it's a fascinating period of its history.

23:16First of all, it's the longest period of Babylon's history, over 400 years of one dynasty ruling. I mean, that's quite an achievement in itself, you know, in this war-driven world that we're dealing with. What I really love about the Kassites is that they take the old Babylonian traditions, they like them very much, but they're not afraid to change them and to present them into this international world. And I guess what I really enjoy about this period of the Kassites is this international integration that goes on.

23:46So we can see the kings of Babylon now speaking as equals to the pharaohs of Egypt, to the great kings of the Hittite Empire, to the Assyrian kings as well. I love that sense of a kind of international consortium going on. And in fact, these great kings, they'd all call themselves brother. They were all intermarried. You know, they all married each other's daughters or sisters and so forth, you know. And from these letters, from the Amarna letters in particular, you get such a sense of individuality coming out.

24:17And that's really rare in ancient history, but especially in the ancient Near East. But certainly we get to know what Buraburiash II of Babylon was like. And he was a bit of a kind of boorish, you know, dot in the I's and cross in the T's kind of fella, you know, wants to get everything absolutely right. Really, really thin-skinned. I love all of that kind of stuff. So writing this book, actually, I became a huge fan of the Kassites. I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice, Michael Jackson.

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26:25Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. So that brings me to another question. You're talking about the Amarna letters, and one of the things that struck me as I was reading this book is just what an extraordinary richness of source material there is to write A History of Babylon. So when you're sitting down to write this, what are you looking at? What are you going to use? How does it vary over time? What are we thinking about? I wanted to give the broadest possible look at the kind of sources we've got,

26:58because you're right. I mean, they are so varied. Let's not forget cuneiform, you know, this wedge writing put into clay tablets originates about 4000 BCE in this area. And really, cuneiform is written until the second century CE, so we have got millennia worth of writings here. And while we do have stone inscriptions and so forth, like we have in Egypt or Rome, much of the material we have is actually written on tablets. And it tends to be far more personal than the kinds of texts that we have surviving from other parts

27:31of the ancient world. We're hard pushed to find personal letters, for instance, from Greece and Rome. They do survive, but only in handfuls. Where in Babylonia, we have thousands and thousands of personal correspondence. So we can really get into the lived experience of a man, a woman, a household, a family. And that's one of the things I love. Then, of course, we've also got all of their great scholastic work

Source Material

27:56as well. Many, many of these tablets that we've discovered have been discovered in school rooms, but sort of school bins, really. You know, we get a sense of scribes learning the art form and then afterwards sort of chucking their tablets sort of back into the refuse. And we found so many of them there. And so we get a really good sense of the education system and the rationale behind education for the Babylonians. And, of course, within those tablets as well, we get the great works of ancient Near Eastern literature being preserved,

28:28their wonderful mythologies, their great epics such as Gilgamesh. But also the other great contribution that the Babylonians made to world history, and that is mathematics and astrology as well. So it's such a diverse corpus of materials, everything from really, really bawdy jokes and wedding songs through to the highest level of theological speculation through to mathematical calculations, which make your brain numb. They're so incredibly, incredibly complex. Oh, I mean, so just a quick follow up there on letters, right? So when I was doing my doctoral dissertation, I wrote about letters.

29:00I read every single Latin language letter that was written between about 450 and 600 A.D. And I could do that for a doctoral dissertation because there were, you know, there were a couple thousand of them. You can't do that for Babylon. There are too many. There's thousands and thousands and thousands. Too many. Like, it's the most disorienting thing for someone who's trained in a different time and place to realize just what, like, just what a rich well of material you have and the kind of texture and granularity that you can understand that world with.

29:34Like, it's insane. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And more texts are being found every year. Plus, there are archives in museums and libraries that haven't yet been looked at, you know, so we don't know what's awaiting us yet. I mean, we have got such a rich corpus. The best you could do with anybody in one's lifetime, really, is just look at one city or even one corpus from one city, you know, Issin or Nippur, and simply stick with that. You know, you can't do the whole lot.

30:05I mean, I teach this kind of stuff to my students, and they love it, because it is the kind of material that gets you closest to ancient people themselves, you know. So let me give you, there are two examples I really love, and I put them in the book, and you may not remember them. So at Nippur, archaeologists found an evidence for a school, okay? And this school, as far as I'm concerned, what I think goes on in a Mesopotamian scribal school is that you've got all levels of students studying there at the same time.

30:39So you've got absolute beginners sitting on a bench next to somebody, you know, who's virtually finished his degree, as it were, in Sumerian. And we found one tablet, clay tablet. And don't forget, clay tablets are soft, okay? They're just made out of wet clay, and you imprint them on. And we've discovered that some schoolboy sunk his teeth into them. He takes a bite out of his tablet, and then he's got his handwriting next to it as well. It's really sloppy, terrible, terrible handwriting. Dental experts have looked at this tablet and assessed that the boy who bit

31:14into it was about eight or nine years old when he started his education. So that immediately opens up a world to us, okay? That we, you know, we now know that they started their education around about eight or nine. And just like kids today, have no concentration whatsoever. You mentioned the child biting into the tablet. That is 100% something I can see my son doing in a classroom. My son is... It's obviously, I'm sure I've done it myself. Yeah. Like, my son is nine. And I'm like, if you handed that boy a thing of wet clay, of

31:48course he's going to take a bite of it. There's not a doubt in my mind. Exactly. Of course it is. Of course, right? That's what you do. And the other one I really love, I'm out of so many, so many, is a little Sumerian proverb. So when you got to a sort of certain degree in your learning, after you'd sort of done your alphabet and your basic vocabulary, you were then allowed, when you were probably about 15 or 16, to start working on Sumerian proverbs, okay? So a lost language, like us learning Latin today.

32:22These are Acadian-speaking people who are writing in a lost language. And so they're doing all these proverbs. And my favorite one I came across was, Such a thing has happened that has never happened in the world before. When before now did the young woman fart in the lap of her husband? That's fantastic. When I got to the translation of that, all I had in my mind was that same kid who had bitten into the play, running home to tell his father, you'll never guess what I heard

32:54in school today. You know, it's just, ah, it's just precious. It's just precious. And all of those millennia just disappear, you know, with them. This is the kind of texture I just absolutely love to see in the past, because you know that this stuff existed everywhere we go, right? Exactly, exactly. You know, when you look at Pompeii and you look at the graffiti, right? And my favorite example of this is there's one of Caesar's marching songs, which is preserved in graffiti there, which basically says, you know, lock up your daughters, lock up your wives, Caesar's coming to town, that bald

33:31guy is going to get after it. And like, that's, but I love that because you get a sense for this whole world of human interaction and humor and just everyday life. That's exactly, you know, Thornton Wilder, the great American playwright in his wonderful play, Our Town, he refers to Babylon. His narrator says, you know, they were folks in Babylon, and that's all we know about them today is that they traded in corn and sometimes they bought some slaves. But just think about it. He says, every night, the dad would go home to his work, from his work

34:06to his home, and there would be smoke going up through the chimneys, and they would talk about what happened that day. And he draws this beautiful picture. I thought, okay, so we get it wrong about the chimneys. But, you know, it's his sensitivity, Thornton Wilder wanting to create a world, which he does so well in his play. And that's what the Babylonian material allows us to do, because it is so rich. Yeah, I mean, the best, great example of this, I think the only, maybe the only famous person from third

34:40millennium BC, Mesopotamia, the copper merchant, Aya Nasir. Like, there is almost no other ancient society in which it would be possible to know that a thieving, cheating copper merchant existed, aside from ancient Mesopotamia. We just, the evidence doesn't exist. There's no way. Absolutely. You know, one of the most fascinating corpus of materials we got actually comes from what we call middle Assyria, so about 1000 BCE, maybe a little bit before that, when there was a trade colony from, went from Assyria and set itself up in Anatolia, in central Turkey, at a place called Karum, or Kul Tepe.

35:15And we have the correspondence between the merchants, the Assyrian merchants living away from home in Turkey, and their wives and daughters who are making all the textiles that they're selling, you know? And this correspondence is just eye-opening, because half of it comes from women as well. And, you know, it's so difficult to get women's voices in antiquity. But here we have an archive full of it, and these women do not hold back. If they think that they're being cheated out of money, or they're working too hard, they let their husbands and

35:49sons know it. It is just a delight to read these things. My favorite one of those is the one where the son is going, like, hat in hand to beg his mother to send him money, because he's spent all of his money in Kul Tepe, or wherever he's at. And you're just like, this is every college student. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, my God. And then, of course, you know, in the Babylonian stuff, we get this incredible archive between, well, basically found at Mari, which, of course, is a city, nowadays, it would be in Syria.

36:24And there, we found a complete royal archive belonging to a king called Zimri Lim. And because we have this archive, he must be one of the best-known individuals in the ancient world. It's a shame that more people don't actually know of him, because he's a real political sort of maneuverer. You know, he's a player in all of its right senses. But we know of him because his personality comes over so strongly in these letters. And he also gives us a really brilliant pen portraits of Hammurabi.

36:54Hammurabi's letters don't survive, but descriptions of Hammurabi survive in Mari. And some of my favorite things, Hammurabi sometimes just goes really, really crazy wild. He obviously has a real temper problem. And the ambassador to Mari reports, you know, that Hammurabi was kind of blowing off steam again in the courtroom today because he was screaming about some diplomats had asked him to provide them with cloaks. And why hadn't Hammurabi give them cloaks? And Hammurabi says, who am I? Am I a tailor that I should keep supplying you with clothes?

37:26I set the rules here. Wonderful, wonderful, lively things. Isn't Zimri Lim the king who has like a really disappointing son that he's mad at? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, you also have from Zimri Lim this incredible set of correspondences from his women, his main wife, and then his several wives and concubines and daughters as well. And we get from those documents, oh, something really, really kind of very intimate and heartbreaking sometimes. There's one letter that his wife writes to another woman in the harem and she says, look, the king is

37:59due back soon. We need to tell him that his little daughter has died. But how can we do this? We've got to tell him so carefully. And we shouldn't sort of throw this at him before he gets home. And this needs to be done in person. And it's those kind of touches, you know, those human touches that are just so rare in the ancient world. But what we have in abundance in Mesopotamia. I mean, it's just extraordinary. And one of the things that I truly love about this book and that makes

38:31it a fantastic accomplishment is that you weave that into each and every period of the city's history. We get a sense. I really try to. We get a sense not just for kind of the grand arc of Babylon's history, but also what was happening to the people who lived there, what they were thinking and feeling, what they were going through. And that is just a wonderful thing to do in a book like this. It really appealed to me. So I can't thank you enough. That's really kind of you. One of the things I really liked researching, actually, was just on really practical things

39:08like garbage and refuse in a city like Babylon, which had no rhyme or reason to the layout of the streets. It was just higgledy-piggledy, you know, really crazy. And of course, there's no garbage collection. So what happens when the ashes are thrown out of a house? And where do people, you know, defecate? And what happens to urine? Well, mainly, it sort of builds up in the streets. And so the stench must have been overwhelming. And this is where, you know, archaeology becomes important because looking at

39:38archaeological reports, I could see that the presence of. Pigs and dogs in Babylon eating the filth. So kind of doing the garbage collecting. It was all of those kind of details that I really loved working on for this book because it does flesh out life, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, one of the most extraordinary things you can do in communicating the past is making people feel like they're there and they could be those people. And in this book, you really feel like you're stepping into

40:08Babylon and you feel like you could be those people. So, I mean, if you could have listeners walk away with one new idea about Babylon, one thing to hold in their heads about the city and why it matters, what would that be? Gosh, that's a really hard one. I would just be happy to know that people have walked away realizing the depth and breadth of Babylon's civilization because it's not a well-known place. In spite of the fact that we know the name and we all think we know a little bit about

40:40it, it doesn't have that mass appeal of Rome, maybe even of Alexandria. So just to be able to, for people to walk away and say, gosh, I never knew that before and now I do. That's good enough for me because if it opens up the world of the ancient Near East, which is so rich and encourages them to pick up the next book on the Near East, then I'll be really, really happy. If a book can do that, this book does. So again, the book is Babylon, the Biography of a Metropolis.

41:13Go and pre-order it right now. It's a lovely book. You will not regret it. Professor Llewellyn-Jones, thank you so much for joining me. This was just absolutely lovely. You're so welcome, Patrick. Anytime. I'd be really happy to come back anytime. All right. Thank you again. And I look forward to doing it. You've been listening to Tides of History, an Audible original. The show is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound engineered by Sergio Enriquez. Produced by Morgan Jaffe. The executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lower Beckman. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Naven. The head of Audible Originals, North America, is Marshall Louis. The chief content officer is Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recorded. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Audible Originals, this has been Tides of History.