Rise of the City: How the great god Marduk built the city of Babylon

[Music] [Applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen i'm julian singers for those who don't know me I'm the Williams director here at the pen Museum and first of all thank you all very much for coming out on this incredibly frigid evening we really appreciate it tonight it's my distinct pleasure to introduce a valued colleague and friend Steve tinny who has many hats here at the pen Museum he's the deputy director of the museum he's the director of the Center for the analysis of archaeological materials and the associate curator in charge of the babylonians section he's also the clerk research associate professor of a Seri ology in the Near Eastern languages and civilizations department and the director of the Pennsylvania Cimmeria dictionary project so Steve is recognized not only in the museum but all the way across campus he received his bachelor's degree in a serie ology from Cambridge University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in addition to the Cimmerian dictionary project which he first joined as a postdoctoral research assistant over 20 years ago his research interests include developing and publishing Sumerian texts and analyzing and presenting the Sumerian language through both the Sumerian dictionary project and the cuneiform digital initiative based at UCLA so after the lecture there will be time for a question and answer period and I hope you'll mark in your calendars Wednesday February the 7th for the next in our great lecture series focusing on India's city of victory but for now speaking this evening on when the high heavens were yet unnamed how the Greek god Marduk built the city of Babylon please join me in welcoming dr. Steve Kenny thank you so much for coming it's a real pleasure to be on the other side of the fence this afternoon or this evening I guess to talk to you about one of the cities that is featured even if not in a leading role in the forthcoming Middle East galleries which are going to open next April now this is another talk in essentially a series I've been doing in these greats work yeah those of you who were here last time last year may remember this slide which I spent a lot of time finishing my talk with and which depicts an zoo and Zoo is the winged lion headed eagle I don't know if we need less light if it's just somebody amount of light by the way you miss the camera guys who decide being pursued by the Gordon otter and this isn't an example of a combat myth which goes back thousands of years and which continues well hundreds of years maybe as much of us as a thousand years after this particular image and what I've never talked to you today is a myth called a numeral eesh in the original language we'll get to them in a moment which is the myth about how Marduk becomes the warrior God and destroys his own monster a very different monster and builds the city of Babylon and in part a numeral ish is a reworking of the Lenora and Anzu myth so let's backtrack just slightly and make sure we know where we are and when we are we are working in ancient Iraq here what you're looking at all up and down here is the area called Mesopotamia between the two rivers between the Tigris and the Euphrates and we are going to be focusing mostly on the south today but in fact this collection of myths what is founded in the South also gets reused in the north with that inertia and nanofy so we may come to that a little later on depending on how time goes I'm going to move quite a bit geographically so I want you to try to remember at least three important cities one down here like ash this is actually a trick largish is kind of a Twin Cities large ash gear suit and we're actually gonna focus slightly more on gear soo but they're really a cultural continuum so that's the first thing we're gonna look at then we're going to look at some material from nip or up here nipple was a site that was excavated by Penn it's actually the site that essentially gave birth to the museum one of our themes and ideas creation so that's highly relevant and then we're gonna look at Babylon up here so Babylon nippur Lagash gonna start with a very very early object indeed I realized this is it difficult to see on the stone this is a function of the color image on the mottled stone I'm gonna show you a line drawing in just a moment okay this dates from maybe as early as 2,700 2,800 BCE very very early document very enigmatic document we don't really know who this figure is you can just make out even in this image there's a figure standing on the base line here with a skirt up there and the headdress appear as feathers and it's called in French laughs Eagle plume the figure with feathers and you can just about see there's writing on the other side this writing all over the place I'm going to talk about why that's so interested in a moment but first I want to start with this sign here this outline here and this drill hole which is the sign for mace schita in Sumerian and one of the things that gonna follow over the centuries or the millennia is the mace that the God uses to kill monsters that the King uses to kill his enemies it's part of it in an ideological continuum okay so let's look at the line drawing little clearer right so now you can see that the inscription covers both sides as I said it's very difficult to understand we haven't figured it all out but we think this is the earliest example of a literary text which is a hymn to the God Ning gear sue the city god of gear sue I mean gear suus appears as the son of Enlil the warrior son of Enlil he's a form of a god called min or tur the same denotes a as an zu they're closely related so it makes sense that he has a mace and I'm gonna try to convince you several times this evening that we can actually read some of this you may not believe me so up here this sign Sheeta beside it these three circles this is the core sign the mountain sign red Ginn in this context and this here is a pair of beads joined by a string Reds are cheetahs eigen a lapis lazuli mace is what is being associated here with here over here nom n AG this n you'll see again is a word for Lord one of the early words for ruler now n is rulership kingship if you like and a keys to do so somehow this is connected with the exercise of kingship and you'll see why this is so interesting as I develop this theme over the course of time and down here ninh gear su ding here this star means book star and god we protested dinger what it means God and you'll hear me say it several times this evening now there's a little bit of a conundrum in this case because we're not quite sure which order to read the signs in okay it's not as bad as it seems trust me I know what I'm doing well Billy we're pretty certain NIM gear Suh is in the right order nin gear suit the question is whether the dinger belongs before Ning gear soo as the determinative as we call it God names are almost always written with the star sign that thingy assigned before them and whether in this case is actually part of a sentence and it seems to make sense if you take it as part of the sentence because the next line says you sue bingi gear soo and then this sign this bar here is meth which means either I am or you are in this case almost certain you are so this is probably a couple lines from the same seasoning you see you are the god of gear soo and somehow appear you exercised kingship connected with this lapis lazuli mace I'm not going any further with that and we're back very very early I'm not gonna push it just to mention over here we have some drill holes on the sign for field this is some how to do with land transfer over here and then it segues into this text about and in gears through which is very interesting so that inscription was from the sign of lagash gear soo as is this this is what remains or at least what can be reconstructed of a steely from a few hundred years later let's say 24 50 2500 BC something like that and it's a steely erected by a king called a Anathem as part of his victory over a collection of enemy cities which involved water rights essentially okay it's heavily inscribed there's a line drawing of the reconstruction just to give you an idea gonna give you some interesting in dual pieces you can see it's inscribed all over here the inscription is quite long it has to do with his enemies repeatedly taking an oath before the gods that they won't reach the contract of obeying like ashes right to water anymore up here you can see what these are right it's called the steely of the vultures these are the vultures and he has an unfortunate victim you can see his ribcage has already been exposed this is an extraordinary piece is one of our earliest pieces of complex iconography one of our earliest pieces of complex narrative it really follows through from the Figaro plume in the sense that it develops some of these themes the god this is almost certainly the gardening gear soo who was mentioned in the earlier piece you can see he's holding an zoo those of you with very good memories may remember that I showed this slide when I talked about an zoo last year and in his right hand what's he carrying he's carrying a mace right absolutely consistent and in his net he's got a nice bag full of enemies which makes an awesome very happy yeah and here is a Anathem slightly bigger than the rest of his army the Phalanx if that's looking familiar to you it's probably because you're channeling the standard of or on the war side there are soldiers depicted in a very similar way carrying their shields and Spears and with their their little type helmets on here one of which you'll be able to see effectively in the Middle East calories in one of the displays and an atom leading the pack you can see he's standing on a lower level than them because they're standing on bodies of enemies right and he's already taller than him as well the text actually tells us with you translate the measurements that A&R team was 9 feet 2 inches tall you know the Cimmerian for King in other words in severe for King is Liu gal big man so he was very literally a big man and another of the interesting things about this document is that you can see a little bit in it where these Kings look for their political authority and this is a theme that is gonna follow us or which we're gonna follow down through anime ilish because it gives us the text I am assumes full name it's a bit of a mouthful let's see if I get it right it's a Yana in Namur eagle akka captain which means the one who is worthy of the a anna of in anna the goddess of the ebb gal the great oval in Anna is an or rock deity one of the old deities Ulrich has an and in Anna and this name really makes the like a shrew this early like ash ruler look to ward Brook in either the appropriation of power or the legitimation of power that changes in the middle of the third millennium BCE this is an object which will be in the Middle East galleries it's actually a tiny object this is a centimeter scale down here okay so something about seven centimeters wide I'm going to show you a drawing don't worry um you can see it's in two registers one has a collection of God's enjoying life in the heavens and the other has I think a returning warrior God now this is from the city of nipper nipper is special among Mesopotamian cities because it never has a king okay we've had two words for rule already N and Lu Gow they don't have that in there for but the chief god of the poor Enlil who is probably depicted here I think this guy here is in a sense the touchstone for the legitimacy of your rule if you're from any town in southern Sumer and you want to claim to rule the whole of Sumer you have to provisionally Anil temple and Enlil has to say yes you're the king of the land so there's a legitimacy aspect where the kings start to look towards nippur and look towards the Newport Pantheon okay so we don't know who all of these people are this is a little bit mysterious in particular I'm not quite sure who this pair of gods is I'd be much happier if this one here were female but Holly assures me it's not so we're going to gloss over that sorry seem we don't understand everything this is from about probably 2300 by the way very very roughly what we have down here is a very different scene you can see there's a hybrid being here kind of an ostrich person and here and this character whose center stage has two pairs of horns marking it as a divinity at bay at E and what's it carrying in its hand a mace and over his shoulder he seems to have slung some kind of a massive monstrous head maybe in a net I'm not quite sure and I'm fairly or that this is a representation of Nanoha returning from some kind of a battle or monstrous defeat and ánotá does this a lot we're going to talk about this for a few minutes one of the nice scenes that occurs in the Cimmerian livery text called which we call the return of the north to nippur describes a nurse's chariot and it says on his shining chariot which inspires terrible or in order hung his captured wild bulls on the axle and hung his captured cows on the cross piece of the yoke he hung the six headed wild Ram on the dust guard he hummed the warrior dragon on the seat he hummed the magg Elam boat on the something broken he hung the bison on the beam he hung the mermaid on the footboard so you seen another has a reputation for defeating hybrid creatures and making them his essentially his top his trophies and I'm fairly sure that this head is a trophy of Nanoha who's carrying the mace so we've gone from 2,700 to 2,500 to 2,300 very roughly okay going down the centuries we're gonna skip physically materially to the mid 18th century BCE now all of the texts that come from this period from the site of nerf war like this one the Sumerian tablet may go back to earlier prototypes we know some of them do a handful of them we can show it some of them probably were composed in the 19th 18th century BCE we can't prove this in all cases but there's certainly some kind of a continuum and one of the strange things in the distribution of the data that we have to face we'll have to work with is there's very little literature between 2100 and about mid 1700s it's really kind of a blank spot in the data we have Gudea of lagash big corpus from good era of lagash who also mentioned in gear so and all that stuff and then we have a big sort of hiatus we have lots of kings in the intervening periods who are mentioned in the texts so all the kings of or Namah should be a must in EB sin-shoo scene they're all mentioned in textured before later tablets hundreds of years later okay so we know very well what B ideology was that Nippur tablets were portraying and that is that all those kings abour and all the ones that follow them in the 19th 19th century looked towards nip or there are texts about how Kings are crowned in n lilz temple about how happy ending is to make them rulers when the or three dynasty Falls around 2000 BCE there's a rule of a city called Eason who writes to the king of war and says you know that grain that I'm supposed to be getting to you up the canal well it's really stuck here but Enlil told me that I was supposed to control the area around Eason and if you're okay with that I can definitely get that grain to you okay so one of these kings are playing the same game and it's all Enlil and they'll end though okay so this is a summary literary text in our collection it's one fragment of a composition which is called in Sumerian by its first word lugal a the king we call it the new notice exploits and other titles appear although it's not very clear again in an attempt to convince you that this is meaningful writing you can just see this horizontal and this vertical and this diagonal and this diagonal and that sign is the star sign which is red ding here right it's the first sign it introduces the god thing and after that there's a triangle kind of thing in a box that's nin and then there's the nota and it says do mu and then there's the end sign again a later version of it little dinghy er up there dingy ER n Lilla in order to son of M long it's a text button in order and it's a very interesting text for a numeral ish because it's a relatively long Sumerian text something over 700 lines and it starts with appraising an orator and then it elaborates a threat which is a revolt by a demon called our saguenay Abbess the mountains who gathers an army of stones and in order defeats the army of stones and then organizes the cosmos afterwards he dams up the mountains to provide constant water supply to provide metered water supply and there's lots of other things decides all the fates for the stones ok and then it so this this sort of prefigures a little bit the structure of a new metal eesh and when you put that together with the Anzu myth which I'm going to talk about much less today which again is is in the neuter versus of threat you see a pattern emerging this is a combat mythology yeah so roundabout when they were still writing this to the composition in nippur Hammurabi of Babylon rises and you all know this monument we have a wonderful cast of it which will actually be at the doorway to the Middle East galleries it'll be kind of your wayfinding and many of you will know what's on it already you'll know that this is the God shamash at the top here the Sun God God of justice and this is Hammurabi meeting him you can see more clearly here he's making this gesture of greeting in Cimmerian this is called kiri Shu now curious knows Shu is hand and now means to put so you put your hand up to your nose as a sign of greeting that's Jesse's making here and shamash is giving him justice effectively and most of this is the famous law code which you all know the Lex talionis I for an eye tooth for tooth right you may be less familiar with the fact there is a lengthy prologue and epilogue in which Hammurabi explains why he's doing this and who told him to do this and curses anybody who moves the monument and lists a great number of gods and it's interesting because there's a transitional quality to this in terms of the magic centrism he's very careful to say the endless great God he's also very careful to say that murder told him to write the steely very very passage I am Hammurabi he says at the beginning of the epilogue I have not been careless or negligent toward humankind entrusted to my care by the god Enlil and with whose shepherding the god Marduk charged me there's a little local sort of lone local double play there okay there is a another break in our corpus we have a very very uneven corpus in Mesopotamian literature so between the end of the old babylonian period let's say 1650 95 bc conventional dates the sack of babylon we have relatively little until the first millenium six seven hundred eight 800 bc okay nevertheless we think that the next text i'm going to talk about in umeå leash probably came into being with the resurgence of modern in the latter part of the second millennium the years thirteen twelve eleven hundred when Maddock definitely becomes more important when we have enough text to know that he's an in there is a significant God and when they're starting to write a little corpus of text was actually fascinating I'm not gonna spend too much time on here but it's basically a corpus of text about God napping and the deal is that when Babylon gets sacked in 1595 Marduk statue is taken away but it gets brought back again eventually and then they get sacked again and it gets brought back again eventually and there's this whole ideology in Babylon itself about whether Marduk was angry with the city or whether the the the heathen enemies did this of their own accord is very interesting the question of agency we don't have any money to tell us from this period but what we have is plenty of a numeral each from about 800 BC onwards we just assume it was mostly written about 300 years before 400 years before so this is a beautiful example was a beautiful example still is a beautiful example of a scholars tablet which writes part of anime ilish one of the interesting things about this literature is we have lots and lots and lots of fragments we don't have very many full tablets and we have to piece together the continuous text by working with individual fragments where they overlap and making sense of them that way again to try to convince you that it is writing here is Anna - and here is Murdoch written this - it looks like verticals there there actually horizontals and then this vertical that's the late form of the dinghy a sign that star sign that we learn yet it gets simplified and then here this corner and these two corners here that's M R and then here these two edges and the slightly angled vertical is bhutesu M are you - calf of you - calf of the sun-god is how they write the name mark it's a little scholarly play on writings on words amar means care for some Mar is one is the word standard word for Sun in Akkadian and the oak took part due to AK is of who - in Sumerian so amar - Murdoch is a very clever little thing and they pale in a numeral each I'm not going to point out this passage when we come to have another agenda here but they say when they first recognize Martin they say marry you to marry you to son of you to son of Lucy he's the son he's the son s oh and uses the S UN emerge from both English and in Acadian happily so I'd like to tell a story in these myths talks and now it's time to tell a story and the story is a numerically SH and here's the very beginning of it a new ma a is slightly broken there's leash there's another leaf here it's just missing that angled sign laughs now boo boo when above the heavens were not named first light of the composition okay and I'm gonna do this by having very short passage on the screen and I'm going to talk a little bit about the progress of the tale so it's not too much reading for you and not too boring I hope now I had a rude awakening about 15 years ago when I told somebody that I knew Meili she was my favorite myth in Mesopotamian culture and fumika raha she replied boring thing you like that I like it I'm unapologetic so when above the heavens were unnamed and below the earth was not called by name there was absolute the first in order their begetter and creator Tiamat who gave birth of them all they mingled their waters together when Meadows the still unformed reedbeds nowhere to be found so we are starting with watery principles OPSEU is the fresh water that comes from now from the sky of the underground and Tiamat is actually a form of the word in Akkadian proceed Tom - so it's the freshwater and the saltwater mingling together okay and the first things that form in this watery matrix are called the lac mu and Blacka mu which Yakima interpreted as the silts and then anshar and kishar so an means heaven he means earth char means everything so it's kind of the total earth and the total sky are created and they give birth to our new who's the first theity in this sequence who really has sort of currency on sort of quotidian worship at the time these texts are being written because our new is an important God the sky God one of the major gods of Oracle haiya his son al is also called Anki and Cimmerian ka is the god of magic he's the next born and then a bunch of descendant generations are born without much elaboration they're in the issue with them is that they're too successful they're too rowdy they start disturbing the sleep of apps ooh and TR man they're just too boisterous too young we all I mean I understand I'm of an age where I'm starting to understand how they feel let's just say right but the response is a little extreme because absolute decides that he's going to kill these generations of God for being so rowdy and when teamö gets wind of this she's outraged at sue and his advisor Moo Moo make a whole plan to kill these junior gods but air intervenes air in many many texts throughout the corpus is the God who prostrates the bad plans of the other gods when the gods decide to create a flood and wipe out humanity its heir who comes up with a plan to save humanity for example so here he's acting exactly in character haiya has magic uses a magic his tech says he put up suits a slumber as he poured out sleep he split up Sioux sinews ripped off his crown carried away his aura and put him on himself he bound out Sioux and killed him he said his dwelling upon a pursuit so a couple of very interesting things there firstly sue is the first king he has a crown the aura and secondly the beginning of this binding of the victory over a God and that the topography of the later successive dynasties and generations haiya makes his throne on top of em soon in the chamber of the destinies the rule of the archetypes in OPSEU was Marduk born anew rendered him perfect his divinity was remarkable incapable of being grasped with the mind hard even to look on for were his ears for his eyes flames shot forth as he moved his lips so this is the air why because the air to air but yama has not really gone away and forgotten everything that happens Shyama is resentful that her spouse was slaughtered and she starts to repel she starts to get rebellious ideas and she's egged on by her her hangers on and they start to create an otherworldly armored army sorry mother who bore creation goddess for not very sure much about her created the hydra the dragon the hairy hero the great demon the savage dog and the scorpion man among the gods her sons whom she constituted her host Tiamat exalted kingu and magnified him among them she gave him the tablet of destinies and fashioned it to his breast after kingu was elevated in her and had acquired the power of our new ship he decreed the destinies for the gods trh sons so on this screen is not the tablet of destinies but it is a tablet in the form of an amulet and probably that's how we have to imagine the tablet of destinies you may remember the tablet of destinies from Anzu whatever the destinies is in endles possession in Anzu when Enlil bathes and while he's naked and who carries it away the table of the destinies is the key to domination of the universe if you have that your word is law in the universe so somehow the text doesn't say it you think this through AB sues the first king perhaps ooh must somehow have had the tablet of destinies when he'd get killed Tiamo must have somehow kept it and now she's elevating one of her subordinates to the rank of ruler of the universe illicitly really she doesn't have the authority to do it the textbook implies that here and explicitly takes it says it later on so now we're set up but the combat myth part we've had the creation of the gods part and now we've got the threat part chiama and her army he hears of Tiamat plottings and and she tells him the whole story and anshar tells air to go and subdue teamö ASX off to do it but stops in his tracks and besides that Shyama is too strong for him too powerful so he comes back and admits defeat to enshou okay and she asks our new is warrior son to go deal with Yama oh that's the same thing gets within eyeshot of Tiamat and says you know what I'm not doing right and if you think back again same structure in the end zoom in a couple of God's who are asked to do this task and they refused the whole thing is a setup right has got the answer and the answer is Marduk a SS to Murdock go my son conversant with all knowledge subdue T arm up with your purse pure spell and Marduk always one step ahead replies if I should bind Tiamat and preserve you convene an assembly and proclaim from me an exalted destiny let me with my utterance decree destinies instead of you in other words Murdock sees an opportunity to become supreme ruler of the universe here and that is his price for doing battle with Shyama and her army so I tried hard to find a really good picture of the lapis lazuli seal but I couldn't find one this is a very nice line drawing this is my dog as you can see in this picture he doesn't seem to have four eyes but it nevertheless is certainly him from the inscription if this is a cafe period object so about thirteen fourteen hundred BCE from this period when we think in him a leash was probably at least the idea of a numeral yishun the first verses of him were written and he's standing or standing by or standing on this dragon figure which is called a Mu Shu Shu in Akkadian and mush mush is Sumerian mush means a snake or a kind of reptile and hush means fierce so people often translate mush mush you as dragon which is not a terrible translation so by now we've gone through a new malicious constructive in in the first millennium as a 7 tablet series we've gone through the first couple of tablets and in tablet latter part of tablet 2 and tablet three most of what happens is repetition and I'm gonna spare you that it's a feature of much sort of lengthy narrative poetry in and especially in Akkadian language where for example when air comes to tell and char about Tiamat they repeat 20 or 30 lines about Tiamat's army being prepared and this happens repeatedly so a large part of this early structure of the composition is that taken up by this repetition so near the end of tablet 3 they finally get round to decree in Murdoch's faith all the great gods who decree destinies gathered as they went they conferred as they sat at table they ate grain they drank ale they strained the sweet liquor through their straws as they drank beer and felt good they became quite carefree their mood was Mary and they decreed that they Creed the faith for Marduk their adventure this is standard operating procedure among the gods in Mesopotamia when you have important decisions to make you get together a big assembly you drink enough liquor that you don't really care what you're doing anymore and then you make the big decisions go figure so tablet 4 is when things really starts to happen the middle of the composition you see this in other texts as well they really they're very cleverly architected to focus on the middle of the composition so modoch took his seat before his father's to receive kingship and they said mark you are the most honored among the great gods your destiny is unequaled your command is like our newest serious guy God you are Marduk our adventure our Avenger we have given you kingship over the sum of the whole universe and they set up a demonstration this is slight anachronism Marek hasn't created the heavens yet you can do that later but they create what we think is a constellation than with to Omashu and they say Samara speaker make it disappear a mother speaks and the constellation disappears and they say do that again make it come back might expects and the constellation comes back so he's got so much power invested in him by the gods and by his magic and by his genealogical relationship to air that he can create and destroy by the power of spoken word this is part of a whole collection of beliefs that go together with magic and incantations and rituals and how you can change the world by reciting certain words right sort of like I do in marriage ceremonies well I'm I'm serious this is performative magic so the when they saw it he did this they rejoiced and they added to him a mace a throne and a rod they gave him an irresistible weapon that overwhelms a throw they said go catch me I'm at stroke and let the winds bear up her blood to give the news so moderate prepares his battle array he yolks for horses to his chariot destroyer merciless lay and fleet I'm almost going to resist reference to seasonal comparisons he set his face award the raging Tiamat in his lips he held a spell more magic the guys writing this text the guys learning this for guys who are working with it in the rituals which would come to and near the end of the talk are themselves the magicians the airship who's this is deeply meaningful to them all this he grasped the planet to counterpoise in his hand and at first his resolve wavers like the other gods before him but he is able to recompose himself he lifts up the storm flood and says to Tiamat why are you so aggressive and arrogant Kingu you have named to be your spouse and you have improperly appointed him to the role of our new ship that is you have made King do have the power of arm and you had no right to do so with the tablet Destiny's teamö was reciting an incantation kept reciting her spell but Belle spread out his net and him meshed her he let loose the evil wind the rearguard in her face Tiamat opened her mouth to saw it she let the evil in so that she could not close her lips the fierce winds rage down her belly her in words were distended and she opened her mouth wide he left lion arrow pierced her belly he tore open her entrails and slit her in words he bound her and extinguished her life he threw down her corpse and stood on it and murder captures the hybrids as well the eleven creatures who were laden with fearfulness the throng of Devils who went as grooms at her right hand he put ropes upon them and bound their arms now kingu who had risen to power among them he bound and reckoned with the dead gods he took from him the tablet of destinies which was not properly King goos sealed it with a seal and fastened it to his own breast then he returned to Tiamat whom he had bound and bel placed on his feet on the lower parts achamma and with his merciless mace smash her skull he severed her arteries and let the Northwind bear up her blood to give the news good stuff isn't it so after defeating the monster remember the trajectory creation threat defeat organization mardik starts to organize the cosmos what exhaustion called bail here by the way bail rested surveying the corpse in order to divide the lump by a clever scheme he split her into like a dried fish one half of her he set up and stretched out that's the heavens by now we're in Table five Murdoch organizes the stars in the skies and the constellations then he creates the moon god nana quite interesting and then from the body of Tiamat from her two eyes he let the Euphrates and Tigris flow which is very nice because in Akkadian as in whereas in Semitic languages generally the word for I Inu is also the word of a spring little hung there so her eyes are the springs the rivers flow from like I am and all the gods are wrapped with awe and appreciation they bow down and they say behold the king one of those performative utterances like I do murder clothed himself in his lordly aura took up his mace and held it in his right hand and then the crowning glorious this creation above the apse ooh I will build a house to be my luxurious abode within if I will establish its shrine I will found my chamber and establish my kingship when you come up from the absolute to make a decision this would be your resting place before the assembly when you descend from heaven to make a decision this would be a resting place before the assembly I shall call its name Babylon the homes of the great gods one etem a lot at the monetization of Babylon Bobbili is the gate of the gods so what's nice about this is it's a very tidy very explicit founding fiction you can think if you like of the Aeneid and rome right Romulus and Remus it's a text about how a city was founded and there's one god that I haven't mentioned in the whole of this first five tablets and that's n-no this all happens in complete ignorance or disrespect to if you like the entire Newport Pantheon this is completely new mythology ization of old things in the service of creating a mythology for a city which wants to be on its own feet and not reliant on the old gods as if they haven't appropriated enough mythology so far there's more there are various stories of the creation of humanity both in Akkadian and Sumerian but we don't care about those because Marduk has to do it I will bring together blood to form bone he says and will bring into being Lulu whose name should be man on him the toilet the gods will be laid that they may rest I will skillfully alter the organization of the gods that they are honor this one they should be divided into two and they are so happy these gods are so happy these girls they say what paper can we do for you let us make a shrine of great renown and Murdock says okay build Babylon the Anunnaki wielded the pick for one year they made the needed bricks go ahead of myself there there we go when the second year arrived they raised the peak of a sigil a replica of the abbe su and this is one of very very many imaginations of Babylon this one's based fairly well on the archaeology of the site here's a ziggurat the ATM and an key and the acai gill is Marduk's temple is all part of the same complex and here is the processional way in Babylon and the Ishtar Gate which we'll come to in a second Bell seated the gods his fathers at the banquet and the lofty shrine which they had built for his dwelling saying this is Babylon your fixed dwelling take your pleasure here sit down enjoy the great gods sat down beer mugs were set out as usual and they sat at the banquet so at this point in the text which is latter part of tablet six and tablet seven there's a very very long account of the fifty names of Marduk which is technical though interesting I'm not gonna dwell too much on it but I will explain it a little quote a little they say he is the god of each and every one of us come let us call the 50 names 50 is important because 50 is in lilz number when you have numbers for God's and the listing year 50 and in fact that the 50 house the a Minu is the name of Ning Gish's temptin Lagash these are old Cypress his first name is marek for an example of another line they call him Lou gal de Morang Kia which means the king of the gods of heaven on earth and they say we have exalted his command above data to the gods his fathers he is the lord of all the gods of heaven underworld the king of whose injunctions the gods in upper and lower regions shudder and then eventually for the first time in the entire composition at name 50 since he created the heavens and fashioned the earth and lil the father called him by his own name who or what of the land's Lugar for Cora and Sumerian and then not wanting to be left out so Marg isn't big enough and important and supreme enough we're not at monotheism here but were at a kind of intense focus on a single deity that sometimes people call henotheism that is to focus on one God above others aya heard the names which all the a Giggy the other gods called and his Experian no doubt fueled by the beer and he says why he his name was extolled by his father's let him like me be called heir so Maddux 50 first name is actually a.m. let him control a SS the sum total of all my rites and rituals so murder is basically taken over everything and everyone okay a few more minutes on the text and then I'm going to talk about a ritual in which the text is used before we finish up the last few lines of the text and I put this slide up here because I wanted to give the last word in a sense to Wilford Lambert who was one of the very greatest of a serial gist ever to live and who worked for decades on a numeral ish and other creation myths they were finally published in part posthumously he submitted the manager before he died and this is his hand copy at the very end of the composition you can see it's not perfectly preserved instruction which a leading figure repeated before him that is martyred he wrote it down and stored it so that generations to come might hear it the destiny of Marduk whom the gods exalted wherever water is drunk let them invoke his name here now is the song of Marduk who defeated Tiamat and assumed kingship and here at the very end we have ilku cirucci assumed kingship it's very very interesting the word order there because it's the the wrong word order in Akkadian nouns usually precede the verbs it should be Shahrukh TL ku they make the last word of the text kingship very deliberately because of the association with kingship through the whole composition and in fact I don't think is too much of a stretch if you think about Gilgamesh where the end of tablet 11 points back to the beginning of tablet 1 so at the end of tablet 11 you're up on the walls and the very last line of the 11 tablet version of Gilgamesh is the line before in the introduction where it says open the tablet box and read the story of Gilgamesh so that's a very conscious frame in Gilgamesh I don't think it's too much of a stretch to read this reversed in the word order as a contribution to another kind of frame and if you think about the first half of the first line when on high and the last half of the last line he took kingship really you've got an epigrammatic version of the whole text right now the Ishtar Gate many of you know this object some of you will have seen it in Berlin it's a fantastic piece many use it as a hook just talk very briefly about one of the ways in which in nuuma ilish was used and numerate leash is a fantastic texture because it has a bunch of different lives I once accidentally taught an entire semester and didn't talk about anything else it was a class about Babylon in my defense one of the lives it led is that we have preserved large parts of a New Year's ritual very appropriate right now right and in this New Year's ritual there are multiple days of celebration there's lots and lots of washing and ritual cleansing lots of offerings made across a period of days they sing prayers tomorrow can sing prayers to his spouse the king actually is involved in this ritual he goes across the river to pour sipper and takes Nabu Martok's son and brings him to participate in the ritual because the girls move around the gods live in their statutes right and one of the things they do is they recite a new Marilla Sh to the statue of my daughter the composition is directly connected with the ritual and in the ritual tablets we have which are admittedly quite late something like 2nd century BCE the ritual involves the king who has to be led in to the statue of martyr by a priest stripped naked so all of his shows of power his robes and his mace and his crown I removed from him and he has to abase himself before murder and say murder I have not sinned I have not maltreated the inhabitants of Babylon and then the priest has to strike him think about that if you think of one of our heads of state got hit by a religious functionary and if the King doesn't shed a tear it's a bad omen so he has to strike him hard enough to bring tears to his eyes and then the king is ritual eerie enthroned because he's got moderates approval so this is a late way of asserting the role of Babylon in approving of Kings and there's a long and multiplex argument which can be boiled down to this in the first millennium Babylon was often subject to foreign kings and one of the roles of this kind of ritual may have been to impress upon foreign kings the importance of treating the city of Babylon in the way it had Authority come to be expected to weaken it to be treated right this is one of several things we could talk about I want to push my point just one minute longer and finish with a very very late reflection Avenue mainly because the stuff that we've been talking about the canal from stuff in the first plane Ian BC isn't where it ends it gets picked up by Barossa who's the guy who writes about the fishermen and money's and it gets picked up from there by later authors and it makes its way in fact as far as the fifth century CE II in a very short version of the text by a North are called Damascus and the mascius says with the Babylonians like the rest of the barbarians pass over in silence the one principle of the universe and they constitute two cows there and a pass on TR map that's right her husband of tau ik and denominating her the mother of the gods and from these proceeds and only begotten son we miss mu mu which I can see this no other than than the intelligible world it's all being rewritten as neoplatonism proceeding from the two principles from them also another progeny is derived the hay and Dallas this is an interesting one because if you either know Greek or you know your Greek system of fraternities you know that capital Delta read manuscripts are written in capitals capital Delta is triangle the capital lambda is an inverted V so Dhaka and Dallas is a textual miss reading for the lac mu and lacquer mu right so it's all from this early cosmic cosmological passage of a numeral eesh it's relatively faithfully preserved and again a third kiss sorry and the Soros Keshawn and char from its the last three others Pernice precede our new Illinois and house air and of house and dal ke damn Hina is born a son called Bayliss Bell who they say is the fabricator of the world so from the mace in Inger Seuss exercise of power in the figure with the feathers around 2700 BCE to Damascus around 550 500 CE e we're crossing about 3,000 years of tradition and we can see it more continuously as different places different cities different thinkers want to make different points within but nevertheless that the red is traceable and for me that's one of those fascinating things a Mesopotamian culture thank you so I am happy to take some questions if there are any there's a microphone on the right and on the left on the first line drawing that you showed just immediately below the mace symbol there appeared to be a Masonic symbol or something perhaps coincidentally appearing to be Masonic and I'm just curious about that so which we shall see where the head is yes that's it right there yeah so I think that is I don't think we're putting this part on line right so I can be expected if I want I think it's actually too it hasn't really been interpreted in the addition so far this is the mess sign here it's the same one that's over here and then underneath it is an old version of the old sign and I think this is actually a writing for meta fitting and that may sound well but it doesn't even sound weird - you have no idea what I'm talking about right there's a very very common word NC which is written with the series of three signs path tear and see and it simply read NC and it's the the governor toriel title or the ruling title of Gudea and all those guys in archaic texts very early texts part SC is actually written part will see is written with this sign here so I think somehow this is another meta fitting something and then I'm not sure what goes here this is T good it's difficult so I'm not I think it's two separate signs but look if you can Dan Brown it go for it yeah I think we have a question over here yeah so the question is to what extent does it reflect oral tradition and was it created when Babylon was a fully fledged city so take the first part I don't think it had anything to do with oral tradition in this case there might be text that we would be ambivalent about but here I really think that we're looking at the production of a very elite group of scholars there's a lot of very rare words in it the whole text has many references to incantations and magic and this whole thing about writing it down future generations at the end which also call sabayon Gilgamesh this is really a product of the of the intellect intelligentsia in a way as for when it was written we really don't know it would not surprise me if tomorrow somebody put online a tablet from 1800 BC in Babylon which had some kind of skeletal version of a primitive version of it I think that one of the things that we have to be very cognizant of in our data set is that not only do we have this very bizarre gross spikes in our data where we have a century where we have 40,000 texts and then five century we have almost nothing but also the entire data set is coagulated against sort of major ideological focal points so we have lots of nippur stuff we have lots of min of e Ashurbanipal stuff we have a decent amount of late babylon stuff but we're missing huge amounts of local mythology and tradition and probably half the cities in Mesopotamia had these kinds of stories about their own local garden about how they become the most important city in the universe and we haven't found them yet not for who I saw one hand there and I've no idea who's in order this is a really basic question that I've been wondering about throughout the series and the best I could illustrate it would provide an example for instance if I saw a depiction of Beauty and the Beast I think we would all know that story but none of us really believed that there was a beast that transformed on the other hand there can be things that we accept as a basis as a matter of religion so when you're talking about say these examples tonight or the people in the society viewing it as a myth or or do they believe it as like almost as a religious idea that these things actually happened or does it depend on the person yeah it's a very good question I mean I can't speak for them unfortunately although I have to I'm going to apologize to them in advance I think we could infer that they at least so let me take a step back one issue is that we tend to think in terms of the Mesopotamian this or the Mesopotamian that and in fact you know in line with what I just answered in terms of the local traditions in all probability there's a lot of differentiation and nuance and even competition and and incongruity and if we look at it all as one collection of belief it may seem to be in conflict with itself but in fact there are relatively few cases in where that is in real life the case nevertheless you can think of something like I should body pals library where they really are trying to collect everything was really the only library in a sense worth the name in ancient Mesopotamia where Shivani Powell actually sends out his emissaries to bring back material from Babylon and actually grant is smiling Renta's published texts in which they actually imprisoned Babylonian scribes in the in the in Assyria and they let them out of their handcuffs and they write a few writing tablets of stuff and they put them back in their manacles so they're actively collecting all knowledge of a ship and past libraries and there they have for example Atrahasis which has one version of the flood and Gilgamesh which has another version of the flood they have conflicting versions of an uma Alicia Syrian versions and Babylonian versions so either they're trying to sort of sort out which is right well they're just saying okay this is a bunch of metaphorical stuff and my own suspicion is it's the latter because there are some very interesting ritual texts or commentaries on rituals where they say things like the ring of flower you put on the ground around the patient is the body of teamö slain by Marduk oh the reads that the king of palm leaves the King walks on when he enters nanofy those are the bodies of Asher's foes so they're taking a lot of mythology that we haven't heard of in some cases and they're mapping it onto material aspects of ritual practice and I can't see that they do that while believing that there's a single truth you know that they're constructing a very elaborate world of metaphor I think is my ultimate answer to your question mr. so to put it more simply no I don't think they believed in literally I'm curious about the influence though I don't know the correlation perhaps if when the when the Jews were taken into Babylon and what influence have you seen I mean I don't know enough about either of them I mean I know I'm enough to ask the question but was there much influence either way it seems like there's a lot of parallel of myths going on here so between the Jews in the and the family during the captivity in Babylon there was a lot of intercultural exchange there's no doubt about that many you know I always would be careful about this I'm a textual historian I see text in terms of their construction over time many people would see the Pentateuch as having taken form in the 5th 6th centuries BC so roughly around the captivity and it seems likely that that's why the flood story in Genesis has such similarities with the flood story and Gilgamesh natural houses for example other similarities stem from the fact that again as a textual historian the Hebrew Bible and the Quran and the Mesopotamian material all of these things are ancient Near Eastern texts they have a common background right there has been some work done about specific individuals and it's been suggested that Isaiah was actually familiar with cuneiform as a writing system and could read the inscription that's based on some very unusual words that might be the the occur only once in Hebrew and there might be mistakes or readings for Akkadian words I frankly am NOT an expert in that I don't know if everybody believes that at this point or not but I think we can assume that there's a lot of interchange do we know how long Marv Duke lived and how he died and where he was buried that's quite a leading question so I I'm gonna say I was I must say why not always I sometimes think that when I'm up on stage talking about Mesopotamian gods what I was gonna strike me down so I'm gonna say that marriage probably still alive somewhere in terms of the this sort of historic the the historical transformations that gods underwent as the Near East became Hellenized and romanized many of the gods were assimilated syncretized with classical gods so mark for example assisted with Jupiter Nabu with Zeus so they they kind of live on in that sort of classical vein vicariously in a way so I don't think there any more questions in which yes there's one more question please you can just yell so the question is should we relate Egyptian representations of the king holding a mace with Mesopotamian ones and I'm just gonna say it's very difficult to know these things are so culturally specific certainly you know there there's certainly interchange between Egypt and Mesopotamia as early as maybe the third millennium BCE it's not continuous it doesn't show as an awful lot of influence one on the other you know even in terms of Egyptian mythology it can be quite hard to find analogies in Egyptian mythology with Mesopotamian mythology so I would hesitate to push the point too strongly but it could be all right well thank you very much coming

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 163,622

Rating: 4.7579675 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Tinney, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Marduk

Id: Ep936ropKlc

Length: 67min 29sec (4049 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2018

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Dr. Steve Tinney, Associate Curator, Babylonian Section, Penn Museum. The great Babylonian myth “When on high …”, often called the Babylonian Epic of Creation, traces the history of Babylon from the very beginning of time itself. Swallowing many other ancient Mesopotamian myths it presents a single story of how Marduk became king of the gods by killing the Sea, and founded Babylon as the center of the universe. As it does so, it reveals much about ancient Mesopotamian cosmos and that most important of institutions, the city.