Babylon and Its History of Decadence

What do we know about historical Babylon?

We know relatively little about Babylon before the first millennium BCE. Its location along the Euphrates means it suffers from high groundwater levels, so any clay-built features or artifacts below the water table (tablets, walls, houses, temples and neighborhoods) have largely reverted back to clay. We have some textual and archaeological evidence that gives a sense of earlier phases, but this material is limited to a few houses and a small corpus of texts that were rescued, saved, or recorded in antiquity.

We can guess that Babylon was a significant city as early as the 23rd century BCE, when Akkadian rulers supported the construction of a temple to Ištar there; we have evidence that it paid taxes to the Ur III state through the 21st century BCE. Some notable landmarks, such as the Ishtar Gate (now in Berlin), probably date back to the eighteenth century BCE, during the time of Hammurabi. Prior to massive rebuilding projects under Nabopolassar (625–605 BCE) and his son Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BCE), there is simply not much surviving information.

At its height during the long sixth century BCE, however, Babylon was extraordinary. It was immensely wealthy, being the capital of the Neo-Babylonian empire. A few scholars have compared daily wages to those of fifth-century Athens or to Cairo in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries CE; the city was in the midst of an economic efflorescence. Researchers at Uppsala Universitet have reconstructed parts of Babylon from this period (see here). Some archaeological material has been reconstructed on site in a project funded during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The Relationship Between Babylon and Entertainment, Recreation, and Nightlife

What do we know about Babylon’s nightlife and entertainment in particular? Again, not much. There are several reasons for this lack of documentation (the answer is in part due to what was written on clay tablets vs degradable parchment), but it is just as worthwhile to ask where our modern expectations of this decadence comes from. Much of that impression can be traced to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE, when historical studies like Assyriology (the study of cuneiform cultures) were still being developed.

When Babylon was first excavated in the 1850s by Sir Austen Henry Layard, his discoveries became an international sensation. Part of that excitement derived from Babylon’s reputation in the Hebrew Bible, but Layard’s storytelling, maps, and illustrations also captured the public imagination. His publications on Nineveh and other cities known from the Bible were widely read and often used to argue for biblical historicity; they also inspired people around the world because this material had frankly never been seen before. Alongside this popular imagination, several additional ideas stand out: the Book of Daniel portrayed Nebuchadnezzar in ways that invite moral and theological criticisms; the Book of Revelation associated Babylon with idolatry and decadence through equivocation with Rome; things like oriental fascination compounded these perceptions.

This period coincided with the growth of universal museums such as the British Museum and the Louvre, which sponsored expeditions and collected artifacts (a key reason why the Ishtar Gate ended up in the Pergamon, for example). Ancient Near Eastern antiquities became cultural currency during a time of intense national change. The resulting infatuation with the ancient Near East shaped nearly everything from architecture, film, to public interest: an endowed professorship for Assyriology at Yale University was funded by J.P. Morgan, the banker; skyscraper designs became inspired by Mesopotamian ziggurats, such as the Western Union Building in New York; Kaiser Wilhelm II formally requested for public lectures by scholars like Friedrich Delitzsch to provide their expertise on things.

I point to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as to a great place to see where all these images and ideas coalesced. The film used then contemporary Art Deco and German Expressionist sets alongside biblical allegory to tell a story of unifying class differences. In one scene a character recounts the Tower of Babel:

“Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel. Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies and on it we will inscribe: ‘great is the world and its creator, and great is man.’ Those who conceived the idea of this tower could not have built it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them. But these toilers knew nothing of the dream of those who planned the tower. While those who conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it. The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many. BABEL.”

In this allegory, Babylon stands for an elite class indifferent to the plight of their workers (and thus need a mediator to communicate grand ideas to plebians; the movie received a mixed reception, as you can imagine). That image of Babylon being filled with rich, out of touch elites has persisted into the present in contemporary works like Babylon (2022). These modern-day impressions of Babylon are not grounded in historical study, but rather reflect modern anxieties about things like extravagant wealth and social stratification, anxieties that were particularly visible in the early twentieth century when these discoveries were taking place.

Readings:

• Olof Pedersén. 2021. Babylon, the Great City.

• Michael Jursa 2010. Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC.

• Sir Austen Henry Layard. 1853. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon.

• Stefania Ermidoro. 2021. “Rethinking Austen Henry Layard,” in Ancient Near East Today 9.12.

• Fritz Lang. 1927. Metropolis. (Screenplay later published in 1973 by Simon and Schuster).