Verisoph story dossier
The city that became a name for the world: Babylon's rise on the Euphrates, Marduk and Ishtar, Hammurabi's law, and Nebuchadnezzar. Its deepest legacy hides in plain sight, the base-60 math behind our hours and the 360-degree circle, the zodiac...
The city that became a name for the world: Babylon's rise on the Euphrates, Marduk and Ishtar, Hammurabi's law, and Nebuchadnezzar. Its deepest legacy hides in plain sight, the base-60 math behind our hours and the 360-degree circle, the zodiac, the seven-day week, and the flood story before Noah.
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also in The old gods and their long shadow
The Sumerian Inanna and her Akkadian counterpart Ishtar embodied both sexual love and battle, linked to the planet Venus. Her worship spread widely and influenced later Near Eastern and Greek goddess figures.
An Amorite dynasty makes the small town of Babylon on the Euphrates the seat of a kingdom. Over the next centuries it becomes the political and religious center of Mesopotamia and a name that would echo for millennia.
Old Babylonian mathematicians, inheriting Sumerian practice, count in base 60 (sexagesimal). This is the hidden root of the 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle that the modern world still uses every day.
also in Forms of government: how societies rule themselves, State, law, and coercion
King Hammurabi of Babylon issued one of the earliest written law codes, presenting himself as chosen by the gods to bring justice. It tied the king's authority to the enforcement of written law.
also in The old gods and their long shadow
As Babylon grew powerful under Hammurabi and after, its city god Marduk was elevated above the older Sumerian gods. He was credited with ordering the cosmos and holding the tablets of destiny.
The Hittite king Mursili I raids down the Euphrates and sacks Babylon, ending the dynasty of Hammurabi. The Kassites later take the city and rule it for centuries.
The standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh tells of Utnapishtim, a man warned by a god to build a boat and survive a great flood, centuries before the biblical Noah. The parallel is one of the clearest threads from Mesopotamian myth into the Hebrew Bible.
Babylonian scribes compile systematic records of the stars and planets, such as the MUL.APIN tablets, and read the sky for omens. Their celestial science is the ancestor of both modern astronomy and Western astrology.
Nabopolassar throws off Assyrian rule and founds the Neo-Babylonian, or Chaldean, empire. Under him and his son the city reaches its greatest glory.
Nebuchadnezzar II becomes king and makes Babylon the wonder of the ancient world. He is the Nebuchadnezzar of the Book of Daniel and the builder of its greatest monuments.
Nebuchadnezzar rebuilds Etemenanki, the great ziggurat of Marduk, a stepped temple-tower reaching to the sky. It is widely thought to lie behind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues.
Nebuchadnezzar's army destroys Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple and deports the Judean elite to Babylon. The Babylonian captivity reshaped Judaism, produced much of the Hebrew Bible in its current form, and gave the word Babylon its lasting weight for exile and worldly power.
Babylon is adorned with the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate, dedicated to the goddess of love and war, and, by tradition, the Hanging Gardens counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world. The city becomes the archetype of imperial splendor.
Cyrus the Great captures Babylon almost without a fight, ending the Neo-Babylonian empire. His decree, recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder, lets the exiled Jews return home and rebuild the Temple, a turning point for Judaism and an early charter of a ruler's tolerance.
Babylonian astronomers divide the ecliptic into twelve equal signs, creating the zodiac still used in horoscopes today. Their astrology passed to the Greeks and, through them, into Western culture, where the Chaldeans became a byword for astrologers.
The Babylonian priest Berossus writes the Babyloniaca in Greek, transmitting Mesopotamian history, myth, and astronomy to the Hellenistic world. He is remembered as a founder of astrology in the Greek and later Roman imagination.
The Book of Revelation casts the Roman Empire as 'Babylon the Great, mother of harlots', turning Babylon into the enduring symbol of worldly power and corruption. The image still drives religious and conspiratorial talk of a 'Mystery Babylon' today.
The seven-day week with days named for the sun, moon, and five planets, rooted in Babylonian astrology and merged with the Jewish sabbath, takes hold across the Roman Empire. It is the direct ancestor of the modern week and the planetary names still carried by the days.
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