Chapter 20
A lot that was written about Nabonidus was penned by his enemies, so he often comes off badly in histories. He was later blamed for the end of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and described as a heretic or even as a madman. I think he would have been surprised and perhaps saddened had he known this. In his own inscriptions he comes off as an earnest and pious man, someone who felt that he was on a mission from the god who had chosen him—the moon god Sin—to ensure Sin’s place at the head of the pantheon. Nabonidus wasn’t a monotheist; he believed in all the gods. He showed himself in an image on a stone stela venerating the symbols of three deities: Sin, Ishtar, and Shamash (see Fig. 20.1). He did, though, seem to see Sin as embodying the characteristics of several gods. He had a sense of himself not as a revolutionary but as a traditionalist, drawing his inspiration from very ancient practices. He just deeply believed that Sin was the king of all the gods. Had he been successful in persuading his fellow Babylonians about this, perhaps he would have been lauded in the chronicles and described as a prophet who had received and conveyed the true message of the moon god. Nabonidus’s problem was that, in Babylonia, Marduk had a very ancient claim to the title of king of the gods, and the Babylonians were not about to change centuries of belief on the basis of the visionary dreams of an elderly king (who was not even a member of the existing royal family) and his even more elderly mother.
Fig. 20.1 Basalt stela, probably of King Nabonidus of Babylon, with symbols of the gods Sin, Ishtar, and Shamash, 554–539 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Nabonidus of Babylon: The King and the Moon God
One of Nabonidus’s first acts was to appoint an en-priestess, the high priestess of the moon god, in the city of Ur. He was walking in the steps of Sargon of Akkad in doing so, only Sargon’s appointment of Enheduana to that same role had taken place about 1,750 years beforehand. Like Sargon (and after several consultations with diviners), Nabonidus chose one of his daughters for the position and gave her a Sumerian name: En-nigaldi-Nanna, meaning “the high priestess requested by Nanna” (Nanna being the Sumerian name for the moon god, Sin). Imagine if a leader today were to appoint someone to be a Vestal Virgin in Rome or a Grand Preceptor in China, reviving a position that had not existed for centuries. Imagine if he also gave that person a name in an old, dead language and excavated the ancient palace that was the traditional home for someone in that role. You might think this leader was pretty eccentric. But Nabonidus believed it to be the will of the moon god. A text called Enuma Anu Enlil, which was already very ancient in his time, included the following omen: “If there is an eclipse of the moon in the month Ululu, (this means that) the god Sin requests a high-priestess.”1 A lunar eclipse did indeed occur—and in the month of Ululu—during Nabonidus’s second year on the throne. A miracle! Nabonidus had no choice; the appointment had to happen. He believed that the moon god was sending him signs confirming his divinely ordained mission.
In an inscription about this appointment he wrote that “I was attentive towards the word of the god Sin, the supreme lord, the god who created me, (and) the command(s) of the gods Shamash and Adad, the lords of divination, and elevated (my) daughter, my own offspring, to the office of entu-priestess and (then) I named (her) En-nigaldi-Nanna, as her (new, official) name.”2 En-nigaldi-Nanna had no choice in this matter, but she made the most of her new role.
She could not live in the traditional Gipar palace of the en-priestess—it was uninhabitable. As Nabonidus put it, “its site was in ruins and had turned into rubble. Date palms and fruit orchards were growing inside it.”3 One can imagine Nabonidus picking his way among the palms and fruit trees, his eyes scanning the ground, looking for the remnants of the ancient walls of the palace. As a result of the love for antiquity that he shared with his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus often expressed his excitement about finding ancient objects during rebuilding projects.
When reconstructing the Ebabbar temple in Sippar, he wrote that he “discovered inside it an inscription of Hammurabi, a king of the past who came before me, for the god Shamash had built Ebabbar and the ziggurat (precisely) on the original foundation(s) 700 years before Burna-Buriash.”4 Nabonidus saw himself as the successor to these Babylonian kings of the past—Hammurabi whose laws were still studied, and Burna-Buriash, one of the great kings of the brotherhood of the Late Bronze Age. To have found an actual inscription of Hammurabi? That was a thrill. He wrote, “Then, my heart was happy (and) my face beamed.” Showing immense respect for the ancient architecture and the kings who had commissioned it, he made sure that his own architects followed the exact footprint of the ancient walls. He had the new walls built “not a fingerbreadth outside or inside” the foundations constructed by Hammurabi.
As he searched for the walls of the ancient Gipar palace, he was no doubt looking for old inscriptions and objects there as well. To his delight, he found them. “I discovered inside it inscription(s) of ancient kings of the past. I (also) discovered an ancient inscribed object of Enanedu, entu-priestess of Ur, daughter of Kudur-mabuk, sister of Rim-Sin, king of Ur, who had renewed the Gipar palace and restored it.”5 This object confirmed that the priestesses had indeed lived here, and in fact that Enanedu herself (not her brother, surprisingly) had restored the palace in the time of King Rim-Sin I of Larsa in the early eighteenth century BCE. “Then,” he wrote proudly, “I rebuilt the Gipar palace anew as (it had been) in ancient times.”
When Woolley was excavating in Ur, he found yet more evidence for the antiquarian passions of Nabonidus and his family. In a building that seems to have been the new Gipar, built by Nabonidus for his daughter En-nigaldi-Nanna, Woolley uncovered some surprising objects, all lying together: a stone kudurru from the Kassite period, an arm of a statue with an inscription of King Shulgi from the Ur III period, a foundation cone from the Old Babylonian period, and a very ancient stone mace head.
Near them was a small clay cylinder, 10.8 centimeters (4.25 inches) high, inscribed with copies of an Old Babylonian period inscription written in Sumerian followed by a Neo-Babylonian explanation written in Akkadian: “Copy of a baked brick from the rubble in Ur, deeds of Amar-Suen, King of Ur”6 (see Fig. 20.2). It went on to explain that the copied brick had been found “in the search for the ground plan of the Ekishnugal (temple) by Sin-balassu-iqbi, governor of Ur.” After Sin-balassu-iqbi found the brick, he had given it to a lamentation priest of the moon god, who “has inspected and written (it) out for observation.” Woolley concluded that these objects had been curated by the priestess En-nigaldi-Nanna as a kind of ancient museum display.7 If you search for En-nigaldi-Nanna’s name online you will find her listed on several sites as the founder of the “first museum.” Clearly though, if these objects were indeed gathered for display, this wouldn’t have been a museum that was open to the public. It was a private collection of ancient objects that had been found during the renovation of the Ekishnugal temple—the temple to the god Sin. It was more a “cabinet of curiosities” than a museum in the modern sense.
Fig. 20.2 Clay cylinder with a copy of a Sumerian brick inscription, found in Ur, 556–539 bce. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Even if it wasn’t exactly a museum, its existence fits well with Nabonidus’s enthusiasm for ancient objects. He would have loved the chance to look over the artifacts and ponder his connection to their age-old makers. It was Nabonidus who had preserved the statue of Enmetena, the Early Dynastic king of Lagash, that we encountered in Chapter 3. The Mesopotamians had always wanted ancient objects to be preserved and displayed, especially when the ancient objects were statues of former kings. For example, Zimri-Lim at Mari had been joined in his throne room by the statues of kings going back hundreds of years. And scribes had copied inscriptions from ancient stelas and tablets at least since the time of Sargon of Akkad, adding notes about where the original inscriptions were to be found (just like the label to Amar-Suen’s brick inscription in the Gipar) and keeping the clay copies that they had made. Their efforts, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, were largely responsible for the preservation of any number of texts that would otherwise have been lost.
In the same inscription in which Nabonidus described the appointment of En-nigaldi-Nanna as priestess and the restoration of the Gipar palace, he also listed the staff of the moon god’s temple in Ur (and other temples in the city) and boasted that he had released these workers from corvée labor and service obligations.8 They would be free to focus on taking care of the moon god. To his mind they deserved this, given that Sin was the greatest of all gods. The list of workers provides a fascinating window into a temple’s personnel, the people who were present in the building daily in service to the deity.
A number of different types of priests head the list: the ramku-priests, the enu-priest, the purification priest, and the zabarbaddu official. (This man held an archaic title that had not been used since the Old Babylonian period—even in naming the positions of his temple administrators, Nabonidus was looking back in time for his inspiration.)9 They were followed by a mix of officials and people working in service positions. Helping to run the temple every day and to provide for the gods were “the brewer, the cook, the miller, . . . the builder, the courtyard sweeper, the head doorkeeper.”10 These men prepared the food and drink for the temple, maintained the property, and provided security. The list also included “the singers who please the heart(s) of the gods.” As in the Early Dynastic period and the kingdom of Mari, where we have encountered such singers before (and, for that matter, in all eras of ancient Near Eastern history), music was as important to the happiness of the gods as food and drink.
Those food and drink preparers—the brewer, the cook, the miller—they were practicing culinary professions that, by Nabonidus’s time, had a pedigree of at least 2,500 years, if not longer. You may remember Kushim, the controller of the barley warehouse in Uruk, way back when syllabic writing had first developed, around 3100 BCE.11 He too worked for a temple, managing the ingredients for beer making, while also distributing jars of beer.
Beer had always been essential to life in this region. In the Neo-Babylonian period, a list of the basic necessities of life consisted of “bread, beer, salt, cress, oil, and garments.”12 By the time of Nabonidus, barley beer, of the kind that had been a staple in earlier times, was mostly consumed by the deities (and their temple staffs). At this point, most people outside the temples drank beer made of fermented dates.13 They drank at home and at work, because beer was still a vital part of the Babylonian diet, but they also drank in inns and taverns. It was expected that an adult would consume a lot of beer: from one to three liters a day.14 Although drunkenness was mentioned sometimes, it was not common; their beer must not have had a high alcohol content.
The Sahit-gines and the Egibis: Rich Temple Families in Sippar and Babylon
By the sixth century BCE, a powerful person in Babylonia often had the equivalent of a surname, which was usually the name of a long-past founder of the family. Just as behind every modern O’Reilly there was some original man named “Reilly,” and behind every “Fernandez” an original “Fernando,” so a whole lot of people in Babylon had, for example, the family name Egibi, because they shared an ancestor who bore that name. There were many other such families. High positions in the temples were dominated by these powerful families, and for their incomes they owned “prebends”—entitlements to particular roles within a temple that assured a continued income and association with that temple. Often a specific named family monopolized the prebends for one role, such as that of the bakers or brewers, or for a higher role such as the head of the bakers or head of the brewers. Lists were drawn up of the people who owned particular prebends and the rights to the income that came from them. But a prebend had, over time, become something you could sell, lend, sublet, or swap, so that you could make money from a prebend without actually having to do the job associated with it.15 This system also provided these elite families with even more opportunities to gain wealth.
The temple families tended to have Babylonian names and they were proud of their local roots. They seem to have resisted adopting Aramaic, which was fast becoming the main spoken and written language of much of the Near East. Instead, they probably spoke Akkadian and they continued to write in Akkadian using cuneiform on clay tablets. This means that many of their records survive.
People who worked outside the temples and who weren’t involved in the vast undertakings of the gods’ estates tended not to have family names, they came from many different places, and they almost certainly used Aramaic as a lingua franca, no matter what their native languages might have been. Although they probably wrote many documents on papyrus or leather, which have since disintegrated, they still had a lot of their contracts and other records set down in the traditional way, in Akkadian on clay (though sometimes they added notes in Aramaic on the edges).16
I mentioned the Egibi family because members of that family went into business and ended up dominating the beer trade (along with several other enterprises). Beer was profitable and was one of the major businesses of the era, both for local consumption and probably for external trade as well.17 Another powerful family, this one in Sippar, was named not for an ancestor but for their traditional vocation. They were the Sahit-gine family; Sahit-gine meant “oil presser of the regular offerings.”18 As the name suggests, they owned the prebends for pressing oil to be used in offerings in the Ebabbar temple.19 The family had migrated to Sippar from Babylon, but they kept close ties to their ancestral home city.20 They were unusual in that they were able to move up into an elite level of the temple hierarchy without losing their ties to the Sippar business district. Like the Egibis, they got involved in the making and selling of beer.
A powerful man usually had three names—a personal name, a patronym (the name of his father), and a family name, each of which was (as always) a short sentence or clause. One of the men we will be meeting was known as Bel-uballit, son of Iqisha, of the Sahit-gine (oil pressers) family. The other was Itti-Marduk-balatu, son of Nab-ahhe-iddin, of the Egibi family. Both of these men began their business careers during the reign of Nabonidus and both made money from beer. These two men do seem to have been aware of one another, even though they lived in different cities and came from different families.21
Bel-uballit: Oil Presser, Brewer, and Temple Functionary
Soon after he married a woman named Bu’itu, Bel-uballit’s business was thriving in his family’s adopted city of Sippar, and at that point he seems mostly to have been involved in the oil and textile industries.22 It was the middle of the reign of Nabonidus. Sippar, as you may recall, was upstream from Babylon, on the road to the north from Ur and other southern cities. Textile traders had passed through there on their way to Ashur more than a thousand years earlier, when Sippar had been home to the entrepreneurial naditum women, with their trading connections to Susa in Iran. In Nabonidus’s time it was still a center for trade between Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East.
The harbor on the river at Sippar buzzed with activity; merchants from all over the Neo-Babylonian Empire and beyond lived and worked there. There were people from Iran, Judah, Syria, and Egypt as well as from Mesopotamia, some of them travelers, others merchants, brewers, and entrepreneurs, many of them storing and selling their goods in warehouses near the river.23 You might see a donkey caravan loading up with a shipment of cloth caps for the army, ready to be transported to the town of Humadeshu (near Persepolis) in Iran,24 or a boat returning with a batch of old beer vats (proudly described as being “without damage or leaks”) to a brewer.25 Every transaction required witnesses, whose names were listed on the tablets that scribes drew up by the hundreds. The community was clearly close-knit. They engaged in the same kinds of transactions as one another, witnessed one another’s contracts, and shared storage locations for their archives.26 Their names generally didn’t include a family name; most of the merchants and traders were not from the elite families.27
Bel-uballit and his family members could be frequently spotted at the harbor, conducting business, but they also owned significant amounts of real estate and were members of the rarefied world of the Ebabbar temple.28 Bel-uballit was able to move up in Sippar society, partly because of his prebend as an oil presser for the temple, and partly because he married a woman from an influential family. His wife Bu’itu had been born into the highest ranks of the Sippar temple community—men in her family held the prestigious position of “head of the temple enterers.”29 A son from Bel-uballit’s marriage to Bu’itu later inherited a prebend from his grandmother on his mother’s side: he too became a “temple enterer.” Unusually for someone with such a role, this son continued to participate actively in the trade of the Sippar harbor.30
But long before this, in 547 and 546 BCE (the ninth and tenth years of Nabonidus’s reign) Bel-uballit spent a fortune on wool. On one occasion he bought c. 900 kilograms (c. 2,000 pounds) of wool for 4 minas 33⅓ shekels of silver.31 This was a huge investment, but presumably he knew that it would pay off. He would have hired women, who worked in their homes, to spin and weave the wool into textiles that he then sold. We know that the wife of one of Bel-uballit’s relatives ran this type of operation, so it’s entirely possible that women in Bel-uballit’s family did the same.32 (A few decades later, in 520 BCE, Bel-uballit owned a herd of sheep and goats of his own, so at that point he probably didn’t need to purchase the wool for his textile operation.)33
Bel-uballit may already have been exploring opportunities in the beer brewing business, even during the reign of Nabonidus. We know that he was trading in large amounts of dates, and the main reason for buying or selling dates at this point was for making beer.34 Later in his life, he was definitely in the beer business: he went into partnership with two other men to run a brewery. One man, a professional merchant, provided a house in which the business would have its home, as a brewery and warehouse, and perhaps as a tavern or inn as well. A second man contributed dozens of beer vats and invested five minas of silver—a significant sum. He also pledged the women of his family to be employees of the firm: his wife, daughters, and female slaves. Bel-uballit contributed 100 more beer vats than his partner, along with another five minas of silver.35 They had what they needed to make the enterprise a success. Beer could be a big money-maker. Everyone drank it.
Nabu-utirri, Mizatu, and Itti-Marduk-balatu: Brewers and a Businessman
In order to learn more about the social world surrounding beer, we need to move south to the capital city, Babylon. Around the time that Bel-uballit was beginning his business career, starting in the fourteenth year of the reign of Nabonidus, two slaves belonging to the businessman Itti-Marduk-balatu (of the Egibi family) were busy setting up a lucrative business, brewing and selling beer in Babylon.36
These slaves were a married couple: the husband, Nabu-utirri, took on many responsibilities as an agent working for Itti-Marduk-balatu—dealing with his master’s business associates and also engaging in transactions of his own.37 His wife Mizatu worked with him in the brewery, but enslaved women like her almost never worked as agents for their owners in this era.38 Nabu-utirri and Mizatu were regularly referred to as slaves in the documents, but they had considerable autonomy. They lived in their own house, for which they paid rent, and they controlled most of the profits from their brewing business. The couple may have produced both date beer for customers and barley beer for religious purposes.
Babylonian date beer probably tasted very different from modern beer. Not only was it not made from grain, it also wasn’t flavored with hops (which were not introduced into beer until the Middle Ages in Europe). In fact, although the Babylonians used the same term for both barley and date beer, the version made from dates was probably more like hard cider.39
The closest thing that survives to a Mesopotamian beer recipe is a hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer. Just as beer was one of the most ancient inventions of the Sumerians, so was Ninkasi one of the most ancient goddesses.40 As always, we are indebted to scribes for making copies of the hymn in school. They weren’t particularly reverent as they wrote—they paired the hymn, in their exercises, with a drinking song dedicated to a woman innkeeper.41 The hymn was written hundreds of years before Nabu-utirri and Mizatu opened their brewery, and it’s about the brewing of barley beer. (Several enterprising modern brewers have tried reproducing Mesopotamian beer from the description in the hymn.)42
The hymn lists the stages in making barley beer, each time noting “(Goddess) Ninkasi you are the one who” takes care of each step. First the dough (bappir) was made, and mixed “in a pit . . . with sweet aromatics.”43 The aromatics were herbs of various kinds.44 Then the dough was baked “in a big oven.”
Meanwhile, “piles of hulled grain” were created, covered in earth, and watered in order to make them germinate. These were then soaked in a jar, and presumably heated (though this isn’t mentioned in the hymn as a specific step). The resulting “cooked mash” was spread “on large reed mats” to be cooled and dried. This was the malt.
The wort was then brewed “with honey (and) wine” and fermented in a fermenting vat. “The fermenting vat . . . makes a pleasant sound; you place (it) appropriately on (top of) a large collector vat.” This suggests that the liquid from the fermenting vat could filter down into the collecting vat—the fermenting vat must have had holes in its base. Finally, the beer was ready. The author of the hymn wrote, appreciatively, that when “the filtered beer . . . (pours out) of the collector vat, it is (like) the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.” The beer must have been a lot sweeter than modern beer, given the honey that was incorporated into the recipe.
Date beer would have been simpler. Scholars who tried making it, following a later Greek recipe from the first century CE, used nothing but water and dates. They found that the resulting drink had a pleasant acidic taste and, surprisingly, wasn’t sweet.45
In 541 BCE, Nabu-utirri and Mizatu were able to earn 5.5 minas of silver as a result of their brewery—a very healthy profit—of which they paid one-sixth to their master.46 Nabu-utirri used the rest of the profits to finance other operations, including lending silver, dates, and barley to other slaves and to free individuals, and, in one instance, renting a boat and hiring a pilot for it.47 Boats were almost always associated with trade, so perhaps he needed the boat to ship some of his beer to another city to sell it there. Nabu-utirri, himself a slave, had even purchased two slaves during Nabonidus’s thirteenth year—a woman and her son.48 We know nothing else about them, but perhaps they came to be involved in the beer business as well. Most of the tablets pertaining to Nabu-utirri show him acting almost completely independently. He was not legally free, but he had the kinds of responsibilities taken on by free businessmen and also had the opportunity to make and keep his own money. Sometimes, though, he did need his master’s help, for example when a man died who still owed him money. Itti-Marduk-balatu imposed some control that way, setting limits on what Nabu-utirri could do.49
Nabu-utirri also rented several properties.50 One of these houses, perhaps the one in which he and his wife ran their beer business, was owned by a man and two women from a wealthy family. Nabu-utirri, according to his contract, was required to “build a reed hut in front of the gate, together (?) with an exit (?), and must spread clay on the roof.”51 His construction work was considered to be worth four shekels and was put toward the year’s rent. It’s tempting to see the reed hut in front of the gate of the house as a place where they sold beer, though that’s just a guess.
In this contract scholars have found a distant connection between Bel-uballit in Sippar and Itti-Marduk-balatu in Babylon: the owners of the house that Itti-Marduk-balatu’s slaves rented in Babylon were members of the Sippar family of Bel-uballit (the Sahit-gines). It makes you wonder if the two men were aware of one another, if, perhaps through mutual friends, the men knew that they were both venturing into the beer trade, in different cities—Bel-uballit on his own in Sippar, Itti-Marduk-balatu, through the efforts of Nabu-utirri and Mizatu, in Babylon.
Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu: A Baker
Itti-Marduk-balatu might have had trouble keeping track of all his ventures and investments. He was a very rich man. He ran many businesses and owned sixteen houses and about 100 slaves, who constituted as many as eighteen different families.52 Most of his slaves had probably been born into slavery, and specifically into his household.53 Generations of enslaved people worked for generations of the same family. But Itti-Marduk-balatu had also purchased slaves on occasion, sometimes whole families of individuals, who had often been captured as prisoners of war. In one instance another wealthy man “sold to Itti-Marduk-balatu . . . his slave woman Nana-ittiya and her daughter of three months, an Egyptian from the booty of the bow, for two minas of silver as the full price.”54 Nana-ittiya and her baby daughter, already so far from their home in Egypt, now joined a new household. They almost certainly never saw their homeland again.
Itti-Marduk-balatu didn’t just buy slaves, he traded them as well. There’s little evidence for professional slave traders in this era,55 but a wealthy man like Itti-Marduk-balatu sometimes used his slaves the way he used some of his other possessions, at one point paying a seller for a house not with silver but with an enslaved family of a woman and her two daughters.56 The Egyptian woman Nana-ittiya and her baby could have been in this situation, shuffled from one household to another, like so many bushels of barley.
So, what was life like for enslaved people? It’s a little hard to tell, because they didn’t write about it, and experiences would have varied considerably from one person to another. But we can reconstruct some details from the contracts that survive.
A baby boy born to an enslaved couple belonging to Itti-Marduk-balatu (or any other rich man like him) grew up knowing no other life. The baby probably had siblings, and he lived in a house in Babylon, perhaps a house rented by his parents (like the one rented by the brewers Nabu-utirri and Mizatu). It’s unlikely that he saw his owner often as he was growing up—a whole hierarchy of members of the enslaved community separated him from the family that controlled his fate. Between the ages of two and four, his parents settled on a name for him. One such boy was given the name Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu (this was quite a mouthful; he probably had a nickname).57 At some point, he went through the (presumably painful) process of having his owner’s name tattooed on his hand.58 Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu was someone’s property, that was something he could never forget; it was right there on his skin. He would have lived with his mother until he reached an age when he could be put to work.59
There must have been endless jobs that needed to be done within the sixteen households owned by Itti-Marduk-balatu. Food and drink had to be made, clothes to be sewn, rooms to be cleaned (though, still, laundry seems to have been sent out to washermen). Although the family owned fields and date orchards, few of the slaves were involved in agriculture. That was still the realm of tenant farmers, as it had been during the Neo-Assyrian Empire.60 It was decided that Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu was to be trained for a specific profession. Some of his friends and relatives in the household might have been apprenticed to weavers, shoemakers, or other craftsmen.61 Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu would become a baker. Slavery was so pervasive in the society that the experienced baker under whom he trained was also a slave. The contract for his apprenticeship was drawn up in the year 534 BCE: “Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu, the slave belonging to Itti-Marduk-balatu, has been placed at the disposal of Reheti, the slave of Basya, to be taught the baker’s trade. . . . He must teach him the baker’s trade in its entirety before the month of Arahsamnu.”62 If Reheti failed to train the boy within fifteen months, he had to pay a fine.
And, from then on, Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu had a profession. He probably baked bread throughout his whole life and may periodically have been hired out to other families.63 Unlike the beer made by the brewers Nabu-utirri and Mizatu, the breads made by Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu weren’t for sale. Most people who worked as slaves produced goods only for the household in which they worked.64
Were they unhappy? The fact that enslaved people ran away, just as they had in the Ur III period, suggests that freedom was always preferred. But, surprisingly, there is little evidence for slaves rebelling in this era,65 and there’s no indication that runaway slaves were punished, or that any slaves were physically restrained.66 Enslaved workers were contracted for their labor and benefited to some extent from the profits they realized, which may have made life bearable.67 Of course, it could be that records of mistreatment just didn’t survive. But based on the lack of evidence, one can hope that they were treated humanely.
Ishunnatu: An Innkeeper
In 524 BCE, a decade after Ina-qate-Nabu-bultu started his apprenticeship as a baker, an enslaved woman from his same household was put in charge of a new venture by their owner Itti-Marduk-balatu. Her name was Ishunnatu. I wonder what it was about her that made her stand out from the rest of the household, that made her seem like the exact person for Itti-Marduk-balatu to invest in. Whatever it was, she proved him right.
His family, the Egibis, had been expanding their operations for some time into Kish, the ancient city just 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the east of Babylon. Kish had benefited from Nebuchadnezzar II’s urban beautification campaign—many buildings there had been restored and improved at the same time that the king had been focusing on Babylon. The city had two main tells. One was known as Kish proper; the other, adjacent to it, was Hursagkalama. The latter was where the Egibi family began to invest. Itti-Marduk-balatu owned a house there, and in the sixteenth year of Nabonidus (540 BCE) he rented it to his brother, who used it as a base for his business.68 Sixteen years later, the enslaved woman Ishunnatu moved to Hursagkalama to open a brewery and inn.
The inn wasn’t new. Another man had been running it and, to help with the transition in ownership, he lent all the furniture and equipment to Ishunnatu for two and a half months. On the eleventh day of the month Kislimu (late November to us), Ishunnatu met with the previous innkeeper right there in the inn in Hursagkalama, along with three male witnesses (all from influential families) and a scribe named Kalbaia, who wrote down the contract between them. It was in Ishunnatu’s name; her owner Itti-Marduk-balatu wasn’t even mentioned, though he does seem to have been present.69
There were three parts to the inn, and the contents of each were listed. Perhaps the group walked from room to room as she inspected the items that she would be using, and the scribe wrote them all down. In the bar, an intimate place that seated just a few people, were three tables, ten chairs, and a lampstand. This was where customers gathered to drink beer and talk. In the mid-sixth century BCE, to judge from the documents that survive, bars seem to have been no more dangerous or notorious than pubs are today in Britain, or coffee shops around the world. They were social gathering spots.
In the second part of the establishment, the brewery, the previous innkeeper left Ishunnatu a fermenting vat, a vessel stand, and a decanting vat.70 Here she would be brewing the beer for her customers. The dates, water, and kasu flavoring would be left to stand for perhaps eleven days in the fermenting vat,71 after which she would filter it into the decanting vat. She also received an iron hoe, probably for her vegetable garden,72 along with a kettle, an ax, and three knives, perhaps for cooking.
And in the third part, the inn, the former proprietor let her use his five beds for her guests. Exactly what a bed looked like at this point is unclear. In the late sixth century, kings had wooden beds, but a “bed” for someone outside the palace might simply have been a rug.73
Many stories have been spun from the mention of these five beds. Some earlier scholars jumped to the conclusion that Ishunnatu ran a brothel, and even that she was, herself, a prostitute. But nothing at all in the documentation backs that up. Had she been a sex worker, they had a term that would have been used to describe her, and the scribe would have used it. He didn’t. There’s no more reason to assume that an inn was a brothel than would be true of a small hotel today.74 Travelers needed places to stay; this had always been true. And an inn providing food and beer was an ideal place to also provide beds for travelers to spend the night. Innkeepers were sometimes women and sometimes men. There is no reason to project modern stereotypes about the past onto Ishunattu’s venture.
In addition to the furniture and equipment lent by the previous innkeeper, on that same day, in front of the same witnesses and recorded by the same scribe, Ishunnatu also received a valuable gift from Itti-Marduk-balatu: “50 vats of fine beer,” “10,800 liters of dates” for brewing more of it, and “720 liters of kasu” for flavoring the beer. Kasu was only used in beer making and was probably the term for a type of the herb dodder called cuscuta, which grew wild, creeping like a weed around other plants.75 He also gave her bronze kettles, cups, and bowls for serving.76 Each vat held 180 liters of beer, so she could have opened her inn that very day if she wanted to. She already had 9,000 liters of beer ready for customers before she even began fermenting the dates to make more.77
After the first few months she had to return the prior innkeeper’s furniture and equipment to him. By that time she had presumably earned enough from her own enterprise to be able to afford to buy replacements for them. But perhaps some of her friends or customers pitched in to help. A third, undated contract, lists items that were “made available to Ishunnatu” (though the donor isn’t listed) in the presence of different witnesses. They were just the things she needed: beds, chairs, a table, a vat for beer, a vat for water, a fermentation vat, and a rack, perhaps for holding jars.78
In any event, Ishunnatu would have been experienced in brewing and ready to serve beer to her customers, to put them up for the night if they needed a place to stay, and perhaps also to serve simple meals. She had to pay Itti-Marduk-balatu some of her profits, but he mostly seems to have left her alone to her entrepreneurial success. And after he died, Ishunnatu continued to run her business, now overseen by Itti-Marduk-balatu’s son, who had a typically long Babylonian name but went by the nickname Shirku.79 In 520 BCE Ishunnatu received a payment of 1,800 liters of dates that she used, in turn, to pay for a new decanting vat,80 and at some other time she borrowed 10,800 liters of dates for some unspecified reason that had to be brought back, perhaps to Babylon “on the canal.”81 She agreed to pay the transportation costs.
Ishunnatu’s inn seems to have been a success. Like Nabu-utirri and Mizatu, several decades earlier, her status as a slave seems to have had little impact on her business or her ability to manage it independently. Itti-Marduk-balatu gave the proprietors of both of these beer establishments plenty of freedom, contenting himself with taking some of the profits.
Cyrus of Persia: Empire Builder and Propagandist
One has the impression that life stayed very much the same in Babylon, Kish, and Sippar between around 545 and 520 BCE. The archives of Itti-Marduk-balatu and Bel-uballit continued through the decades as their businesses grew. Sometimes they experienced small setbacks and recovered, and gradually their sons took over more of the work, but, to judge from the archives that they kept of their business activities, their world hadn’t changed.
Except that, in fact, it had. Falling right in the middle of those years of brewing beer, making loans, serving customers, and renting houses, was one of the Big Years in world history: 539 BCE. That was when the Persian Empire conquered Babylonia, the Neo-Babylonian Empire came to an end, and Mesopotamia, for the first time ever, began to be ruled by a king who had not been born there, who didn’t even live there. This was Cyrus II, and he, in turn, is one of the Big Names of world history. His story is told in almost every survey of ancient history. He was the king of a dynasty known as the Achaemenids (from the name of the founder, Achaemenes), who started building the Persian Empire, which became the largest empire that had ever been known on Earth. Cyrus styled himself as a kind and tolerant man and drew contrasts between himself and the supposedly extremist king of Babylon who had preceded him, namely Nabonidus. Cyrus was featured in the book on the Persian Wars written by Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” and he was viewed favorably by writers in the Bible, who asserted that Cyrus had been chosen by God. He was the only person from outside the Judean community to receive the title of “messiah” from any biblical author. He reversed the practice of deporting conquered peoples and instead allowed former deportees to return to their homelands. Among these were the Jews, who were permitted to leave Babylon and to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple. An inscription that Cyrus commissioned, known as the Cyrus Cylinder, has sometimes been described as the first statement of human rights (though the abstract concept of human rights did not develop for a long time after this).82 A replica of the Cylinder is displayed at the headquarters of the United Nations.
But, to Itti-Marduk-balatu, Cyrus seems to have been just another king, another reason for the dating system to go back to year one; in the business documents written in Babylon and Kish, “Cyrus year 1” followed “Nabonidus year 17” without so much as a comment. In the past, the collapses of some ancient states in the Near East had left great swaths of devastation that affected almost everyone. This was true when the Late Bronze Age powers came to an end in the twelfth century BCE and when the Neo-Assyrian Empire was conquered in 609 BCE. But when the Third Dynasty of Ur was replaced by the First Dynasty of Isin, for example, people living under its rule could have been forgiven for not noticing it at all. The same seems to have been true of the switch from rule by the Neo-Babylonian kings to rule by the Persian kings, at least at first. To the average person living in Babylon, Ur, or Sippar, Cyrus’s takeover may even have seemed like a return to stability after the uncertainties of Nabonidus’s somewhat erratic regime.
We should go back in time in order to understand why this might have been true. Nabonidus, as you know, was singularly obsessed with restoring the temple in his hometown of Harran. In 556 BCE, once he had become king, just one obstacle stood in his way of completing this project, but it was a big one. He didn’t actually control Harran. It was in the region of the former Assyrian Empire that was now ruled by the Medes. He couldn’t send construction teams to a city in another state, or command the king of the Medes to follow his directions. The temple would remain unrestored unless he gained control of Harran.
The Medes were clearly a major power—they had, after all, made an important contribution to the fall of Assyria—but we can see them only through the texts written by others; not a single Median document has ever been recovered. They always seem to be out of focus, just beyond our line of sight. They spoke an Indo-European language and had been mentioned in Assyrian records since the ninth century BCE. Their capital city was at Ecbatana, modern Hamadan, in a mountainous region of western Iran. But how big was their empire during the reign of Nabonidus? How powerful an army did their king command? How difficult would it have been for Nabonidus to take them on? We don’t know. And he was in no mood to attack the Medes, anyway.
As it happened, an ambitious young king named Cyrus (559–530 BCE) had recently come to the throne in Persia. This land adjoined the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf and comprised what had previously been called Anshan in Elam, to the south and east of Mesopotamia. Like the Medes, the Persians spoke an Indo-European language. They ended up playing such a huge role in history that it’s hard to remember that around 550 BCE Persia was not a powerful kingdom at all. The apparently nomadic Persians had arrived in Anshan only about a century before, and they didn’t displace the local population. Most people living in Persia continued to speak their own language of Elamite, though Aramaic was gaining speakers, as it had across the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The land wasn’t even called Persia right away, Cyrus was “king of Anshan.”83
When Cyrus became king, his land, like Harran, was subject to the Medes, and perhaps Nabonidus sent envoys to his court to encourage him to lead a force against his overlords. An alliance may even have developed between the elderly Babylonian king and the upstart Persian.84 Whether inspired by Nabonidus or not, Cyrus did rebel and, by 550 BCE, he had replaced the king of the Medes as ruler of their empire, at which point Harran fell into Nabonidus’s hands, and both men were presumably happy with the outcome. Nabonidus commissioned the construction to begin on the temple to the moon god Sin. Cyrus, meanwhile, now ruled all the lands that had been subject to the Medes, including the northern lands of Urartu and central Anatolia.
When Croesus, the king of Lydia, in western Anatolia, tried to claim some lands beyond the river Halys, Cyrus marched his troops there, to his far western border, to fight back. They were successful and, in 547 BCE, the Persians took control of Lydia as well. Lydia was a rich place, with gold mines and an opulent capital city called Sardis. Lydia is also notable as the place where coins were first minted. Once coinage had developed it spread widely, not least through the Persian Empire that Cyrus was building.85 People had paid for goods with silver for more than a thousand years before this, but the silver had to be weighed each time. A stamped coin was much easier to manage. Although it took Cyrus’s troops several years to fully subdue rebellions in Lydia, the region became a source of considerable wealth for the growing empire.
You might think that all this would have worried Nabonidus. His Neo-Babylonian empire lay just to the south of Cyrus’s growing empire, and Cyrus was showing no signs of feeling that he had done enough expanding.
Here’s the odd thing, though. Through all of this, Nabonidus was away from Babylon. He wasn’t on campaign; he was just living somewhere else. He’d been gone since 553 BCE, just three years into his reign. He was away when he made the agreement with Cyrus (if indeed that is what happened), away when Cyrus conquered the Medes, away when he himself authorized construction of a new temple in Harran (apparently not even going there to visit his mother’s beloved home city), away when his mother Adad-guppi died during his ninth year on the throne, away when her elaborate burial took place, away when Cyrus conquered Lydia.
This was not something that Babylonian kings were in the habit of doing. They normally lived in Babylon, maintaining their administrations in the fortress-like palace there, close to Marduk, their god, and available to participate in all the rituals that marked the seasons. The Akitu festival, which took place in spring at the celebration of the new year, was particularly important. Babylonians believed that its enactment helped ensure the continued order of the universe. Year after year, though, in the absence of Nabonidus, the Babylonian Chronicles noted that the Akitu festival did not take place. Nabonidus had left his thoroughly competent son Belshazzar in charge in Babylon when he left, but Belshazzar wasn’t the king. He could run the government, but he couldn’t enact the Akitu festival. And, given the amount of military activity going on beyond the Babylonian borders, Nabonidus had even more reason to be present and visible in his city.
So, where was Nabonidus all this time? In his inscriptions he wrote that he was in northern Arabia, mostly in a city called Tayma. Archaeological excavations there have backed up his claim; the great king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire really did decide to spend a whole decade in a distant town in the Arabian desert. There are many theories as to why he did so. It didn’t hurt that Tayma was a city devoted to the moon god. Perhaps Nabonidus felt uncomfortable in Marduk-centric Babylon and wanted to live in a place where he could express his passion for the moon god without restraint. He could also avoid the tensions that had erupted in his court. He was also elderly; he didn’t know how long he was going to live. Perhaps he thought that Belshazzar would soon be inheriting the throne anyway and would do a better job, even now, at running the empire. There was no tradition of abdication in the Near East; a king left the throne either by dying or by being overthrown. Nabonidus had created a limbo for himself—not exactly out of royal office, not dead, not required to defer and cower before Marduk at the Akitu festival, not in easy smiting distance of his enemies.
As you might imagine, a pretty vocal anti-Nabonidus faction started growing in Babylon. What was wrong with this king? Marduk couldn’t possibly be happy about being so rudely ignored by him. Later writers, including Cyrus himself, piled on the recriminations, making it difficult to discern the man Nabonidus from the heretic portrayed by his enemies. Even the author of the biblical book of Daniel, writing much later, in the second century BCE, reported stories of the king’s madness. He wrote that a Babylonian king, the father of Belshazzar, “was driven away from his people and ate grass like cattle”86 for seven years. It was only later, after his exile that his “sanity was restored.”87 (In the intervening centuries the king’s name had been mixed up—the author of Daniel called this king Nebuchadnezzar, but it was Nabonidus who was the father of Belshazzar, who went into exile, and who acquired a reputation for insanity.)
Nabonidus did, indeed, return from Tayma to Babylon around 543 BCE, apparently finally worried about the threat that Cyrus posed to Babylonian autonomy. Three years later, for reasons that must have made sense to him but didn’t add to his popularity, he summoned the gods of much of Mesopotamia to Babylon. Indeed, the actual statues of many gods departed from their home cities to live for a while in exile in the capital. Nabonidus may have been protecting the gods in case of Persian attack, or hoping that their combined power would protect the empire (or at least its capital), but it seems to have been a thoroughly unpopular move. Residents of other cities could no longer enact their usual rituals and festivals and must have felt that they were no longer protected by their local deities. Later, Cyrus wrote that “The gods living inside them abandoned their shrines, angry that he (Nabonidus) had made (them) enter Shuanna (Babylon).”88
In the end, Cyrus was able to take over Babylonia with very little destruction or disturbance to the land’s usual routines. He arrived so quickly that some northern cities had not yet dispatched the gods who had been summoned by Nabonidus, though apparently they had made plans to do so.89 A battle did take place between Persian and Babylonian forces at Opis, north of Babylon, near the Tigris River, in late September 539 BCE, and it proved to be a victory for the Persians. A few days after that, Sippar, where Bel-uballit and his family were living, surrendered to Cyrus without a fight, without even a siege.90 According to Cyrus, the same thing happened shortly afterward in Babylon itself, and with the blessing of the city god Marduk, no less:
Without a fight, he (Marduk) allowed him (Cyrus) to enter Shuanna (Babylon). . . . The people of Babylon, all of them, the entirety of the land of Sumer and Akkad, (as well as) the nobles and governor(s), bowed down before him (and) kissed his feet. They were happy at him being king (and) their faces shone.91
This sounds a bit exaggerated, but perhaps the relentless anti-Nabonidus propaganda put out by his enemies in Babylonia and magnified by Cyrus in his own campaign for the hearts of the Babylonians had worked. They had become convinced that they would be better off with a Persian ruler who claimed to have been chosen by Marduk than with a usurper from Harran who continued in his mission to prove that the moon god was the greater power. Nabonidus was arrested and exiled far from the city about which he seems to have been so ambivalent.
Rebellions and Changes in Babylonia
Initially, life in Babylonia was comfortable under the Achaemenid Persian kings. Cyrus did not allow his troops to loot the cities. He returned the gods to their home cities, allowed his new subjects plenty of autonomy and freedom of movement, proclaimed his love for Marduk, rebuilt damaged shrines and constructed new buildings in Babylon,92 and even participated in the Akitu festival. He put out a statement, on the Cyrus Cylinder, concerning his relationship with Babylonia. It was written in Akkadian, in cuneiform, and was so like a traditional Mesopotamian royal inscription, and so reverent toward Marduk, that one would be hard pressed to tell, from reading it, that Cyrus was Persian.93 He did not, however, choose to live in Babylon. Cyrus commissioned a brand-new capital city, Pasargadae—a place of columned halls and lush gardens—but he had it constructed in his homeland of Persia.94
When Cyrus died, nine years after taking control in Mesopotamia, his son Cambyses II (530–522 BCE) succeeded him. But there were grumblings now in Babylonia about Persian rule. The Babylonians had little experience being ruled from outside. The Assyrian kings had left a thoroughly bad impression, and now the Persian kings seemed less attractive than before. When Cambyses died in 522 BCE, some of the Babylonians rebelled, supporting first one local would-be king (calling himself, optimistically, Nebuchadnezzar III) and then another (Nebuchadnezzar IV).
They were not successful. The next Persian king, Darius I (522–486 BCE) made a point not just of executing both of the rebel Nebuchadnezzars but of boasting about it on public monuments. Darius’s most ostentatious monument (though also the one that was hardest to read, being halfway up a mountain on a steep cliff face) was at Bisitun in Iran. Under a huge image of himself, victorious over a number of rebels, he had the account inscribed in three different languages—Elamite, Old Persian (now written in a new cuneiform alphabet that bore no real connection to Akkadian cuneiform), and a rather clunky Akkadian (see Fig. 20.3). No human could have read the tiny script at such a distance, so presumably it was written for the gods and for the future. The future—our modern era—actually made good use of it, but not in the way Darius could have intended or even imagined. Since the Persian version could be understood without too much difficulty once the basic alphabetic code was broken, the Bisitun inscription provided the key to the decipherment of Akkadian in the early nineteenth century of our era, not unlike the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Fig. 20.3 Relief sculpture showing King Darius I of Persia, with a trilingal inscription, on a rock face in Bisitun, Iran. Early fifth century bce. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
In Sippar, Bel-uballit’s family’s fortunes began to change at this point. The political crises finally started having an impact on daily life at the harbor and in the Ebabbar temple. The two pretenders, the rebel Nebuchadnezzars, had been popular in Sippar and supported by the family that controlled the position of high priest there, so Darius punished the city by putting his own nominee into the role of high priest of the Ebabbar temple.95 Bel-uballit had died shortly before this, but his son still managed to profit from his businesses, in spite of the changed mood of the city. He even ended up as what was called a College Scribe of the Ebabbar temple—one of the most important people in the community.96
Life in Babylonia got worse under the rule of Darius’s son Xerxes (485–465 BCE). The Babylonians were thoroughly done with Persian rule, but the Persians were not even vaguely inclined to cut them free from the empire. Babylonia was proving to be a valuable source of income. Xerxes no longer made any pretense of being a Babylonian king. He didn’t worship Marduk, nor did he participate in the Akitu festival. Darius had built another beautiful new capital city at Persepolis in the heart of Persia, and Xerxes had every intention of living there while embellishing it further.
His only reason to come to Babylon was to crush another rebellion, which broke out in his second year, with two more local pretenders claiming the throne. Xerxes made it clear that this type of behavior was unacceptable. Babylonia was a Persian province, not an independent state.
You remember the beautiful ziggurat for Marduk that Nebuchadnezzar II had so carefully restored in the heart of Babylon, with its shining blue shrine at the top? Xerxes had his troops destroy its staircases.97 No one could now climb up to reach the shrine. Marduk was snubbed, dishonored; no longer the king of all gods, he was, in the eyes of the Persian king, a non-entity.
Old commercial families like the Egibis went out of business; their archives came to an end. Right up through the reign of Darius they had continued to trade, lend money, go to court, invest in businesses, and so on. Ishunnatu’s inn had still been in business in 520 BCE, during the first years of Darius’s reign. But the power of those old families came to an end. Cuneiform largely went out of use in the area around Babylon, an event known to scholars as the “end of archives.” Commerce, along with positions of power in the temples, switched to new individuals who would be more supportive of Persepolis. Only in the south, in the areas closer to the Persian Gulf, like Uruk, which had not rebelled, did cuneiform continue to be used to any extent.
Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Alexander
Throughout this period, Darius and Xerxes had been preoccupied with many details of their empire besides coping with rebellions in Babylon. Darius had sent his armies out across thousands of miles as he continued to expand the borders of the Persian Empire in all directions. Egypt had already been conquered by Persia in the reign of Cambyses, but Darius went farther south, so that Nubia was now under Persian control. His forces drove east all the way to western India, and west all the way to Libya in Africa, and to Thrace in Europe. The Persians must have seemed unstoppable. Their empire was now wildly bigger than anything the Assyrians had achieved. More than two dozen modern countries lie at least partly within its ancient boundaries at their greatest extent. In 490 BCE, the Persians confronted the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon. It must have been a shock to Darius when his army lost the battle, and a great morale boost to the Greeks. Their city-states weren’t unified under a single government and the idea that they could possibly fight off the fearsome Persian army must have seemed quixotic beforehand.
Whether Darius cared much about this loss is hard to tell. He was busy with a great many other things. He was constructing his new capital at Persepolis and rebuilding the ancient city of Susa; organizing the empire into provinces, all of which paid tribute to the king; creating military garrisons to respond to rebellions; building roads across the empire (notably the Royal Road, which covered 2,500 kilometers [1,550 miles] from Susa to Sardis); gathering information from a network of spies; and maintaining diplomatic relations with innumerable leaders inside and outside the borders of the empire. Darius must have been deluged with letters; his scribes were no doubt constantly at work keeping up with his correspondence. He took the model of empire created by the Assyrians and made it more efficient and, initially at least, less terrifying to its subjects.
During the reign of Xerxes, the Persians again tried to conquer Greece and to bring it into their empire, and again they failed. This seems to have made a much greater impression on the Greeks than it did on the Persians. Herodotus devoted his extensive “Histories” to the Persian War and all that led up to it, with the result that the war has been studied in the West ever since. The Persians didn’t continue to send troops to Greece; perhaps it didn’t seem worth the expense.
You may be wondering about the fate of cuneiform and the scribes, whose careers we have been following, in all this. The Persians had written some documents in cuneiform after they conquered Babylonia, but starting in the reign of Xerxes their kings made the decision to adopt Aramaic as their lingua franca. It was already spoken over much of the empire, after all. And Aramaic was written not on clay but mostly on leather and papyrus.98 No one at the time contemplated the fact that cuneiform documents, even documents written thousands of years earlier, would outlive the new Aramaic ones by millennia. We don’t look at stone inscriptions today and think, those will be here forever, whereas books in our libraries will disintegrate, and digital files will simply vanish when technology changes. Most of us don’t get the mad urge to write essays on clay tablets or stone stelas just so that the future has some record of us. Nor did they. Cuneiform was harder to learn and more time-consuming to write than the Aramaic script, and it recorded languages that were no longer spoken. The later Achaemenid kings had no interest at all in supporting cuneiform scholarship.99
The Persian Empire continued to thrive after the reign of Xerxes, but surviving sources become much less abundant after the switch to the use of Aramaic. Meanwhile the Greeks turned to fighting one another, while always glancing over their shoulders to check on Persia, and sometimes even appealing to Persia to help.
The man who brought an end to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the stages in his conquest, seem like inevitabilities in retrospect. Alexander of Macedon—“Alexander the Great” (336–323 BCE)—tore across the empire with his armies and engraved his name across the conquered lands and across history. Following in the footsteps of many Near Eastern kings who had built cities that they named for themselves, Alexander founded (or at least renamed) more than twenty cities, calling them all Alexandria. Some of these cities—Alexandria in Egypt, Kandahar in Afghanistan, Iskandariya in Iraq—still bear his name today. (Kandahar derives from Iskander, the local pronunciation of Alexander.) But it must have been a strange time to live through, and his victory may have seemed far from inevitable at the beginning.
It was Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon (359–336 BCE), who had conceived the idea of conquering Persia. He managed to unify Greece—far from an easy task, given the perpetual wars that had divided it—but was assassinated in 336 BCE, before he had been able to venture out eastward. His son Alexander, twenty years old, took the throne and launched into fulfilling his father’s plans. By the age of thirty-two, Alexander was dead, in Babylon, having brought the whole Persian Empire under his control in the course of ten years of almost constant military campaigns.
From here, this book could take a deep breath and embark on the discovery of this whole transformed world that had developed between the time of Darius and the conquest of the region by Alexander. We could stop and knock at the doors of many more individuals and eavesdrop on their lives. But we are not going to do that. This book has been held together by cuneiform records. We began with the invention of proto-cuneiform writing in the Uruk period, and we are now coming close to the end of the use of cuneiform, other than for esoteric scholarly purposes.
Once the Persians lost interest in using cuneiform for administration, the only people still using the script were in Mesopotamia, and there weren’t many of them. But some very dedicated scribes seem to have been determined not to let the ancient system of writing die. Generation after generation of scribal students learned to write the complicated signs in order to record texts in languages that no one spoke natively anymore.
With Alexander’s conquests and Macedonian rule over the Near East, Greek was introduced as a new language of administration, while Aramaic was still spoken on the streets. But as late as 61 BCE, scholars still, remarkably, continued to stare at the night sky and to record their astronomical observations in Akkadian, in cuneiform, continuing to add to the series of texts that had started 700 years earlier. Next to notes about the locations of planets, the moon, and so on, they recorded current political events. They were still looking for messages from the gods—the same gods who had been worshiped for thousands of years. But they lived in a time when Mesopotamia was under Parthian rule and the Roman Empire was the great power in the west. They lived in a time far beyond the world of this book, far beyond the world that was bound together by the use of cuneiform for communication and shared memory.
Rimut-Anu: Exorcist and Scholar in Uruk
Let’s travel, then, back to Uruk, where we began this journey. It had been abandoned a couple of times when life got bad in southern Mesopotamia, but was always resettled. Even when Alexander conquered Mesopotamia, Uruk stood in exactly the same place where it had been founded, atop the tell that included the remains of the city from every previous era.
It had changed a great deal over 3,000 years. After the rebellions during the reign of Xerxes, in the fifth century BCE, and after the “end of archives” in the north, the great Eanna complex was no longer dedicated to the goddess Ishtar (Inana). The main temple of Uruk had been renamed the Bit-Resh and it was dedicated entirely to the god of the heavens, Anu. Of course, Anu had been there all along—he had been the resident of an important temple in the Uruk period as well—but now he was the only great god of Uruk. The gods Marduk and Nabu, introduced by the Neo-Babylonian kings and even worshiped in the magnificent shrines of the city gods, had been removed. Prominent Babylonian families who had been living there lost their influence too. Uruk was looking backward to its origins, and Marduk had no place there.100 In fact, just as Nabonidus had believed that Sin was the greatest of the gods, so the priests in Uruk may have believed the same about Anu, even that Anu embodied gods who had previously been considered to be distinct deities. The Persians worshiped a great god named Ahuramazda who encompassed all virtuous gods. The Jews worshiped a single god named Yahweh. Their ideas were circulating across the Near East and may well have influenced new ideas about the Mesopotamian gods as well.
It is time for us to knock on one last door. Fittingly, it was a house of scribes. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, a family of scribes lived in a house in a residential neighborhood southeast of the temple to Anu in Uruk. They were the Shangu-Ninurta family.101 The section of their house that archaeologists were able to excavate included three rooms grouped around a big courtyard, and the size of the courtyard suggests that there was a lot more to the house that extended beyond the area that the archaeologists uncovered. The Shangu-Ninurtas weren’t the only scholarly family to live in the house; a later family of cuneiform-writing professionals occupied it in the late fourth century BCE, after Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire.102
The Shangu-Ninurta family probably took a lot of their cuneiform tablets with them when they moved out, around 420 BCE, but about 160 of their tablets remained in the house for archaeologists eventually to find. Some of them had been abandoned or scattered by later residents, but some had been put into clay jars by the Shangu-Ninurtas and carefully buried, as though the family intended to return to get them (though they never did). Reading their tablets, we are once again in the company of a family, and of a group of scribes who consciously copied documents that they felt were important to keep, important to study, important to pass down to the future. They could have had no idea just how far into the future their efforts would reverberate. Scribes like those of the Shangu-Ninurta family have been our guides to so much of their world. But there were fewer such scribes now, and they were increasingly isolated in their use of cuneiform. The types of contracts, administrative lists, letters, and memos on which so much of this book has been based were still being written, but, as we have seen, usually in the easier alphabetic scripts, in languages that people actually spoke, and on more ephemeral materials.
Three generations of men in the family served as priests known as ashipus, or “exorcists.” You may recall that we encountered an ashipu who worked for Esarhaddon. They were scholars who focused on healing people, largely through incantations, prayers, and rituals, though they could also use medicine as well.103 The men of the family were highly educated and respected, continuing a tradition that went back for eons. One of them was named Rimut-Anu. He was in the middle generation, son of the patriarch Shamash-iddin, brother to a third ashipu, and uncle to a fourth.104 They all seem to have lived and worked in the house. There must have been women in the family as well, but unfortunately they aren’t mentioned in the tablets. Given how many women we have met along the way, I was hoping to end the book with a family that included prominent women, but it was not to be. Perhaps it’s fitting, though; women’s roles outside the household had become more limited over time.
The library of the Shangu-Ninurtas included, as you might expect, plenty of incantations, along with prescriptions and rituals that the men used in their work, but they also owned omen texts, lexical lists, hymns, and even astronomical and mathematical documents—the kinds that scribes had learned in school for as long as there had been schools. The library also included a handful of tablets that had come from Babylon.105 They received documents that moved among a network of scholars; in spite of the decline in cuneiform scholarship in the north, the scribes in Uruk were not alone.
One document is known as the “Ashipu’s Handbook,” and the version of it in the household library had been copied by Rimut-Anu. This was a well-known work at the time, among ashipus, one that included a catalog of about 200 texts that were important to their work. Rimut-Anu had access to about fifty of these, to judge from what was found in the house. It’s possible, though, that more of them might have been kept on wax-covered wooden boards,106 and others might have been taken by the family when they left. The handbook laid out the rituals and responsibilities of the ashipu, including “the totality of wisdom (and) the secret of exorcism.”107 It noted that an exorcist performed treatments against ten specific ailments, including those called “falling sickness . . . Hand of a god . . . Evil spirit, Hand of a curse, and Hand of humanity.” All of these would have been familiar to Rimut-Anu. He recognized their symptoms and knew the secret ways to bring the person back to health. But his training extended far beyond that. An ashipu understood how to treat “the whole range of affliction(s) of a sick person, against seizure of fever and against women’s afflictions.” If a person was sick, an ashipu understood how to restore him or her to health, how to manage the very gods or demons who caused the sickness. This was still absolutely real to the Mesopotamians. It was not some sort of laughable superstition or magic. They were intelligent people and they had seen patients get well as a result of the ministrations of the ashipu. The gods controlled everything, in their eyes; it would have been foolish not to bring in the man who knew the right words to speak, the right actions to take, to get the gods’ attention and to give the patient the best chance at recovery.
Rimut-Anu’s knowledge, and that of his father, brother, and nephew, included more than just what they needed for their profession. They copied and studied classic texts in order to master ancient knowledge, some of it not practical at all. The handbook acknowledged this, noting that “you will interpret the commentaries, the glosses and the compositions in Emesal, you will learn to research the rituals in Sumerian and Akkadian.”108 Sumerian had been a dead language for about 1,500 years, and Emesal was a dialect of Sumerian, one that had long ago been used by the lamentation priests. As Akkadian, too, was going out of use, these scholars of ancient knowledge may have felt that they were fighting a tide of ignorance, holding on to ancient wisdom in a modern age that was losing track of these important ideas. The handbook assured the ashipu that he would be “wise, erudite” and that “the gods of exorcism will give expanded intelligence.” The world in which Rimut-Anu lived was full of new ideas that were being written down in other languages and other scripts, while the study of ancient cuneiform wisdom was a dying art, practiced by fewer and fewer scholars who had decreasing access to one another and to their classic texts.109
The last few lines of the handbook tablet are touching. Rimut-Anu was finishing up his careful copy, coming to the benediction—the blessing on himself, in fact, that had been penned by an earlier scholar. “May . . . his tutelary god, be good! His name will be pronounced until distant days.” Did this mean the name of the tutelary god, or the name of the exorcist? Rimut-Anu may have hoped that it would be his own name that would be kept alive into the unknown future, as a result of his careful efforts. He wasn’t wrong.
As he sat in the room of his house in Uruk, he looked back over the original tablet that he was copying and put it next to his clean new version. Was everything correct? Had he missed any signs? It looked good. He picked up his stylus and added the colophon, the only lines that he did not copy from the original document. He wrote, “In accordance with the (original) tablet. Duplicate written and checked and properly executed.” Anyone using the tablet in their work as an ashipu, and anyone who came across this tablet in the future, could be assured that he had done it carefully. Then he signed his name: “Rimut-Anu, [son of] Shamash-iddin, descendant of Shangu-Ninurta.”
All that was left was the date and the place. “Uruk,” he wrote. He must have known that he was living in the oldest city on Earth. His education had taught him that. Modern archaeologists have confirmed it. He certainly did not think of himself as living in the ancient world. He knew about the ancient world—he studied it every day. His world, his life, were in the modern new era of the Persian kings. For better or worse, they seemed to be in Mesopotamia to stay. He wouldn’t have dreamed that a century later his city would be ruled by a dynasty from Greece. Greece! Impossible, not even in the realm of imagining. Greece was a tiny, unimportant, blip of a place at the edge of the mighty Persian Empire, a land not even ruled by a single government. Uruk, its gods, its language, and its literature would surely live on forever. Rimut-Anu put down his stylus.