The Babylonians: Gate of the God — Sleep Podcast

One name, and everyone knows it: Babylon. The city of a famous lawgiver and a famous tower — and of a sky-keeping craft so precise that the divisions of it are still running in the room with you tonight.

In this episode we sit with the Babylonians for a long, slow walk: the city at the edge of the marsh, and the politics of the canals; the god Marduk, and the poem that wrote the argument for why his city came first; Hammurabi, the shepherd king — and his black stone in Paris, two hundred and eighty-two laws of it, and the honest debate about what the stone actually was; the Venus tablet, the star catalogue, the Saros, and the base of sixty that your wristwatch is still counting in; the week that was not a week; the eclipse over the Halys; the glazed gate and the processional way; the gardens that may not have been there; the exile, the last king, and the fall without a battle; and the long quiet — until the count that stayed.

A bedtime-history episode from The Slow Ages, narrated at the edge of sleep.

Sources: Louvre (stele SB 8 object record and feature page); British Museum (Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa K.160; Cyrus Cylinder 90920); Reiner & Pingree, Enūma Anu Enlil Tablet 63, the Venus Tablet of Ammiṣaduqa (1975); Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (1975); Aaboe, Episodes from the Early History of Astronomy (1996); Robson, "Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Babylon" (2001); Mansfield & Wildberger (2017); Ossendrijver, Science 351 (2016); Brack-Bernsen & Steele, Centaurus 47 (2005); Høyrup's sexagesimal tradition (Friberg 2019); Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East; Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (1995); Westbrook, Kent Law Review (2003); George, The Babylonian Genesis (2003); Dalley, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (2013); Finkel, The Cyrus Cylinder (2009); Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (1914); Pedersén, Iraq (2023); Hunger & de Jong, ZA 104 (2014).