What was it like to live in Babylon?
November 21, 2011 1:57 PM   Subscribe

What was it like to live in Babylon?

A friend of mine is writing a story, and to get a proper feel for the setting he'd like to read more about life and culture in the city of Babylon. What books, articles, websites, etc. would you recommend to learn more about the city, specifically? Any topic from cooking to government to architecture to religious practice and so on is fair game.
posted by Lifeson to Grab Bag (10 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
When? The city was inhabited for about 2500 years.
posted by oinopaponton at 2:04 PM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


What time period? Babylon's history spans from 1867 BC to 700 AD.
posted by goethean at 2:04 PM on November 21, 2011


I don't know how useful this is for research purposes, but there's a character in the book Mendoza in Hollywood by Kage Baker who lived through Babylon, and she has an odd flashback while watching a movie about it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:09 PM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


There's a book called Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia and another called Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. They might be helpful.
posted by Jehan at 2:14 PM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Is there a period that can be called the golden age of Babylon? Material about the city at its largest and most successful would be preferable, but I don't know what point in its history that would be. I suppose a good survey of the rise and fall of Babylon would be a good option as well.
posted by Lifeson at 2:17 PM on November 21, 2011


While not really accurate, C. Card has much to say about the subject, and it kind of involves you with sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you.

Okay on a more serious side, not knowing what your friend is writing, a bit of gentle humored mocking of popular culture whilst also referring to historical fact does touch upon a Douglas Adams-esque whimsy.

And I found this after a few minutes search: http://history-world.org/babylonia.htm
posted by elendil71 at 2:18 PM on November 21, 2011


Snellen's 'Life in the Ancient Near East' is a mostly economic and business treatment of the various periods and may help your friend narrow down what period he wants to do, but don't buy it, try to find a library that can get it for you.

The Old Babylonian period is about 2000 -1600 BCE, the Middle Babylonian 1375-1155 BCE, and the Neo-Babylonian (which I personally like the best, but that's a bias of my undergraduate degree studies in trade) is much later and shorter, 625-539 BCE. The OB period is at its best during the reign of Hammurabi, the MB is kind of half-Assyrian, and wasn't quite as hot, and NB is a bit more interesting in the cultural changes and greater access to trade and organization.
posted by cobaltnine at 3:53 PM on November 21, 2011


The novel 'Creation' by Gore Vidal is historical fiction, but it has some pretty interesting stuff about Babylonian culture around 500 BC. Nice reference to ancient banking credit used to finance warfare and trade missions.
posted by ovvl at 5:41 PM on November 21, 2011


In the older periods, everyone would fit into one of the following categories, listed in order of power/wealth:

-agricultural producers/peasants (not quite serfs, but close), living outside the city proper. Most of their produce would go to temple or palace granaries, where it would be doled out to the rest of the population in a ration system. This is before industrial agriculture made farming possible without huge amounts of human labor, so the vast majority of the population was part of this group.
-craftsmen. They crafted things, and would usually be paid in grain via the ration system, especially if they were employed by temples or the royal family.
-merchants/"entrepreneurs." This population (which would have been very small) steadily increases over the course of the second millennium, and had ties with other cities and states in the Near East and even into the Mediterranean.
-scribes. They would be trained in cuneiform writing and the Sumerian and Akkadian languages (and maybe a few more) from a young age, and were instrumental in the day-to-day functioning of the state, including the rationing system I mentioned above as well as international relations. They were pretty much the backbone of the state bureaucracy.
-priests. They did priesty things at temples, which also functioned as administrative centers and could own large amounts of farmland, which would be farmed by the peasants mentioned above.
-royal family and associated aristocratic relatives. They were part of an international elite in the earlier parts of Babylonian history, which means that they intermarried with Egyptian/Hittite/whatever royal families. They didn't engage with the rest of society all that much, but were huge landowners.

As for day-to-day life, it would completely depend on your social class. If you were a member of the royal family, you'd spend your time lounging around on fancy furniture, hunting, and sometimes getting murdered in palace intrigues. If you were a peasant, you'd farm all day, every day. If you were a merchant, you might get to travel around to exotic places-- or you might never leave your neighborhood and just sell the cloth your wife weaves.
posted by oinopaponton at 6:20 PM on November 21, 2011


Um, and soldiers. Don't forget the soldiers. Travel to beautiful foreign places! Meet exotic peoples and kill/enslave them!
posted by likeso at 8:40 PM on November 21, 2011


« Older Best pub trivia in Philadelphia?   |   Gnorthern California Holiday Gnocchi? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.