Yet enough remains, too, to see the reality behind this myth, even for the first Babylonian empire. The great palace of Mari is an outstanding example; walls in places 40 feet thick surrounded courtyards, 300 or so rooms forming a complex drained by bitumen-lined pipes running 30 feet deep. It covered an area measuring 150 yards by 200 plus and is the fi nest evidence of the authority the monarch had come to enjoy. In this palace, too, were found great quantities of clay tablets whose writing reveals the business and detail which government embraces by this period.
Many more tablets survive from the fi rst Babylonian empire than from its predecessors or immediate successors. They provide the detail which enables us to know this civilization better (it has been pointed out) than we know some European countries of a thousand years ago. They contribute evidence of the life of the mind in Babylon, too. It was then that the Epic of Gilgamesh took the shape in which we know it. The Babylonians gave cuneiform script a syllabic form, thus enormously increasing its fl exibility and usefulness. Their astrology pushed forward the observation of nature and left another myth behind, that of the wisdom of the Chaldeans, a name sometimes misleadingly given to the Babylonians.
Hoping to understand their destinies by scanning the stars, the Babylonians built up a science – astronomy – and established an important series of observations which was another major legacy of their culture. It took centuries to accumulate after its remote beginnings in Ur, but by 1000 BCthe prediction of lunar eclipses was possible and within another two or three centuries the path of the sun and some of the planets had been plotted with remarkable accuracy against the positions of the apparently fixed stars. This was a scientific tradition refl ected in Babylonian mathematics, which has passed on to us the sexagesimal system of Sumer in our circle of 360 degrees and the hour of 60minutes. The Babylonians also worked out mathematical tables and an algebraic geometry of great practical utility and it seems likely they invented the sundial, the earliest known instrument for measuring the passage of time.
Astronomy began in the temple, in the contemplation of celestial movements announcing the advent of festivals of fertility and sowing, and Babylonian religion held close to the Sumerian tradition. Like the old cities, Babylon had a civic god, Marduk; gradually he elbowed his way to the front among his Mesopotamian rivals. This took a long time. Hammurabi said (signifi cantly) that Anu and Enlil, the Sumerian gods, had conferred the headship of the Mesopotamian pantheon upon Marduk, much as they had bidden him to rule over all men for their good. Subsequent vicissitudes (sometimes accompanied by the abduction of his statue by invaders) obscured Marduk’s status, but after the twelfth century BCit was usually unquestioned.
Meanwhile, Sumerian tradition remained alive well into the first millennium BC in the use of Sumerian in the Babylonian liturgies, in the names of the gods and the attributions they enjoyed. Babylonian cosmogony began, like that of Sumer, with the creation of the world from watery waste (the name of one god meant ‘silt’) and the eventual fabrication of Man as the slave of the gods. In one version, gods turned men out like bricks, from clay moulds. It was a world picture suited to absolute monarchy, where kings exercised power like that of gods over the men who toiled to build their palaces and sustained a hierarchy of offi cials and great men which mirrored that of the heavens.
Johannes Brahms: Aims and Achievements
