Baker, H.D. 2012. The Neo-Babylonian Empire

2014

This article examines new approaches to investigating the fabric of the Babylonian cities, based on both archaeological and written sources. It focuses on the physical composition of the non-monumental sectors of the city, emphasising the agency of the local inhabitants in shaping their immediate environment and examining the processes by which houses and neighbourhoods were transformed over time.

Babylonian Archaeologists of the(ir) Mesopotamian Past That ancient Mesopotamians had a clear sense of historical tradition, and were wont to use that tradition for their own purposes, will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the scholarly literature of the field. Studies of the reception of the third-millennium BC ruler Sargon of Agade, his sons, and his grandson Naram-Sln (e.g., Glassner 1986), for example, show how the dynasty was at times reviled, at times reified as a golden age of the past. The Babylonians of the mid-first millennium BCE have actually been called "antiquarians" , particularly engaged with their past (Clay 1912; Unger 1931 : 227); but the archaeological component of their activities has not been investigated systematically. In the present paper, 1would like to move beyond issues of the availability of sources and an awareness of the past, to review the actual practice of excavation as both a technique and a strategy for recovery of the past in ancient times. The evidence is largely textual, and has generally been the concern of text-based historians, as distinct from archaeologists. Yet when this evidence is looked at from the perspective of ancient claims to knowledge it reinforces the premise that in the first millennium BC at least, under the guise of royal patronage and purpose, the Babylonian past was actively sought in the field. The resultant finds then served a variety of purposes that bear a rather striking resemblance to our understanding of the" uses of the past in the present" today. What is demonstrable is that they, like us, mounted campaigns to actively recover ancient remains; and that they declared themselves as having dug in order to reveal works attributed to the ancients. Finally, they also, like at least some of us, proclaimed these finds to be the results of a (divinely directed) research design geared to an empirical and positivist recovery of true "traces" of the past-that is, a decidedly processual as distinct from post-processual set of assumptions! For late zo" century archaeologists of our era, excavations are expected to yield evidence of ancient systems of cognition through patterns of behavior manifest by material culture: architecture, artifacts and texts. So too the Babylonians. While they may not have subjected their finds to modem chemical, osteological, or paleobotanical analysis, they did very much claim to have discovered both ancient materials and evidence of ancient cognition, and to have studied them accordingly. In what follows, I shall cite a number of cases to demonstrate: I. The mounting of Field Campaigns, II. The exposure of Architectural Remains, III. The discovery of Texts and Artifacts, which, once found, were subject to analysis, and IV. The subsequent Display of a selected sample of finds.

Mesopotamian history tends to be phrased in terms of stages: Early Dynastic city-states replaced by imperial Akkad, bureaucratic Ur III replaced by the more individualistic Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods thanks to the influence of the Amorites, etc. Lost in this process is a sense of the longue duree of Mesopotamian civilization, the basic and largely unchanging aspects of its society, economy and politics. In this paper I will explore one of these transitions, that between Ur III and Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian times, by examining the nexus between the cuneiform and archaeological records.

The World of Achaemenid Persia. History, Art and Society in Iran and the Ancient Near East, 2010

The Babylonian World, 2000

The Babylonian World. The built environment/ Architecture.

Five issues pertaining to the history of Babylonia in the Chaldean and early Achaemenid periods (the so-called "long 6th century BCE") are discussed below. The first two concern the connections of Babylonia with the West, viz. the Levant and Egypt. It is argued here that Adad of Hallab, who was worshipped in Borsippa, refers to the storm deity of Aleppo, and not to a deity of a small north Babylonian settlement as was suspected earlier. The subsequent section discusses the incorporation of the Egyptian prisoners of war in the workforce of the Babylonian . = son; w. = witness; wi. = wife. Images of the tablets are found on the web: CBS = http://cdli.ucla.edu, museum no. in Alphabets, Texts and Artifacts; Studies Presented to Benjamin Sass temples. They were organized in decuries like the indigenous and other workmen. The third section is another step in my pursuit of the ever-increasing material concerning the Chaldeo-Arameans. They emerged as a significant population group in Babylonia during the first millennium BCE alongside the long-established Babylonian urbanites. The penultimate section is about a new chief administrator of Esaggila, the temple of the capital of Babylon, and an unknown stage in the career of the future king Neriglissar. The last section contains information about prices of several items.

Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies Journal, 2022

This paper examines the transmission history of plans depicting the city layout of Babylon. It argues that most published plans of Babylon incorporate elements of reconstruction—especially of the city’s streets—that are not supported by the archaeological and written evidence.