The sociocultural conditions of the Hellenistic period stimulated creativity, research, and science.Īmong these texts we find tablets and fragments, mostly unpublished, relating to aspects of the rituals, ceremonies, and topography of Babylonian temples. Scholars working in the Esagil not only preserved and safeguarded this knowledge, but also researched and produced new reference works. The Esagil temple library contained a wide selection of technical texts (astronomy, mathematics, medicine, religion, exorcism, divination), along with a collection of literary and historical texts. This activity and dynamism in science and research, in the cultivation of knowledge of all sorts, and in literary and scientific output took place in the temples, which played a key role in Babylonian social and intellectual life and in the preservation of its ancient cultural and literary heritage. Indeed, the period’s intellectual activity and scientific and literary production single it out as one of the crowning moments in Babylonian history. While it was undermined by centuries of foreign cultural influence and reduced to priestly settings, Sumerian-Akkadian culture was not to disappear for some time. With political power in foreign hands and the region’s capital shifted to Seleucia-on-Tigris at the end of the 4th century BCE, Babylon would never again be the great metropolis from which, as in the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, the destinies of much of the Near East had been decided. The Seleucids, Alexander’s successors in Syria and Mesopotamia, changed Babylonia’s cultural and social configuration. Much more consequential was the incorporation of the huge territory into the empire of Alexander the Great (331 BCE). This elitist, urban culture revolved around political power (the crown) and religious power (the temples), while the bulk of the population expressed itself in Aramaic, whose language and writing system (generally on perishable materials) had been replacing Akkadian throughout the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. It marked the end of the last independent state in Babylonia and the progressive decline of a centuries-old official culture passed down through the Akkadian and Sumerian languages in cuneiform script on clay tablets. The Persian conquest of Babylonia (539 BCE) brought radical transformation to Mesopotamia.
Tablet BM 92704 (AN01324027), ©Trustees of the British Museum. Tablet BM 92686 (AN01324116), ©Trustees of the British Museum. Tablet BM 32485 (AN310598001), ©Trustees of the British Museum. The texts include a very important group on rituals relating to the other temples of Babylon, which provide in-depth descriptions of the procedures and actions that must be performed in worship. Scholars assume that all the documents once belonged to the Esagil temple library, which operated between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE as a veritable repository of “scientific excellence” on a par with the celebrated library of Alexandria. The tablets, many of which now reside in the British Museum, contain texts addressing the entire curriculum of sciences and arts that ancient scribes could master. The Late Babylonian period (late 1st millennium BCE) is one of the most familiar to historians and philologists of ancient Mesopotamia because of the vast number of cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian that have come down to us.Ī large number of tablets, roughly 3,500 to 4,000, were unearthed in the 19th century during excavations of Babylon, specifically in the vicinity of the Esagil temple, dedicated to worship of Babylonia’s patron god Marduk. What Sorts of Rituals Really Went on Inside Late Babylonian Temples? By Rocío Da Riva ASOR-AFFILIATED RESEARCH CENTERS FELLOWSHIPS.MEMBERSHIP & ANNUAL MEETING SCHOLARSHIPS.
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