NEBUCHADNEZZAR KING OF BABYLON

NEBUCHADNEZZAR

KING OF  BABYLON

THE time of Babylon's greatest material wealth and splendour, and the period which is reflected in much of the later tradition about Babylon, was the reign of Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.).

At the time of Nebuchadnezzar the city of Babylon spread out on both sides of the Euphrates. What we may call the 'old city' was the part on the east bank, and this was somewhat larger than the 'new city' opposite.

 the 'tower of Babel' story of the Bible (Genesis xi 1-9), though of course the Biblical tradition relates to a period over 2000 years before Nebuchadnezzar. This great tower, with a small temple on its summit, rose to a height of almost 300 feet and dominated the view across the plain for many miles around. 

 'House of the Raised Head'. This contained not only the principal shrine sacred to the city-god Marduk (otherwise called Bel, 'The Lord'), but also others sacred to Marduk's son Nabu 

Nebuchadnezzar himself records that he overlaid the whole of its interior, including the rafters, with gold.

In the northern part of the old city, just inside the inner walls, stood the principal palace of Nebuchadnezzar. As was usual in the ancient Near East, this was not only a royal residence but also a garrison and an administrative centre. Basically this palace  was built round a series of five courtyards, used respectively  for the garrison, the secretariat, the State rooms, the King's private quarters, and the women's apartments or harem.

Babylon was recognised by its inhabitants as being made up of a number of distinct districts, the names The streets of Babylon, of which twenty-four.  a  road is usually known as the Processional Way  Winding through the old city, making a wide curve from its inlet from the Euphrates in the north-west corner to the point at which it passed through the inner wall in the south-east, was the ancient canal Libil-hegalla, whose name meant 'May it bring prosperity'. The origin of this canal may well have gone back to Hammurabi 1200 years before, but it was Nebuchadnezzar who restored it,

The whole city was protected by formidable fortifications. Around the main built-up area on both sides of the Euphrates ran a powerful defensive system consisting of a double wall of unbaked brick with an encircling moat. The inner part of this double wall was 21 feet thick, with towers regularly placed every 59 feet. Separated by a space of 24 feet was the outer part of the wall, 12 feet thick, with towers every 67 feet. Outside the walls came the moat, with its bed lined with burnt brick and bitumen; the source of its water was of course the Euphrates. Entrance to the city was through the Ishtar Gate

The total population of Babylon at the time of Nebuchadnezzar  indicate a population of up to 200,000  which estimates the population of Nineveh, a comparable capital, at 120,000.

Some of the farms were let out to farmers who paid rent in the form of a share of the produce, whilst others were worked by the temple's own slaves. It was on the farms that the majority of the temple slaves were employed, as agricultural labourers engaged in the seasonal round of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing, as herdsmen to tend the temple flocks and herds, as fowlers and fishermen, or as blacksmiths and carpenters to repair the ploughs

The duties of male private slaves mainly involved manual labour, and would depend to some extent upon the trade or craft of the owner. A female slave, when young, would probably act not only as a maid to the lady of the house but also as a concubine of either the master of the house or one of the teenage sons. Any children born to the slave-girl would become slaves unless the head of the family formally accepted them as his own children, which would probably only happen if his wife were childless. When the slave-girl grew old and ugly, she would come in for such duties as grinding the corn, drawing the water, and so on. The average household at the time of Nebuchadnezzar had two or three slaves, though of course an average does not tell the whole story: wealthy families might own considerably more and poor families none. We do find some wealthy families owning a hundred or more slaves, but most of these would have been used on the land or in workshops and would not have been included in the household.

Free men might engage in a wide range of crafts or professions, though this is not the same as saying that any particular man had a wide choice of craft or profession. The hereditary principle was very strong, and the chances were very much that a man would follow in his father's footsteps. Among the crafts and professions we find mentioned in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar are matmakers, weavers, stone-masons, laundryman, goldsmiths, fishermen, boatmen, leather-workers and shoemakers, confectioners, bakers, brewers, oil-pressers, brickmakers, blacksmiths and coppersmiths, millers, fowlers, carpenters, canal-diggers, and sheep-shearers, to mention but  few.

At the apex of society was the royal court and the King, Nebuchadnezzar himself. Nebuchadnezzar is most famous as a brilliant strategist and general, but nothing will be said here about his army or his military activities, as the details would be too similar to those of the Assyrian army . Besides being a great soldier, Nebuchadnezzar was a great builder, and most of the palaces, temples, fortifications and canals of Babylon were restored during his reign

the Greek traveller Herodotus, writing about a century after Nebuchadnezzar, many of the houses in Babylon were of three or four storeys. If this, or anything approaching it, was true of the time of Nebuchadnezzar, then the upper storeys may possibly have consisted of light timber structures, perhaps to ensure privacy to members of the household sleeping on the roof in the summer. There is no archaeological evidence of stairs to upper storeys, but this does not prove there were no upper storeys, as stairs could well have been made of wood, which is far less likely to leave traces than stone or brick

Babylonians who could afford it had four meals a day, a substantial breakfast, a light lunch, and a heavy meal and a light snack again in the evening. A meal began with a slave pouring  water over the hands of those dining, into a basin beneath. The family group then sat round the table, and  the head of the family said a grace calling upon certain gods. The food was then placed on the table, mainly in one large vessel, from which everyone helped himself, generally using fingers, though knives, forks and spoons were not unknown in ancient Babylonia. Largely the meal consisted of vegetable products. Beef, mutton and goat-meat were regular items of the diet of the gods, and also (contrary to the statement of some other books) of those Babylonians who could afford it, though the poorer people may seldom have eaten red meat, except at religious festivals. Pig-meat was taboo to all the gods, but humans still ate it, and since pigs wandered about the streets semi-wild as scavengers, poor people probably had the chance of eating pork much more often than they did beef. The Euphrates abounded (and still does) with fish of various edible species, some of them reaching a weight of 200 pounds, and we know there were professional fishermen at this time, so that we may conclude that fish was a common item of diet and, of course, a valuable source of protein(105). Of poultry and game, ducks, geese, pigeons and partridges had always been available, and the hen had been introduced a century or so before Nebuchadnezzar, so that it was probably quite common by this time. The fish may have been split open and grilled over a charcoal fire, whilst the meat and poultry were generally boiled in a pot to make a stew.

 The main part of most meals, and the whole of many meals for poor people, consisted of vegetable products. The main source of carbohydrate was barley bread, made by slapping lumps of unleavened dough on to the inside of a large pot heated in a fire to form a primitive oven. A method which is basically the same as the Babylonian one is still used in Iraq, and it produces a slab of bread, very appetising when fresh, which looks rather like a pancake cooked crisp. Coarse barley meal was also cooked with water to produce a kind of porridge or gruel. Various puddings and cakes were made with a basis of such ingredients as flour, olive oil or sesame oil, date-syrup, and lard. Date-syrup was date juice pressed out and allowed to evaporate to a semi-solid consistency; this, and dates in other forms, adequately took the place of the prepared sugar in our diet. Honey from bees was known, and the honey-bee had in fact been domesticated in Mesopotamia for several centuries by the time of Nebuchadnezzar, but the honey from bees was still of less economic importance than their wax. Amongst fruit and vegetables eaten may be mentioned onions, garlic, gherkins of various kinds, peas and beans, lettuces, radishes, pomegranates, figs, grapes, and apricots.

The main drink was beer, though cold water was by no means despised. Beer was available in many different varieties, depending upon the method of preparation and the particular herbs used to flavour it. Alcoholic beverages were also made from dates. Wine made from grapes had long been known, but it was more expensive than date-wine, as the better qualities of it had to be imported from cooler climates. A letter of this period contains a complaint about a consignment of wine which had been sent in a ship normally used for carrying bitumen; the stench of the bitumen had apparently tainted the wine

After a meal the diners wiped their mouths on table-napkins, and the slaves again poured water over their hands. If it was the midday meal, the diners would then go to their bedrooms for a siesta, which was very necessary, since for much of the year the heat is intolerable in Iraq during the early afternoon: this was so commonly accepted that one of the Babylonian words for midday meant in fact 'the time of lying down'.

How did an average Babylonian actually spend his day? There are of course many details we do not know, but it is possible to put together a general outline in which all the individual facts are authentic. Let us consider a certain Bel-ibni, who was, we may suppose, a skilled goldsmith. Bel-ibni and his wife woke up just before dawn, kissed each other and the children, and then went for a bath, which they completed by rubbing themselves down with olive oil and perfumes. The wife then superintended the slaves in the production of breakfast, whilst Bel-ibni and the boys of the family went on to the roof to prostrate themselves before the rising sun. After breakfast Bel-ibni went along to a small temple near by, taking, for an offering due from him, a lamb which he had bought the previous day and which had been tied up in the courtyard all night. As he entered the temple courtyard he saw a disturbance going on: a man had just been arrested by the temple guards for attempting to approach a certain part of the temple without performing the appropriate ceremonial. Bel-ibni handed over his lamb to a temple official, whose scribe quickly drew up a receipt on a small clay tablet, at the same time entering a note of the source of the lamb on a much larger tablet destined for the temple's annual records. This duty done, Bel-ibni then made his way towards the great city-temple Esagila, passing near the river embankment, where he stopped for a moment to watch the bustle of the shipping. At the quay. serving Esagila a foreign ship which had come up from the Persian Gulf was unloading a cargo of ingots of copper; a smaller vessel which had brought a load of alum down from Carchemish was waiting its turn, and another one was being loaded with sesame destined for the temple of one of the cities downstream from Babylon. Leaving the riverside

As Bel-ibni's day had begun at about five a.m. by our time, it was now still before eight. At his workshop in the goldsmiths' bazaar, Bel-ibni found his oldest son Kudda awaiting him, with the charcoal brazier used for melting the metal already blown into life with bellows. Bel-ibni and his son whispered a short traditional incantation in the name of the patron-god of the goldsmiths, and then placed the gold in a terracotta crucible, and moved the crucible gradually into the hottest part of the charcoal. Bel-ibni's son applied himself, as his father had taught him, to the blowpipe, and soon had the charcoal around the crucible at a white heat. Bel-ibni had  meanwhile taken the appropriate moulds from the terracotta box in which he kept his stock-in-trade, and had set these up in a bowl of sand and put the whole lot to heat up, so that the molten metal should not crack the moulds. Finally the gold in the crucible melted, and Bel-ibni took tongs and lifted out the crucible, pouring its molten contents carefully into the moulds. The gold was given time to set and cool off, and the ornaments were then withdrawn from their moulds. With the aid of files, chisels, punches and light hammers, gold and silver wire, solder and heat judiciously applied with the blowpipe, Bel-ibni and his son converted the plain castings into fine examples of Babylonian embossed and engraved ornamentation and filigree work.

Bel-ibni and Kudda arrived home to find Bel-ibni's wife in some excitement. The new slave-girl, whom Bel-ibni had only bought a fortnight before, had had an epileptic fit during the morning. This was annoying, as Bel-ibni had thought she was a promising girl as concubine for Kudda, who was fourteen and just becoming interested in such things, but there was no financial loss involved, since the girl carried a three-month guarantee against such symptoms and Bel-ibni had only to return her to get his money back.
Bel-ibni and his wife, Kudda and the younger son and daughter, now had their light lunch around the table in the main room, as already described. Afterwards Bel-ibni and his wife went to their bedroom for the siesta. The heat outside was now intolerable, but within the massive walls of the rooms, with their thick mud roofs and small ventilation openings, the temperature remained quite comfortable. Tired after the work and heat of the morning, Belibni and his wife soon fell asleep. They awoke refreshed and made love: this was not only a pleasure but also a positive duty. Bel-ibni's wife was five months pregnant, and the omen collections stated that this was a highly favourable time for this activity.

Bel-ibni now had another bath, and with Kudda returned for further work in the goldsmiths' bazaar. At dusk they returned home for the main evening meal. Tonight there was a minor festival at the local temple, and so after the meal all the members of the family put on their best clothing, arranged their hair-styles with special care, and went along to join in the festivities. There seems to be no proof that at this period Bel-ibni's wife would have had to be veiled in public, although at earlier periods of Babylonian and Assyrian history this was certainly usual.
The temple courtyard flickered in the light of torches made of reeds soaked in crude bitumen, and there was a great throng of people, most of them neighbours known to Bel-ibni, dancing and singing. In the entrance to the main shrine at one side of the courtyard the priests inspected a bull with its legs tied, all ready for slaughter. Silence fell as they began intoning a long series of ritual texts, many of them quite unintelligible to anyone listening, since they were in the dead language Sumerian. The sense of the ritual was none the less not lost on the crowd, for a group of masked priests performed a series of symbolic fights and dances reflecting the mythological allusions contained in the words of the ritual. As one of the actors fell to the ground in mimic death the crowd would break out in lamentation, or when a god was seen to overcome the evil powers opposing him the watchers broke into cries of joy.

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