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Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered
- wglb 1y agoSource article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0021088924000238/type/journal_article https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...
- echelon 1y agoThis is great! Thank you.
- idoubtit 1y agoThank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org. I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous. "Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells. "The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
- catlikesshrimp 1y agoThey did cite the source at the bottom of the phys.org page (The source article and the link) "More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
- treve 1y agoLegend has a specific meaning: > A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated. Even though it's BS I think it's still interesting to read how people relate to the story.
- metalman 1y agothe "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders. Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull". Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla"......... quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
- stevenwoo 1y agoYou might enjoy Emily Wilson’s take on the Gilgamesh/Innana stories, though I went in blind and was mostly ignorant.
- sramsay 1y ago> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous. Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous. But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
- dzdt 1y agoI was wondering about the headline date "missing for a millennium", as this Babylon is much older than 1000 years. From the article it seems like "two millenia" is more accurate: "The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE"
- mechanicum 1y agoI don’t think that necessarily follows. The age of the surviving fragments today isn’t the whole story. We could presumably infer it still wasn’t “missing” as recently as a thousand years ago from later sources referring to it, even if the specific text (or oral tradition) those authors knew of hasn’t survived. Like how we know about some of now lost Greek plays, originally written in the 5th century BC, because they were still being performed in Imperial Rome and writers of that time described them, even the details of how they were staged.
- freilanzer 1y agoFascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
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- Isamu 1y agoI found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.
- cheese_van 1y agoSpeaking of junk, I was in Syria, many years ago, when it had about 250k tourists yearly, under Hafez al-Assad . I was in the company of an Assyriologist and in a shop of a vendor I knew (who sold artifacts under the table). The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish." The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages! Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoDamn. I'm the opposite. When learning a language I'm careful to pick languages which are culturally influencial and have a prospect of continuing to be - it's not enough that they're alive. Ironically, last new language I learned was Russian, and then Putin goes and invades Ukraine. Fuck my life. All this to say I have infinite respect for someone who'd learn a dead language, let alone two. I'm glad someone is doing this work, and fortunately it's not me.
- octopoc 1y agoThe Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.
- zppln 1y agoI can recommend this episode as well. If I don't mix things up they gave some very good examples of how everyday life wasn't that much different from what it is now. Amazing how stuff like that can be communicated through identations on pieces of clay.
- bee_rider 1y agoPolytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.
- atoav 1y agoWell also in polytheism gods were displayed as incredibly flawed.
- bee_rider 1y agoA common-sense and straightforward extrapolation of human behavior. And also an obvious solution to the “problem of evil.”
- dragontamer 1y agoMonotheism elevates godhood in many regards. In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok. In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims). Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu). ---------- Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God. --------- But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed. Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
- MrGuts 1y ago"Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered" Oh great, just in time for the passage of an interstellar object and the Dalai Lama's reincarnation day.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoIf I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated. I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThat would involve better funding for the humanities, which has been in notoriously short supply for the past century or so. Digitization efforts are underway in many institutions and have been for decades.
- smithkl42 1y ago"missing for a millennium" - according to both the article and the journal piece, the most recent of these fragments is nearly two millennia old. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/literary-texts-from-the-sippar-library-v-a-hymn-in-praise-of-babylon-and-the-babylonians/B477D54E6554CA35718880339B3736CD https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/literar...
- ajcp 1y agoI think just because it's 2,000 years old doesn't mean it's been missing for 2,000 years? There could be references to a fragment as recently as 1,000 years ago, even if the contents of it were not recorded at that time. Or bad copy-editing.
- cjs_ac 1y agoSomewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
- Eupolemos 1y agoDr. Finkel is just plain amazing.
- yayitswei 1y agoInteresting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks. If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
- johnnyApplePRNG 1y agoYou're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch. History isn't exponential—it's bumpy.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago"Progress" and "enlightenment" are neither uniform, linear, upwards, or continuous. All it takes is one absurdly corrupt regime to burn down the "Library of Alexandria", and with it, thousands of years of history and accomplishment.
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- FridayoLeary 1y agoIt's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet during the Reneissance.
- defrost 1y agoWhy are the European "Dark Ages" considered a misnomer? https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_are_the_european_dark_ages_considered_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_a...
- darqis 1y agoI would like to hear the music, we're notes part of the find?