Babylon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the truth about Babylon. Six thousand years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built. The great empire to spring from the region was Babylon, which held sway for over a thousand years and in that time managed to garner an extraordinarily bad press: it’s associated with the Tower of Babel, with Nineveh where Jonah is sent to preach repentance and, perhaps most famously, with “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” - the whore of Babylon, who in Revelation is taken to personify the city itself. It’s not just the Bible; Herodotus described the Babylonians as effeminate, lascivious and decadent as well.But what is the true story? Classics in this country has meant a study of Greece and Rome, but there is an increasingly vocal contingent that claims that Babylonian culture has been hugely undervalued, and that there is a great wealth of extraordinary literature waiting to be translated.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Eleanor Robson 5 episodes
  Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University
• Irving Finkel No other episodes
  Curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum
• Andrew George 3 episodes
  Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies

Related episodes

• The Library at Nineveh
  
  15 May, 2008 930 History of the Ancient World
• Archaeology and Imperialism
  
  14 Apr, 2005 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Apocalypse
  
  17 Jul, 2003 230 Christianity
• Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome
  
  10 Jul, 2008 930 History of the Ancient World
• Thebes
  
  23 Nov, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• Byzantium
  
  19 Jul, 2001 940 History of Europe
• Persepolis
  
  7 Jun, 2018 930 History of the Ancient World
• History and Understanding the Past
  
  30 Mar, 2000 900 History
• Rome and European Civilization
  
  20 Dec, 2001 930 History of the Ancient World
• Literature
  
  5 Jan, 2012 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p004y25j

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y25j

Auto-category: 935 (History of ancient Mesopotamia)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Six thousand years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built.