Divinity Atlas

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Babylonians

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The Babylonians were the Akkadian speaking people of southern Mesopotamia who took their name from the city of Babylon, dominant in the region under Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE and again under Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth. Their religion inherited the Sumerian pantheon and reordered it around Marduk, whose elevation is narrated in the Enuma Elish. Babylonian scribes produced the astronomical diaries and omen series that stand behind later celestial divination, and the deportation of Judeans to Babylon left a permanent mark on Jewish scripture and law.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
The southern Mesopotamian floodplain around Babylon, in what is now central and southern Iraq. 1
Language Family
Akkadian in its Babylonian dialect, East Semitic within Afro-Asiatic, with Sumerian kept beside it as a learned and liturgical language. 2
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
The temple religion of Marduk at the Esagila, with the Enuma Elish recited at the new year festival; the older Sumerian pantheon reordered beneath him; and a highly developed divinatory and astronomical practice serving the court. 3
Practice
Practice Status
Discontinued as a state religion 3
Learn More
Marduk, Enuma Elish and the Reading of Heaven

Babylonian religion inherited the Sumerian pantheon and reordered it around Marduk, the city god of Babylon, whose promotion is narrated rather than assumed. W. G. Lambert's edition of the creation material presents Enuma Elish as an argument. The gods, unable to face Tiamat, grant Marduk supremacy in advance as the price of his fighting her, and he then makes the world from her body and humankind from the blood of her defeated consort, so that people exist to carry the gods' labour. The epic was recited at the New Year festival, the akitu, during which the king was struck and made to declare that he had not neglected the city, and the god's statue processed out of Babylon and back.

Reading the future was not a fringe activity but an official science. Francesca Rochberg's work on the celestial material shows a discipline moving towards mathematical astronomy without ever abandoning the premise that the sky is a writing addressed to those able to read it. The great omen series, the extispicy handbooks and the incantation collections were copied, taught and applied at state expense.

Babylonian wisdom literature holds the counterweight. Lambert's collection includes the poem of the righteous sufferer and a dialogue on divine justice, texts stating plainly that the rules by which the gods act are not knowable from below.

The City, the Exile and the Long Afterlife

Babylon was a minor place until the Amorite dynasty of Hammurabi made it a capital in the eighteenth century BCE, and its law collection, set up on a stele beneath a relief of the king before the sun god, is the best known legal document of the ancient world. The city was sacked, ruled by Kassites, dominated by Assyria, and then rebuilt on an imperial scale by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. That later Babylon is the one Robert Koldewey's excavations from 1899 uncovered, including the Ishtar Gate now reconstructed in Berlin.

The same empire carried out the deportations from Judah, and with them the most consequential encounter in the city's religious history. The exile shaped the Hebrew Bible, gave Judaism a diaspora, and left Babylon in Jewish and later Christian literature as the type of the worldly imperial city, a usage that reaches the Book of Revelation and travels far beyond it.

Cyrus took the city in 539 BCE without a siege, and the cuneiform scribal tradition continued under Persian, Greek and Parthian rule, with the last dated astronomical tablets falling in the first century of the common era. Andrew George's edition of the Gilgamesh epic shows how much of that tradition was still being copied late. The Jewish academies of Mesopotamia afterwards produced the Babylonian Talmud, which carries the name of a place whose gods it does not mention.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Babylonians directly: "James Herschel Holden served for decades as Research Director of the American Federation of Astrologers, and this book is the standard reference history of Western horoscopic astrology, tracing its..."

Source A History of Horoscopic AstrologyJames Herschel Holden

This source names Babylonians directly: "Alexander Jones and John M."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses is a peer-reviewed open academic reference, part of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus project at the University of Pennsylvania, with entries..."

Source Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and GoddessesNicole Brisch (ed.)

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Aquarius is a pair of parallel zigzag lines, read as ripples of water or as the two streams poured from the water-bearer's jar."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Aramaic Bowl Spells, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls, Volume One, by Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford and Siam Bhayro, published by the academic press Brill in Leiden in 2013, is the modern critical..."

Source Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls, Volume OneShaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford and Siam Bhayro

This source names Babylonians directly: "James A. Montgomery's Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, published by the University Museum in Philadelphia in 1913, is the first substantial scholarly edition of the Aramaic incantation bowls..."

Source Aramaic Incantation Texts from NippurJames A. Montgomery

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Aries is read as the face and curved horns of the ram, the animal the sign has carried since Babylonian star lore named this stretch of the ecliptic the Hired Man and Greek tradition..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Wikipedia's article on the Babylonian captivity, community-edited."

Source Babylonian Captivity (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Babylonians directly: "W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Creation Myths, published posthumously by Eisenbrauns in 2013, is the standard scholarly critical edition and study of Babylonian creation texts including the Enuma Elish..."

Source Babylonian Creation MythsW. G. Lambert

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Capricorn is a compound figure read as the head and forequarters of a goat joined to the hindquarters and curling tail of a fish."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Cheiro's book is a tradition's own primary statement of its numerological system, not independent scholarship, and this record holds it at the tier that reflects that: it is the standard printed..."

Source Cheiro's Book of NumbersCheiro (William John Warner)

This source names Babylonians directly: "A scholarly essay by Clare Fitzgerald, published by New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, checked directly at its own URL."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Robert Koldewey's Das wieder erstehende Babylon, published by J."

Source Das wieder erstehende BabylonRobert Koldewey

This source names Babylonians directly: "D. R. Dicks published "Thales" in The Classical Quarterly in 1959, a close critical examination of everything later Greek and Roman writers credited to Thales of Miletus, including the geometry, the..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The opening lines of the Babylonian creation epic, whose first two words give it its name."

Source The Seven Tablets of CreationLeonard William King

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Gemini is a pair of uprights closed by a bar above and below, read as the twins standing side by side and often equated with the Roman numeral two."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary works entry by entry from the excavated iconographic and textual record of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian religion, giving each deity, demon or symbol..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Gudsisu Festival was a Sumerian agricultural festival centred on the city of Nippur, marking the beginning of the plowing season and invoking divine sanction for the year's cultivation."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The historical reconstruction of astrological systems and their transmission between Babylonian, Hellenistic, Indian, Chinese and Islamic astronomy, treated as ancient science's own technical..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Rembrandt painted this small panel in 1630, during his final year working in his native Leiden before moving to Amsterdam, showing the prophet Jeremiah seated in darkness, his weary head resting on..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "David Pingree's survey traces the textual history of Indian astral science specifically through its documented exchanges with Babylonian, Greek and Islamic astral sciences, a cross cultural..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "A peer reviewed article in Iraq, the journal of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, examining Johannes Kepler's proposal that a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in 7 BCE..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "A page of the Babylonian Talmud recording the Sages of Usha's ruling that charitable giving should not exceed one fifth of a person's means, the primary source behind the chomesh figure in later..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Libra is a horizontal bar surmounted by a smaller bar rising to a curve, read as a weighing balance with its beam, and alternatively as the sun resting on the horizon at the moment of..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "D. J. Wiseman's Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon, published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in 1985, collects Wiseman's 1983 Schweich Lectures on Neo-Babylonian archaeology, delivered..."

Source Nebuchadnezzar and BabylonD. J. Wiseman

This source names Babylonians directly: "Nebuchadnezzar II's Wikipedia article is a community-edited encyclopedia entry rather than a peer-reviewed publication."

Source Nebuchadnezzar II (reference article)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Pisces is two crescents facing away from one another and joined across the middle by a bar, read as two fish swimming in opposite directions and bound together by a cord."

Psalm 137:1, Passages

This source names Babylonians directly: "The opening of the exile psalm."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian Talmud is an eleventh century manuscript work with no single date of composition; Rashi's death in 1105 fixes only an upper bound on when it was finished, a..."

Source Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian TalmudShlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi)

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Sagittarius is an arrow rising to the right, crossed near its base by a short bar taken to represent the drawn bow or bowstring."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Scorpio is an M-like figure whose final stroke rises into a barb, read as the scorpion with its sting raised over its back."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The crescent with a star beside or within it is far older than Islam and was not originally Islamic at all."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Babylonians directly: "The first tablet of the standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh opens with the people of Uruk complaining to the gods that their king Gilgamesh is a tyrant, prompting the birth goddess Aruru to pinch..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Taurus is conventionally read as the head of a bull seen face on, a circle for the muzzle surmounted by the sweep of the horns."

This source names Babylonians directly: "Andrew George's edition is the standard critical scholarly edition of the Gilgamesh epic, working directly from the cuneiform tablets themselves to set out the documented relationship between the..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Soncino Press English translation of the Babylonian Talmud, the foundational compilation of rabbinic law, ethics and commentary redacted over several centuries."

Source The Babylonian TalmudAnonymous (multiple authors)

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Great Assembly, Hebrew Anshei Knesset HaGedolah or "Men of the Great Assembly," is, according to rabbinic tradition, a body of 120 sages, prophets and scribes active in the early Second Temple..."

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)

This source names Babylonians directly: "The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, James Evans' 1998 study from Oxford University Press, covers ancient astronomy from Babylon through Greek astronomy to sixteenth century Europe, with..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Ishtar Gate was the eighth and grandest of the fortified gates of inner Babylon, built under King Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who reigned from 604 to 562 BCE, and commonly..."

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Laws of Hammurabi, preserved on the Susa stele now in the Louvre, is a primary source of the first order, the actual inscribed law code issued in the name of the Babylonian king, one of the most..."

Source The Laws of Hammurabi (the Susa stele, Louvre)Anonymous, issued in the name of Hammurabi of Babylon

This source names Babylonians directly: "The Seven Tablets of Creation is Leonard William King's early twentieth century translation and study of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, originally published by Luzac and cited here..."

Source The Seven Tablets of CreationLeonard William King

This source names Babylonians directly: "Tractate Shabbat is the first tractate of Seder Moed ("Order of Appointed Times") in the Mishnah and Talmud, devoted to the laws of the Sabbath and organized primarily around the thirty nine..."

Source The Mishnah: A New TranslationJacob Neusner, trans.

Originated In

Iraq, Countries
Mesopotamia, Regions

Originates in Language

Akkadian, Languages
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. The Semitic Languages
Robert Hetzron (ed.), Routledge, 1997View the Source
3. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary
Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British Museum Press, 1992
Babylonian Creation Myths
W. G. Lambert, Eisenbrauns, 2013
Babylonian Wisdom Literature
W. G. Lambert, Oxford University Press, 1960
The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts
Andrew R. George, Oxford University Press, 2003View the Source
The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture
Francesca Rochberg, Cambridge University Press, 2004View the Source
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