Babylonia

Babylonia is the southern Mesopotamian floodplain around Babylon, and its religious system is the best documented of the ancient Near East because its scribes wrote it down at length and its cities were excavated early.

Marduk, originally a local god of Babylon, was promoted to head of the pantheon as the city rose, and the Enuma Elish is the text that argues for that promotion. It tells of a young god who defeats the primordial sea, splits her body to make the sky and the earth, sets the stars in their stations, creates humanity to relieve the gods of labour, and receives fifty names from the assembled gods in acknowledgement. It is a cosmogony and a constitutional document at once.

The text was recited during the New Year festival, the akitu, held in the spring at the Esagila, Marduk's temple complex, over eleven days. The king took part, and one episode of the ritual required him to be struck by a priest and to declare that he had not neglected the city or its god. Whether that rite ran continuously and in the form the surviving late texts describe is uncertain, since the sources are fragmentary and mostly late.

Divination ran alongside the cult on an industrial scale. Omen collections list thousands of observations, of livers, of births, of the sky, with their meanings, and the astronomical record kept for this purpose became the longest continuous set of celestial observations in the ancient world.

For Judaism, Babylonia is first a catastrophe and then, for a much longer period, a home.

Jerusalem fell in 587 BCE, the temple was burned and part of the population was deported to Babylonia. The exile lasted about fifty years before a Persian conquest allowed a return, and what happened during it was decisive for the religion that emerged: a community without a temple, sacrifices or a king had to work out what its obligations now were, and the answers, an emphasis on sabbath and circumcision, the assembling and editing of texts, and a theology in which defeat is explained as covenant failure rather than as the defeat of a god, are visible throughout the later books.

Not everyone returned. A Jewish population remained in Babylonia continuously for well over two thousand years, and from roughly the third century CE its academies at Sura and Pumbedita became the leading centres of rabbinic learning anywhere. The Babylonian Talmud, compiled there over several centuries, became the authoritative text of rabbinic Judaism, more so than the earlier Talmud produced in Galilee, and the heads of those academies exercised legal authority over communities across the Islamic world.

The Jewish community of Iraq, direct heir to all of this, was very largely dissolved between 1948 and the early 1950s, when the great majority emigrated to Israel. Almost none remain.