Babylon Had It Coming
Babylon had survived five destructions before Sennacherib tried to erase it for good. Why did Assyria's most bookish king — a man who loved Babylonian scholarship — finally flood the city and smash its temples in 689 BCE?
This is Oldest Stories, a biweekly deep dive into ancient Mesopotamia. Online at oldeststories.net
In this episode we trace Babylon's strange immortality: a city founded around 1894 BCE that claimed six thousand years of history by borrowing it from Eridu, the first city of the gods. We walk through each of Babylon's "deaths":
Death 1: the ritual transfer from dying Eridu to…
The skinny
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