What Was Everyday Life Like in Ancient Babylon?

What was ordinary life really like in ancient Babylon? Not the Babylon of legend, but the real city on the Euphrates around 570 BC, under King Nebuchadnezzar II: its mudbrick houses and rooftops, bread, beer and dates, canals and fields, silver and loans, marriage and family, clay tablets and schools, the night sky, the New Year festival, and the many peoples who lived there. A calm, fact-based history documentary from Hidden Map Stories. Good for learning, and slow enough to fall asleep to. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:11 A City on the Euphrates 2:47 The Ishtar Gate 5:15 Houses and Neighborhoods 7:33 Bread, Beer, and Dates 9:00 Rivers, Canals, and Fields 10:23 Work, Crafts, and the Temples 12:19 Silver, Loans, and Family Businesses 13:50 Families and Marriage 15:49 Clay, Reeds, and Learning to Write 17:47 Watching the Sky 19:16 The New Year Festival 20:40 Many Peoples in One City 21:57 The Hanging Gardens Question 22:57 The Long Life of Babylon SOURCES AND FURTHER READING The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Babylon" (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History) Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU), Ishtar Gate exhibition: stamped brick of Nebuchadnezzar II Livius.org, "Babylon, Esagila" and Mesopotamian chronicles (Nabonidus Chronicle, Market Prices Chronicle) K. Abraham, Business and Politics under the Persian Empire: The Financial Dealings of Marduk-nasir-apli of the House of Egibi (2004) C. Waerzeggers on Neo-Babylonian marriage, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History (2020); M. Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 7th-3rd Centuries B.C. (1989) A. Sachs and H. Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia L. Pearce and C. Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia (2014), the Al-Yahudu tablets S. Dalley, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford, 2013) UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Babylon" (inscribed 2019) Illustrations are simplified reconstructions; population, measurements and some dates are estimates that scholars still debate. Every place on the map is hiding a story. Subscribe for more. #history #babylon #mesopotamia #documentary #historyforsleep