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5 min readIn Old Babylon, around 1750 BCE, most people were dead by age 30. The streets were piled high with garbage, rabid dogs were a constant threat, and there was no concept of hygiene or germs. Yet the Babylonians considered themselves the most blessed people on earth, living at the heart of civilization. Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff draws on an extraordinary wealth of cuneiform texts—personal letters, contracts, hymns, love songs, laundry lists, and even cookbook parodies—to reconstruct what daily life actually looked like in Hammurabi's Babylon.
The City Itself: Chaos Behind the Walls
Approaching Babylon by river, a traveler would have seen a landscape laced with irrigation canals and date palms. The city itself, Llewellyn-Jones notes, "looked more like Venice than modern-day Baghdad," completely intersected with canals. But the grandeur of the great Ziggurat of Marduk and the royal palace gave way to residential chaos. Streets had no names and no planning. A wide thoroughfare called "the Way of Shamash" might suddenly dead-end at someone's front door. Houses could appear overnight in the middle of a boulevard, and fallen walls created new passages. The outside of houses was deliberately modest—Babylonian proverbs warned that a flashy exterior would bring family ruin—so every street looked identical. Finding a specific house meant asking neig
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:44) **Introduction to Old Babylon & The Sources** - Tristan and Lloyd set up the period (c. 1770-1750 BCE, the era of Hammurabi) and the incredible textual evidence—from personal letters and laundry lists to hymns and contracts—that makes this social history possible.
- 2 (06:17) **Approaching the City: Landscape and Agriculture** - The journey to Babylon via the Euphrates reveals a "Venice-like" city of canals, surrounded by self-sufficient farms and date palms.
- 3 (09:04) **Food and Beer: Diet and Cuisine** - The Babylonians ate almost anything that moved, from foxes and bears to insects, and relied on beer as a dietary staple due to unsafe water.
- 4 (12:26) **The Center of Power: The Ziggurat and Palace** - The monumental heart of the city featured the great Ziggurat dedicated to Marduk and the royal palace, representing the twin peaks of Babylonian ambition.
- 5 (15:19) **The Chaos of the Streets: Layout, Filth, and Vermin** - Downtown Babylon was a chaotic, unplanned maze of dead-end streets, piled high with garbage, and teeming with rabid dogs and wild pigs.
- 6 (23:15) **Inside the Mud-Brick Houses: Architecture and Daily Life** - Houses were ergonomic, built around a central courtyard for light and activity, with flexible, multi-purpose rooms and flat roofs used for sleeping and work.
- 7 (30:04) **The Household: Family, Marriage, and Childbirth** - The household was an extended unit including in-laws, servants, and enslaved people, with marriage at the heart of the legal system, offering surprising protections for women.
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Show Notes
Babylon was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. But what was life really like for the people who lived there? Behind its magnificent temples and royal palaces lay a city of crowded streets, disease, danger and everyday struggles.
Tristan Hughes is joined by friend of the show and Babylonian extraordinaire Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to uncover the realities of life in Hammurabi's Babylon. Drawing on the remarkable texts left behind by its people, they explore everything from marriage and childbirth to taverns, rubbish-filled streets and the strange demons believed to haunt the home. What did it mean to walk the streets of Mesopotamia's most famous ancient city?
MORE
The Fall of Babylon
The Tower of Babel
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. Producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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