Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered
25 comments
·July 4, 2025octopoc
cogman10
Some of this is visible in the Bible.
For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.
From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.
The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.
You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
giraffe_lady
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
tiahura
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
jollyllama
The Hebrew view may not have been so different [0] and in turn this view is congruent with Christian teaching, depending on the theology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Council#Hebrew/Israelit...
jschveibinz
This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity.
So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the comment makes sense in context.
mlinhares
Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.
zdragnar
I have vague memories from college about China having something similar during the dynasties.
The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
detourdog
Thought it’s as more ancestral teams. Each city marveling at the founding families.
zppln
I can recommend this episode as well. If I don't mix things up they gave some very good examples of how everyday life wasn't that much different from what it is now. Amazing how stuff like that can be communicated through identations on pieces of clay.
bee_rider
Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.
dragontamer
Monotheism elevates godhood in many regards.
In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.
In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).
Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).
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Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
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But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.
Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
atoav
Well also in polytheism gods were displayed as incredibly flawed.
wglb
Source article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...
idoubtit
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
treve
Legend has a specific meaning:
> A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.
Even though it's BS I think it's still interesting to read how people relate to the story.
catlikesshrimp
They did cite the source at the bottom of the phys.org page (The source article and the link)
"More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
metalman
the "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders. Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull". Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla"......... quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
echelon
This is great! Thank you.
MrGuts
"Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered"
Oh great, just in time for the passage of an interstellar object and the Dalai Lama's reincarnation day.
freilanzer
Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
Isamu
I found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.
null
The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.