Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
A Babylonian hymn which is more than 2,000 years old has been rediscovered after being lost for a thousand years.
The text is a paean – a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving – and is described in a paper published in the Cambridge University Press journal Iraq.
“It’s a fascinating hymn that describes Babylon in all its majesty and gives insights into the lives of its inhabitants, male and female,” says co-author Enrique Jiménez from Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, who rediscovered the text in collaboration with Iraq’s University of Baghdad.
Jiménez and colleagues are working to decipher hundreds of Babylonian texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
The tablets belonged to the Sippar Library in an ancient city 60km north of Babylon and 30km southeast of modern-day Baghdad. Legend says Noah hid the tablets at Sippar to save them from the floodwaters before boarding the ark.
“Using our AI-supported platform, we managed to identify 30 other manuscripts that belong to the rediscovered hymn – a process that would formerly have taken decades,” says Jiménez.
The scholars deciphered the complete hymn, parts of which were previously missing. The full text is 250 lines.
Numerous copies of the text suggest that it was widespread at the time.
“The hymn was copied by children at school. It’s unusual that such a popular text in its day was unknown to us before now,” Jiménez says.
The manuscripts were produced between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE.
“It was written by a Babylonian who wanted to praise his city,” Jiménez explains. “The author describes the buildings in the city, but also how the waters of the Euphrates bring the spring and green the fields. This is all the more spectacular as surviving Mesopotamian literature is sparing in its descriptions of natural phenomena.”
Information about the women of Babylon contained in the text includes their role as priestesses and associated tasks. No other texts revealing these details have been found.
Other insights include a reference to the respect of Babylon’s inhabitants to foreigners.
Babylon was founded in Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE. It was the largest city in the world and a cultural metropolis.