The Babylonian mind
About this video
Starting from a 2,500-year-old Mušḫuššu dragon from Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, the video shows that Babylonian culture is surprisingly close to ours. Because Babylonian writing in cuneiform can be fully read, we know their ideas: a base-sixty number system that gives us 60 seconds and 60 minutes, divination such as reading sheep's livers, and the zodiac and horoscope.
You'll be able to
- explain how we know about Babylonian ideas today.
- explain how the Babylonian base-sixty system still shapes how we measure time.
- name Babylonian ideas about predicting the future that survive today.
Key words
- Mušḫuššu
- A dragon-like creature shown on Babylon's walls.
- cuneiform
- The ancient wedge-shaped writing used on clay or stone tablets.
- base sixty
- A number system built on groups of 60 instead of groups of 10.
- divination
- Trying to predict the future by reading signs, such as marks on an animal's liver.
- zodiac
- A set of star-sign figures in the sky, first developed in Babylon.
- horoscope
- A prediction about someone's life based on their star sign.
Transcript
This dragon here called a Mušḫuššu is about 2500 years old And it comes from Nebuchadnezzar's capital city Babylon in the middle of ancient Iraq And when you see it now, when you look at it and look in its eye it might strike you as something very alien and very distant and nothing to do with the modern world Well the culture from which it comes the Babylonian world is surprisingly close to ours and the thinkers and the writers and the poets and the mathematicians of that ancient culture came up with things which still exist today in our modern lives and are a part of our daily lives all around us These Babylonian discoveries and ideas are conveyed to us through the ancient form of writing called Cuneiform
written on tablets of clay or stone The Babylonian language is fully understood today so that many of their ideas and achievements have been preserved for us Great engineers have come up with very ingenious machinery to measure the passage of time And one of the interesting things about the ancient Babylonians was that they had a mathematical system based on sixty not on ten like we do today And one consequence of this is the fact that our own time division of the minute and the hour into sixtieth parts is a direct inheritance of a principle which goes back to ancient Babylon And it's come down to us somehow through the Greeks who looked at Babylonian ideas incorporated them into their own work
and maintained this sixty figure as a central calculating device And that is why everyone who has a watch on their wrist or a clock on their kitchen wall is somehow perpetuating the work of these ancient Babylonian thinkers The Babylonians were always attempting to predict the future This clay model of a sheep's liver, complete with gallbladder was used to teach the art of divination zones and Cuneiform inscriptions revealing the ominous signs Much later people relied on dreams or the stars for their portentous messages Another thing that has come to us from ancient Babylon are the signs of the Zodiac And this goes back a long way already in the second millennium some of the figures which became the zodiac figures
were already to be found on monuments And side by side with the Zodiac grew up in the late period the idea of the horoscope so the thing when you open your newspaper and you look up your star sign and read what it predicts or you get a horoscope those two ideas likewise come from ancient Babylon
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