Climates of Conflict in Ancient Babylonia (CLICAB)

Rhonda McGovern (mcgoverh@tcd.ie) & Francis Ludlow (ludlowf@tcd.ie)

Location

Babylon is south of modern-day Baghdad. The city and the kingdom went through many dynasties and social changes throughout its lifetime. Through a need to record administration data (ownership, taxes, historical events), as well as recording astronomical phenomena with the aim of successfully predicting the future, the Babylonian scribes used cuneiform writing on clay tablets.

Location of the kingdom of Babylon south of modern-day Baghdad (outlined in red).

Google Maps 2019

Background

The region has a rich textual and archaeological history and is the origin of scientific and cultural advances, such as the definition of the seven-day week, the invention of zero, and many legal principles still underlying modern contract, tort, criminal, property, and family law. Through a need to record administration data (ownership, taxes, historical events), as well as the recording of astronomical phenomena with the aim of successfully predicting the future, the Babylonian scribes used cuneiform writing on clay tablets.

The night sky was of great importance to the Ancient Babylonians. Their day begins at sunset; a month begins after sunset on the evening when the lunar crescent becomes visible for the first time after conjunction (the apparent meeting or passing of two or more celestial bodies in the same degree of the zodiac); and their year begins after the vernal equinox. Events of the sky, both night and day, were recorded in astronomical diaries. It was believed by witnessing repetition of events such eclipse and lunar events, or by recording the annual cycles of the position of stars in the sky, the Babylonians could predict what could or should happen. This belief has meant that through their recording of these events on clay tablets, we now have a wealth of data to analyse from the Ancient world of Babylonia and beyond.

Cuneiform

Cuneiform is a complex script constructed from a variety of wedge and line shapes produced by pressing the tip of a reed into wet clay. It is through the choice of medium that we can still study this ancient language today. Clay hardens over time and it is one of the few mediums that benefits from fires. Many clay tablets that may have been discarded, survived by accident, allowing us to delve into the time capsule each tablet provides.

Reed tip being pressed into clay (top), result shown (middle), different combinations of shapes (bottom).

Finkel & Taylor, 2015.

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History of Cuneiform

Cuneiform started as a pictographic script used to record administration data. A story from 1800 BC states its origins in a battle of wits. Enmerkar, king of Uruk, invented cuneiform to help his messenger remember increasing complex messages for his rival. As the story goes, upon seeing the complexity of this strange clay tablet, the rival submitted (Finkel & Taylor, 2015). Changes to the underlying language resulted in a move away from pictographs and towards a combination of shapes which produced syllables to make up stunted sentences. There were over 1,000 syllables used to produce a word-syllabic script. Although only around 200 were used regularly and this was enough to get by for most scribes in Ancient Babylon. Often the role of scribe was handed down from father to son. Very few scribes were female and very few were members of royalty. They began their career early starting in childhood. Much of the education came about through repetition of sentences, these were also written in both Sumerian and Akkadian. Classical texts were copied many times over the years by generations of scribes in training. Through sheer abundance many have survived and these scholarly texts assisted in the development of transliteration (from one form of text to another) and translation of cuneiform (image below).

Transliteration (top) and translation (bottom) of text from Astrological Diary dated 164 BC.

Sachs & Hunger (1996).

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A sample of coded material. Data is the same as shown in image above.

Some variables have been omitted to allow visual ease such as price, river levels, etc., as there were no figures for these dates.

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Cracking the code

How can we trust the transliteration and the translations? Decipherment began in the 1840s and was tested in 1857 when the Royal Asiatic Society in London ran a competition in which four leading scholars submitted independent translations of a long military account. Each submission was similar enough to confirm that the code had been cracked (Finkel & Taylor, 2015: 40-41). The success of decipherment was in part due to the finding of a trilingual inscription stone which had Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite of the Persian king Darius (ibid.). The competition gave confidence to the process of transliteration and in the following century over 50,000 texts were published (Sachs, 1965). Abraham Sachs (1915-1983) was an American Assyriologist who worked on the astronomical diaries for over thirty years and passed along this work to Hermann Hunger before his death in 1983. By 1988 Hunger had published the first volume of six, containing translations spanning 652 BC to 61 BC. The diaries were unfinished when Hunger received them, he completed the transliterations as best he could, highlighting that there are more tablets in the British Museum that probably belong to this data set, leaving it unfinished in its current form (in 1988, 1989 & 1996). Hunger also translated all the work. Throughout the diaries there are a few phrases that are not translated, these are phrases that Hunger did not feel he had ‘cracked’ and so left in their transliterated format. It is these volumes that form the foundation of the CLICAB project.

Prism of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076 BC).

Contains the military account used in the competition to crack the code in 1857.

Image 1621. British Museum 2019a.

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About CLICAB

This project hypothesises that climatic changes, including periods of drought, flooding and other extreme weather, are linked to patterns of violence and conflict in the Ancient Near East. We also hypothise that any “climate-conflict linkages” vary meaningfully through time according evolving socioeconomic, political and cultural background in which climatic changes and extreme weather occurred. This research aims to investigate climatic changes in Babylonia during the final eight centuries BCE and assess for linkages to patterns of violence and conflict, through the application of historical climatology to the wealth of data available.

Project aims

1. Provide a new climatic reconstruction of unprecedented detail (sub-daily resolution) for Babylonia.
2. Assess climatic changes found in the multi-proxy climate reconstruction for statistical significance with changes in frequency, type and geography of violence & conflict in the region.
3. To delineate the complex societal dynamics and pathways by which past climatic changes may have catalysed violence and conflict, and how Babylonian society at both local and elite / state levels may have adapted to and developed strategies to mitigate violence and conflict promoted by climatic changes.
4. To examine how the evolving historical context mediates any contributory role for climate in violence and conflict through this long and transformative period of Babylonian history, comprising many political, economic, institutional, cultural, demographic and technological developments.

Methodology

A critical review of the source material will be undertaken which considers the categorisation of data into primary observations (directly observed and recorded phenomena or conditions in the astronomical diaries) or indirect information from which inferences can be made. The researcher will code the weather and astronomical phenomena alongside monthly economic data and river levels, all are recorded variables within the astronomical diaries. This will include the compilation of an ordinal intensity index which can be calibrated against other documentary sources throughout the project. Professor R.J. van der Spek of the Free University in Amsterdam, has been working on price data at a daily resolution. He has kindly allowed the project to access his unpublished daily price series. Examination of this data will allow an insight into the influence of extreme weather and conflict on price volatility. The coded data and the daily economic data will be assessed against speleothem data for the region which provides a long-term record of the climate. In the absence of dendrochronology, speleothems are becoming increasingly important in filling in the paleoclimatic story for this region. Professor Dominik Fleitmann of the University of Reading will provide the project with paleoclimatic data. The project will also incorporate climate model outputs from the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model in consultation with Dr. Matthew Toohey.

An in-depth assessment of the documentary sources on the region will provide the timeline for conflict and will also inform the project of the complex societal dynamics and pathways that serve to either increase violence and conflict or to increase mitigation and adaptive capacity. It is estimated that these societal pathways will change according to local conditions, such as changes to ruler, law, agricultural practices and so on, on a temporal basis. The project will study the timing of conflict against the timing of climatic events to assess for climate-conflict feedbacks. The project’s reconstruction of violence and conflict will also help rectify data shortages that are presently hampering understandings of (even contemporary) climate-conflict linkages (Scheffran et al., 2012), and will provide a model (methodological) for creating new multi-centennial violence and conflict records. This will be undertaken by a second PhD researcher.

Map of a property.

Image 86394. British Museum 2019b.

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Clay tablet with two columns of text.

There are sixty lines on obverse (left) and forty five lines on reverse (right). 8.13 x 9.66 inches.

Image 108548. British Museum 2019c.

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