Babylon: Myth and Reality

[lethargic_man]

Just been with green_knight to see the exhibition on Babylon: Myth and Reality at the British Museum, which was full of really cool things, like lions:

...and dragons:

...and wild men, oh my:

(To my pleasure, it did point out that the incident depicted by Blake above never actually happened, and the Nebuchadrezzar the Bible depicts returning to the throne afterwards was actually his successor Nabu-na'id (Nabonidus).)

Viewing paintings with a fellow pedant also turned out to be unexpectedly fun. It was interesting to see details from the archaeological discoveries at Babylon appearing in the art during the course of the nineteenth century. I think my favourite piece of art, though, was this by Julee Holcombe:

(Like the painting it's commenting on, it's full of detail that doesn't come out at this resolution; like the cooling towers at the right.)

One unexpectedly cool moment was coming across a 2700-year-old clay tablet I quoted on my blog less than a month ago.

My only complaint concerns one panel which explained the Babylonian month names as referring to the signs of the zodiac—but completely disagreeing with everything I know of these already: For example, it explains the month Araḫsamna (Hebraicised as מַרְחֶשְׁוַן) as meaning scorpion; whereas Klein gives it as Waraḫsamnu, meaning "eighth month" (יֶרַח שְׁמוֹנָה in Hebrew, in which initial /w/ always becomes /y/). (A word (not necessarily the word) in Akkadian for scorpion is aqrabu—the same (modulo the loss of the proto-Semitic masculine nominative noun ending, and gain of the spirants found in Hebrew) as the Hebrew.)

The exhibition left me wanting to make a cylinder seal, out of wood... but I probably won't, because that would involve writing letters rather than email, and that's way too much effort. As a form of communication, it's so second millennium BCE...