2024-07-06 18:40:18
It was probably created between 2600 and 2900 years ago, a time when the New Kingdom of Babylon was leading the world in architecture, culture, mathematics and early science.
The discovery of the map in the 19th century. is almost as mysterious as the object itself. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the artifact was discovered by Hormuzd Rassam, a renowned archaeologist who unearthed some of the best Assyrian and Babylonian historical finds ever found, including the Epic of Gilgamesh tablets, the world’s oldest literary work.
A Babylonian world map was found in a box associated with 1881. H. Rassam’s excavations in the ancient Sumerian city of Sippar, in present-day Iraq, approximately 40 km southwest of present-day Baghdad. The map is currently kept in the British Museum in London.
The cracked map board measures 12.2 x 8.2 cm. It shows a circular map next to fragments of text written in cuneiform. Because of the crack, some information is missing from the artifact, although decades of research have allowed scientists to piece together most of its contents.
The map shows Mesopotamia, a historic region of the Middle East often called the “cradle of civilization” because it was home to several notable civilizations and cultures in ancient history, including the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Most believe that the city of Babylon is represented in a rectangle (numbered 13 in the illustration below). This rectangle is crossed from top to bottom by parallel lines, as if representing the Euphrates River. The famous river rises from the mountains in the north, flows through Babylon, and finally flows into a swampy area in the south.
We can also find the locations of many other cities and kingdoms, including Assyria and Urartia, positive in 1988 in the article. All these areas are surrounded by an almost perfect circle, which symbolizes the “Bitter Water” or “Bitter River”, usually interpreted as the ocean.
The upper part of the map, beyond the ocean, is marked as a place “where the Sun cannot be seen”. Perhaps the Babylonians believed it to be a land of eternal darkness – like the strange spaces described in the Epic of Gilgamesh – or perhaps it is an enigmatic commentary on the movement of the Sun.
Part of the text alludes to various monsters and fantastic creatures that inhabit different regions, including a winged horse, a large sea serpent, a scorpion man, and a bull man. Less surprising beasts are also mentioned, such as gazelles, panthers, deer, monkeys, Asiatic buffalo and wolves.
There are also human characters on the map. The text mentions several different people, including Utnapish, a legendary hero who survived the Babylonian flood, and Sargon, the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire.
If you were trying to find your way around Western Asia today, it’s safe to say that a Babylonian world map would not be very useful. But as a historical document, the object holds many intriguing insights into the dominance of the New Babylonian kingdom at the time of the map’s creation.
British Museum expert Dr. In the words of Irving Finkel, Babylon is depicted as “extraordinarily large compared to the other cities on the map” – indicating that “the contents of the map clearly reflect Babylon as the center of the world,” according to IFLScience.
2024-07-06 18:40:18