Hymn of Babylon pieced together after 2,100 years — but how?

Times

02-07-2025

In the dying days of Babylon, about 100BC, as the remnants of the city's former splendour crumbled around them, its young scribes would study a thousand-year-old poem about the marvel that their civilisation had once been.
Set at the dawn of creation, the hymn to the god Marduk described a verdant paradise of flowering meadows nourished by the River Euphrates, a sacred metropolis with jewelled gates 'flourishing in her charms like a garden of fruit'.
This lost classic of Mesopotamian literature has now largely been reconstructed by scholars, who used artificial intelligence to piece together fragments of 30 ancient clay tablets.
The hymn's origins are obscure but a fleeting reference to tolerance for foreign exiles suggests it may have been written before the 13th century BC. That would put it a little before the Trojan war and about the same time as the youngest parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long poem known to modernity.
It vanished into the sands after Babylon was conquered by Alexander the Great in 331BC, yet numerous scattered fragments of it survived to the present in the ruins of Sippar, a city that was once about 40 miles to the north of Babylon. According to legend, Noah used the site to preserve a treasury of manuscripts from the great flood.
Since the end of the 19th century, excavations at Sippar have yielded a vast library of thousands of tablets covered in cuneiform script.
Those tablets are being digitised and re­assembled with help from algorithms by researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich and the University of Baghdad. The song of Marduk, which originally consisted of about 250 lines, has been restored to about two thirds of its original length.
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Enrique Jiménez, a professor of ancient oriental languages at LMU, said it belonged to a handful of Babylonian poems that seemed to have been fixtures in the school curriculum, such as the national creation epic, Marduk's Address to the Demons and the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer.
'Very few texts qualify as 'classics' in the sense of being widely used for scribal education,' he said. 'What unites these texts is their focus on Babylon and its patron god Marduk — essentially, they were tools to teach or even indoctrinate students about the city's greatness and its divine centre.'
In Jiménez's view, its carefully nested structure suggests it was the work of a single author, rather than a composite of accreted traditions like Gilgamesh.
'The hymn's structure is very attractive: a natural-feeling mise en abyme where each section elegantly contains the next,' he said.
'The rhythmic precision is also very sophisticated. Some manuscripts even show metrical scansion, which is uncommon.'
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The poem opens with a lofty barrage of praise to Marduk, 'bright torch of the great gods' and 'architect of the universe', who commands the great floods in the distant mountains and brings life to the plains of the Euphrates. It then moves on to a description of spring floods that ­Jiménez said was unparalleled in its vividness, since Babylonian poets did not usually waste much breath on the wonders of nature.
The city itself is portrayed as a paragon of almost social-democratic charity: 'The foreigners among them they do not humiliate. The humble they protect, the weak they support. Under their care, the poor and destitute can thrive. To the orphan they offer succour and favour.'
By the time the last copies were written in the 1st or 2nd century BC, the poem would have been a bittersweet echo of everything the Babylonians had lost.
'Cuneiform documents from this period are scarce compared to earlier times, and the script eventually disappeared around the turn of the eras,' Jiménez said. 'This text must have served as a reminder of Babylon's past glories during its twilight.'
The poem is published in an article by Jiménez and Anmar A Fadhil, an Iraqi colleague, in the journal Iraq.