Assyrian Propaganda and the People of Babylon

It is one thing to trace a discourse impressed on clay tablets, physical objects that have survived to the present day; it is far more difficult to determine how that same discourse was impressed upon the minds of the population.

Tablets from Babylon dated early in Esarhaddon's reign indicate that the city was at least partially resettled by 679,⁷⁰ but the full restoration of the city, particularly its temples, began with ritual acts, some of which included a public component. Esarhaddon famously revived the basket-carrying ceremony performed by second-millennium kings in which the monarch, as dutiful caretaker of the god's house, carried a labourer's basket to the building site.⁷¹ Both Samas-suma-ukin and Ashurbanipal later repeated this act, and reliefs depicting them with baskets above their heads were created in deliberate imitation of much older statuettes that were part of royal building deposits interred by earlier kings.⁷² The purpose of these rituals was to demonstrate the emperor's commitment to Babylon by making him the central figure in a ritual that evoked Babylon's past, thereby legitimating him in the eyes of the Babylonian public by presenting him in the role of earlier Babylonian kings.

The basket-carrying ceremony inaugurated a 12-year project to rebuild the city that must have entailed remarkable effort. The full restoration of the city was essential for the proper observance of the akitu festival. As a result, the project to rebuild Babylon was not an opportunity for Esarhaddon to remake the city anew, but rather was an attempt to recover the city as it had been prior to the destruction. Sennacherib had attempted to prevent precisely such a restoration of the city by removing even the foundations of its structures.⁷³ Sennacherib may have been guilty of some hyperbole, but evidence from the Merkes quarter at Babylon may corroborate his claims. Remains from the residential quarter assigned to the Middle Babylonian-Assyrian stratum included a layer of debris and sand with a layer of poorly built houses above. The excavators interpreted these layers as evidence of the abandonment that followed Sennacherib’s sack of the city and the tentative resettlement that later ensued, though no evidence of flooding was found.⁷⁴

Regardless of the severity of the devastation, conditions at Babylon compelled Esarhaddon to initiate rebuilding. In his own inscriptions, he emphasized that he had Esagil rebuilt on its foundations without any deviation from the original plan.⁷⁵ To this aim, the builders tried to determine the proper location and alignment of the temples and also sought to resituate correctly the network of major streets and processional avenues.⁷⁶ Texts detailing the topography of the city may have been consulted in this process,⁷⁷ and the information from their contents would have been combined with the evidence on the ground. Workers trying to retrace the foundations of the temples would have known to look out for building inscriptions interred by previous rulers,⁷⁸ and those overseeing the project may even have sought the aid of those residents who remembered the city before its destruction.

Such assiduous attention to restoration was consistent with Mesopotamian ideology regarding the temple. Kings predating Esarhaddon by more than a millennium expressed similar sentiments in their own building inscrip­tions,⁷⁹ and the evidence of the practice has been found at prehistoric sites.⁸⁰ Mesopotamian kings knew to look for their predecessors’ foundation deposits when engaged in restoration projects, and the temple foundations which Esarhaddon’s work crews sought for had essentially the same layout as they had had during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I and earlier.⁸¹ The cumulative effect of the building rituals and the care taken to identify the original topog­raphy of the city compelled those Babylonians engaged in the city’s rebuilding to reflect on the antiquity of their city while filled with the awareness that all of their efforts were in anticipation of Marduk’s return. Under these conditions, it is hard to think that the parallels with Nebuchadnezzar I were not apparent to residents of the city, if knowledge of Nebuchadnezzar I still survived in the collective memory.

That anticipation would have been fulfilled when Samas-suma-ukin entered into Babylon with Marduk. This act marked the completion of rebuilding and promised the resumption of cultic activities in the city by evoking the central act of the akitu festival, the entry of Marduk into the city.⁸² The annual spectacle of the akitu festival would have made an indelible impression on all who participated, both the major players and the throngs who assembled as spectators. During the 12 days of the festival, the temples, the gates, the processional ways and all of the other features that made up the topography of the city and anchored the popular cultural memory came alive. Gods hidden from view were on display before the masses. Priests who typically practised their rituals behind temple doors found themselves functioning in their religious capacity before the public eye.

A collective mood of occasion undoubtedly gripped the people of Babylon throughout the 12 days of the festival and the days of public processions and pronouncements must have been high-points. These moments were ideally suited for shaping popular sentiment and can be viewed as part of a public discourse that consisted of oral traditions, public recitations of prayers and other ritualized utterances and actions, speeches and proclamations by the king and priests, and the acclamations of the assembled masses in response. While it is difficult to discern the presence of oral historical traditions, they were certainly present in Babylonian society and on occasion their existence is mentioned in the written record. Petitioners before the king could give testimony referencing oral traditions that stretched back over generations.⁸⁴ Likewise, the Babylonian chronicles, while heavily reliant on written sources, also included references to information that came from oral sources.⁸⁵ Such traditions could have been present in the minds of those who attended the public recitation of enuma ells, the epic poem that described Marduk's rise to the head of the Babylonian pantheon and his creation of Babylon, during the first akitu festival after Marduk's return, and would have informed how the negative oath that Samas-suma-ukin swore stating that he had not done harm to Babylon, its people and its temples was understood.⁸⁶ Public recita­tions were also opportunities for the king and, perhaps, temple officials to make pronouncements before the assembled masses.

The regular celebration of festivals within a society plays an important role in the perpetuation of cultural memory.⁸⁹ To the Babylonians, the akitu festival was ideally a regular and unchanging social performance that stretched back into the past and reified their world-view. At the same time, each celebration was distinctive and played out against the backdrop of the events and concerns of the previous years.⁹⁰ The contemporary interest in Nebuchadnezzar I as exemplified by the literary-historical traditions circu­lating simultaneously in Babylonia and Assyria that emphasized the king's taking of the hand of Bel, the central act of the akitu festival, spoke to these concerns by offering an historical mirror to more recent events.