Collective Memory and Use of the Past in Babylonia

The role of collective memory in Babylonian culture has been treated most extensively by Gerdien Jonker, who, drawing upon the work of Maurice Halbwachs, understands remembering as a dynamic phenomenon carried out collectively and repeatedly within society in order to address the demands of the present.⁷ Following Halbwachs, Jonker applies the term cadre materiel to the material culture that was critical to the creation of collective memory and asserts that it was through the setting of the cult with its stone statues and monuments, inscriptions and architecture, that initiates ‘began to condense the vestiges of the past into a consistent pattern of memory’.⁸ Jonker differ­entiates between ‘collective memory’ and ‘history’ by asserting that in the collective memory the past is actively present in society while history consti­tutes an active effort to reacquire the past.⁹

But if memory was constructed collectively, it was not constructed equitably in Babylonia.

The Sumerian King List and the legends surrounding the Akkadian emperors Sargon the Great and Naram-Sin have been held up as prime examples of compositions that contain such biases.

By comparison, the thoughts and attitudes of commoners toward the past are far more elusive.¹⁸ This segment of the population would not have been initiated into the religious secrets that gave priests the right to enter the sanctuaries and therefore would not have been privy to the same cultural artifacts, nor in possession of the same literary training. However, they did have access to those public manifestations of the cadre materiel that inspired collective memory. In their daily life they would have encountered many public projections of the past: the temples that loomed over the rooftops of the surrounding houses; the major processional ways that led from the gates to the temples; and the city itself.¹⁹ It is not unreasonable to believe that their understanding of these monuments would have been informed by their own memories and by the collective memory of the past kept alive within their community through oral traditions. Although their status did not place them among the circles of the powerful, they could not simply be ignored and any attempts to sway them through appeals to earlier precedents must have taken into account the likelihood that they were not entirely ignorant of the past.

A series of events that may exemplify this process can be found in Esarhaddon's rebuilding of Babylon after his father, Sennacherib, had destroyed the city in 689 bc and the return of the Marduk statue to Babylon in 668 by his son, Samas-suma-ukin, whom Esarhaddon had designated for the Babylonian throne. Within the written record it is possible to follow a discourse that sought to minimize the Assyrian role in the destruction of Babylon and to reconcile the city to its new Assyrian king by emphasizing Marduk's agency in those events. Simultaneously, there was a discernable interest in literary- historical traditions that took as their subject Babylonian rulers from the distant past who were responsible for the loss or return of Marduk, the most notable being Nebuchadnezzar I, who reigned in Babylon more than four centuries earlier from 1125 to 1104 bc.²⁰ It will be argued here that these older traditions constituted a metadiscourse that supported the dominant discourse surrounding the return of Marduk, even if they were not mentioned explicitly within contemporary communications. Those engaged in the textual discourse, both on the Babylonian and Assyrian sides, were familiar with those traditions and shared an interest in the rebuilding of Babylon that was motivated out of mutually beneficial self-interests: Esarhaddon hoped to win Babylonian support and the Babylonian elites sought the revival of the institu­tions from which they derived both economic benefits and social prestige.

The project in which Esarhaddon was engaged was intended to win over broad Babylonian support for Assyrian rule, and not just the allegiance of the educated elite. Expanding the discourse beyond literate circles was a task requiring actions in addition to words. In the process of rebuilding Babylon, Esarhaddon appropriated Babylonian customs to legitimize his actions. This performative discourse extended by necessity beyond the medium of the tablet and was communicated to the Babylonian populace through public acts and observances including the rebuilding project itself, marked by the revival of the basket-carrying ritual by Esarhaddon, and eventually the resumption of the akitu festival in 667, the celebration of the New Year at Babylon, by Esarhaddon's son, Samas-suma-ukin, following his instillation on the Babylonian throne. It is difficult to say if and how the Nebuchadnezzar tradition fitted within this popular discourse, but if elements of it were retained within the collective Babylonian memory, then aspects of the performative discourse may have been intended to appeal to those memories. Consequently the Babylonian literati could not simply tailor literary-historical narratives to satisfy the desires of the emperor; they also had to remain responsible to knowledge that existed within the collective memory if their narratives were to be credible.