Babbling About Babylonia with Dan Barnes

Iceni Barnes: Hi, I'm Iceni Barnes, exclusively interviewing the OG Nerdler, Dan Barnes, about his passion for Bronze Age archeology.

Dan Barnes: Hi, Iceni.

Iceni Barnes: What first drew you to your interest in Bronze Age archeology?

Dan Barnes: Well, I really like stories. Stories are very important to me, and lots of the oldest stories we know about come from the Bronze Age. So, if you think about the Bible and the Iliad and the Odyssey, all of them originate from the Bronze Age, and particularly in the Middle East, including Egypt, what's now known as Canaan, and also Babylonia and Assyria.

Iceni Barnes: Great. Have there been any new discoveries which have changed the way you think about the period?

Dan Barnes: Yes, completely. Up until about the late 1800s, people only really knew most of the stories from that region from very old books that have been recorded, and that's why I mentioned the Bible and the Iliad and the Odyssey. Since then, we've learnt Egyptian, and ancient Egyptian has a huge number of records, which means that we now know a lot more about the archaeology and the history of the region, which is fascinating. In addition to that, we've also dug up loads and loads of texts, inscriptions, and statues from Babylonia, which means that we now better understand two of the major empire cultures that influenced lots of the other parts of the Middle East, from which many of the stories originated. Also, we can see how they influenced other parts of the stories we know. To give you an example, in the Odyssey, it talks about how Odysseus took a wooden horse into the city of Troy, all his men hid in it, and they then escaped and they captured the city. Well, there's a city called Jaffa, then called Joppa, that was actually captured by a general called Djehuti back in the Bronze Age. Now, Djehuti was an Egyptian general, and he captured the city by hiding all of his men in baskets. He told the people in the city that they were going to be given them some presents. And so, they brought these baskets in, and his men then got out with ropes, knives and swords, and they captured the city. So that story, that idea, was definitely already in existence in around 1400 BC in the Bronze Age, which is really interesting because we think that the Odyssey and the Iliad were probably written about 400 to 500 years later. So it might be that parts of that Egyptian story were copied in the Greek story of the Odyssey, and so, by knowing much more about Egypt and knowing much more about other places like Babylon and the stories they had, we can start to work out the origins of the stories that we know today.

Iceni Barnes: Wow, that's really interesting, especially the part that you mentioned about religions. How much continuity is there, notably between the Bronze Age religions and current ones?

Dan Barnes: There's some continuity, including some very strange which many people don't know about. One of the things that we now know about the Egyptian religions and the religions of, say, Babylon is that a lot of the stories we hear about in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and a lot of the iconography of those actually come from those two different sets of cultures. For example, having two winged women on the top of the ark, which was described as seraphim, we now know was described as seraphim in the Bible. So that meant that they were angels who were pointing their wings together at each other. We now know that's actually very old iconography from Egypt. They used to have bronze boxes which had the two goddesses, Isis and Nephthys, pointing their wings at each other, and this was incredibly common, as known in Canaan. This was all over the iconography of Egypt, and was a very recognisable part of Egyptian art, and also, of course, very recognizable that these were goddesses from Egypt. So everyone would have known these weren't angels at the time, and so that part of the story suggests that Exodus and the story about Moses, who has an Egyptian name, was originally an Egyptian story, which was then copied in terms of its pictures and writings about what happened, and then reinterpreted later by people who didn't understand what its iconography actually was. We can see examples like that all the way through history into all the religions that would have existed around the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. When we move into the Iron Age, we start to see these stories having been copied, changed and retranslated, and also, of course, there's influence from Babylon in the monotheistic religions, because when the Jews were captured and taken to Babylon, it is very probable that some of the influence from the religion there rubbed off on what was then Yahweism, where they worshiped the god Yahweh, and influenced it ,because the religion that we see in the Iron Age in the same region around Yahwehism is very different to what we later see in Judaism. And so, by being influenced by all these other religions, we see that the religions that we now have, including some major ones now in Western Europe, have actually been influenced by many much older cultures.

Iceni Barnes: That's really interesting. Are there any elements of this which you have theorised but you're not yet able to prove, which may become more evident with more information?

Dan Barnes: Yeah, absolutely. I think a very interesting one is that if you look at the Egyptian gods Djehuti and Iah, Iah being the god of the moon, and Djehuti actually a god linked to him. Djehuti is a god that we talk more often about using his Greek name, Thoth, and one of the many problems with not having had Egyptian for 2000 years is that we very often talk about Egyptian words using their Greek names, rather than their Egyptian names. The god whom the Greeks called 'Thoth' was actually called Djehuti, and the god called 'Ah' by the Greeks was originally called 'Iah/Jah', and I theorise that the many religions that are now based around Jehu/Yahweh most likely originated around the Egyptian god Djehuti. One of the reasons I say this is that if you cross over some of the names of people in the Bible, like Jehusa, or Josiah in Greek, who was recorded as conquering cities in Canaan, you will find that he actually conquered the same number of cities, including many of the same cities, as a pharaoh, who was called Djehuti-mose. So both were called Djehu/Jehu, and both conquered lots of cities in the Bronze Age around the 1400 period, and later on, it was recorded that Ramesses (Ra-Moses) II, went into Canaan on another invasion, and many of the things that he did were translated into parts of Exodus, with Ramesses II's parts being written as conducted by Moses. These stories of invasions even include the building of mobile shrines, similar to how Exodus features the building of the 'ark', and both are gilded wooden boxes carried on poles. So, rather than Ramesses, it was simply Moses, and we can even see this with the battle of Kadesh, the most commonly recorded battle story in the ancient world. It was written on many temple walls, and it was even rewritten by scribes - we have found copies in their tombs, proving that it was very well known. Now, we have found that some of the inscriptions about the battle, and writings about the battle, mirror exactly some of the parts of Exodus. We cannot prove how that change was taken on, however, I would theorise that perhaps some Egyptian artifacts left behind in Canaan were reused and reread, and then misinterpreted as being parts of the original myths from cities of that region, and so they became the mythological origins of the cities surrounding Samaria and Judea, and very probably some other cities as well, whose religions didn't survive going forward. However, this is only a theory, and we will need to find more evidence to further support that.

Iceni Barnes: Well, I'm afraid that that's all we have time for on these fascinating discoveries and theories. Thank you so much for being on this podcast, Dan, and I hope to interview you again soon.

Dan Barnes: Thanks, Iceni, see you next time.