It’s just a badly damaged, 4-inch-high clay map inscribed on both sides with cuneiform text. But it gives us a clean bird’s-eye view of the ancient Babylonians themselves.
The Babylonian Map of the World shows a vast circular continent completely surrounded by a great ocean (labeled marratu, meaning “salt sea”). Beyond the ocean are eight uncharted regions, depicted as triangles.
Prominently at the center of the world is Babylon,which is represented as a large rectangle. The map also shows Assyria, as a much smaller circle, and several cities, such as Susa. The Euphrates River, depicted as a pair of parallel lines, flows from the northern mountains to Babylon, where it bisects the city, turns due south and empties into a marshland (labeled apparu, or “swamp”). This marshland is the region where the Euphrates River merges with the Tigris River (not shown on the map) before draining into the Persian Gulf.
No one knows where the map was found, though many scholars believe it came from Sippar or Borsippa, both about 50 miles north of Babylon. The map’s date is also unknown. It cannot be older than the ninth century B.C. because it uses certain words—such as the word for salt sea, marratu—that did not appear in cuneiform texts until the reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.).
In these early texts, however, marratu refers specifically to the Persian Gulf; only in the late eighth century B.C. did marratu come to designate any ocean. So our ancient Babylonian cartographer probably made this map in the late eighth or seventh century B.C.
Clearly, he was not making a map to travel by. Assyria, which was really north of Babylon, is placed to the east. The ancient Persian city of Susa, though in fact directly east of Babylon, comes far to the south on the map. The Euphrates is almost as large as the great ocean, and the Tigris has vanished entirely.
The map does, however, get some things right. It correctly depicts the Euphrates’s course, the northern mountains and the southern marshland. We also know that in the first millennium B.C., the Euphrates did indeed bisect Babylon. According to the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, for example, “There are two sections of the city [Babylon], for a river flows through the middle. The name is the Euphrates” (Histories 1.180).
Why was the map made? Probably to set distant, peripheral regions in relation to the navel of the world: Babylon.
The text on the reverse side, though fragmentary, tells of the eight triangular regions beyond the ocean, while the text on the obverse side (above the map) appears to describe the creation of the universe by the Babylonian god Marduk after his battle with the sea. Therefore, the map’s main purpose is ideological, not geographical: It presents an image of Babylonian cosmology and cultural hegemony.
For more information, see Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Eisenbrauns, 1998).
It’s just a badly damaged, 4-inch-high clay map inscribed on both sides with cuneiform text. But it gives us a clean bird’s-eye view of the ancient Babylonians themselves. The Babylonian Map of the World shows a vast circular continent completely surrounded by a great ocean (labeled marratu, meaning “salt sea”). Beyond the ocean are eight uncharted regions, depicted as triangles. Prominently at the center of the world is Babylon,which is represented as a large rectangle. The map also shows Assyria, as a much smaller circle, and several cities, such as Susa. The Euphrates River, depicted as a pair of […]
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