Episode 79. Rocío Da Riva and Nathan Wasserman: Carnival in Babylon: Show notes

Rocío and Nathan take us to Babylon in the Late Babylonian period for a remarkable public ritual. The divine love lyrics are one of the most surprising literary survivals from antiquity. Sarpanitu discovers that Marduk has been sleeping with Ishtar. The two goddesses become embroiled in a very public shouting match, throwing insults at each other. What was this ritual and what did it mean? 

3:56  introduction to the Divine Love Lyrics 
5:42  one text, a series, or something else?
7:20  content in detail
10:45  reading the text
16:55  making sense of the texts
20:29  literary qualities
22:18  whose perspectives?
26:05  the lyrics in Babylonian theology
32:36  was it shocking?
34:29  who was it for?
37:56  what don’t we know?
40:15  about the book

Statuette of a goddess. Parthian period Borsippa. BM 91593 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Statuette of a goddess. Parthian period. © 1997 Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Christian Larrieu. Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, AO 20132 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010144847 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU
Statuette of a goddess. Parthian period Babylon. © 2010 GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux. Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, AO 20129 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010144843 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

Music by Ruba Hillawi

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