A clay fragment no larger than a postcard sat untouched in a Baghdad storeroom. Now its words sing again, thanks to artificial intelligence that stitched it to 30 other scattered fragments and revived a hymn praising Babylon.
The project began when Enrique Jiménez of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich teamed up with scholars at the University of Baghdad. Their Electronic Babylonian Library fed thousands of photographed fragments into pattern-matching software.
Individually, the fragments were indecipherable. But the algorithm spotted overlaps that human eyes had missed for a century.
“It’s a fascinating hymn that describes Babylon in all its majesty and gives insights into the lives of its inhabitants, male and female,” says Jiménez.
Scholars soon realized they had found a classic. The hymn survives in at least 20 cuneiform manuscripts copied between the seventh and second centuries B.C.E., which suggests the hymn was very popular at the time. Most manuscripts were unearthed from the ruins of the ancient city of Sippar, once a center of scholarship in southern Mesopotamia.
“The hymn was copied by children at school. It’s unusual that such a popular text in its day was unknown to us before now,” says Jiménez.
This effort restored roughly two-thirds of the original composition, around 250 lines. That’s more than enough though to get a feel of what the text is about.
What the Text Reveals
The hymn opens in reverence to Marduk, Babylon’s patron deity. It then turns its gaze to the city itself, portraying a place that “flourishes in her charms like a fruit garden” and “is called Eridu, Babylon is its name”.
The Euphrates, the river that nourished the fields and souls of Babylon, is described next.
“It quenches the lea, saturates the canebrake,
Disgorges its waters into lagoon and sea,
Its fields burgeon with herbs and flowers,
… Wealth and splendor — what befit mankind —
Are bestowed, multiplied, and regally granted.”
Such lyrical poise is unusual in Mesopotamian literature. Most surviving texts are legal codes, myths, or royal inscriptions. One of the oldest surviving Babylonian clay tablets is a 3,700-year-old complaint letter. But here, the poet sings of barley and spring blossoms as easily as temples and kings.
The hymn lauds the “free citizens” of Babylon — the ṣābū kidinni — as protectors of the orphan and the humble. “They follow the divine precepts and keep justice,” the text declares. Most striking of all: “they respect the foreigners who live among them.”
The rediscovered lines also give rare voice to Babylon’s women, especially its priestesses. It describes them as devout and discreet, “holy women who cleanse with pure water,” who “kneel in prayer, armed with supplication” and “visit the sanctuaries, seeking life.”
The text mentions three priestess classes by name — ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu — and links them not just to ritual duties but to social virtue. This rare information about the women of Babylon. Their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, is perhaps the most striking part of the hymn. Previously, we had no known texts describing these things.
The hymn ends, or perhaps trails off, with a broken doxology: “These are the ones freed by Marduk.”
History Recovered
Roughly 100 lines are missing from the final column, but hints remain of gods bestowing prosperity and “permanent happiness,” followed by a majestic appearance of Marduk riding into view.
Though the poem is set in mythic time, it may have been composed as late as the first millennium BCE. Some copies are from the 2nd century BCE, after Babylon was conquered by Alexander the Great and came under Hellenistic rule.
“Assyriology’s main objective is, as it was once put, ‘the recovery and reconstruction of a lost heritage,’” write Jiménez and Fadhil. That heritage, once fragmented and lost, now finds new breath in the unlikeliest of partnerships: clay tablets and code, lost verses and algorithms.
The findings appeared in the journal Iraq.
