Have you ever heard the story of the baby found in the river, destined for greatness? A priestess gives birth in secret, seals the basket with tar, sets it on the water. A man drawing water finds him and raises him. The boy becomes king. Everybody says that is Moses. This one is from Mesopotamia, around 2300 BC, and the boy is Sargon, the first emperor in history, way before Moses.
Listen on YouTube or in any podcast app. The full transcript follows, in chapters.
Signature 0:00
The Pistomechanics podcast. This is not the show you've been waiting for. This is the programming already running you. Together we built this clumsy civilization belief by belief. Now we take the reins, working with the sublime machine. Nobody taught you to drive your own mind. Welcome to the Pistomechanics Podcast.
Teaser: the red light 0:33
The reason you stop your car at a red light is that one day long ago, a ruler said heaven told him to make you stop. Today we uncover what installations were made 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and still keep us entranced.
The baby in the river 0:56
Have you ever heard the story of the baby found in the river, destined for greatness? You mean in the beginning, a priestess. Has a baby in secret. She knows she cannot keep him, so she puts him in a basket made of reeds, carefully seals the lid with tar to keep the water out, and sets him adrift on the current of the river. A man drawing water along the bank finds the basket. He opens it, takes the child and raises him as his own son. And you know, that boy grows up to be king. That is Moses. You are talking about the book of Exodus. Everybody says that is Moses, but.
Well, this particular story is not from the Bible. It is from Mesopotamia, the ancient land between the two rivers. Wait, if that is not Moses, then who is the boy in the basket? His name is Sargon. He was the first emperor in history, and he ruled around 2300 BC. That is roughly 4300 years ago. And, well, it is way before Moses. So the first emperor in human history was the baby in the basket, but I have never heard of him.
Why one story stuck 1:50
If he was the first emperor and he had this dramatic origin story, why has nobody heard of him? We all know the Moses version. It is the exact same basket, but two very different boys. One grows up to build the first empire the world had ever seen. The other grows up to lead a nation of slaves out of an empire. What matters is why one of those two boys is famous today and the other is not. Sargon's story was highly effective for a long time. Is that so? Yeah, it was meticulously copied by trained scribes for 1500 years, but eventually, nobody wanted it anymore. Moses story never stopped.
People are reading it out loud in public this week in cities all over the world. So one story stuck around for millennia, and the other one eventually faded out into the sand. Why did the Moses story stick while Sargon's disappeared? Well, you have to look at what the story was engineered to do. Sargon's story was built for a very specific, narrow purpose. To make one man king. When his royal line eventually went Extinct. The story had nobody left to work for. It was a tool that had lost its user. Moses story, on the other hand, is built so that no king can ever own it.
Think about it. The boy in that biblical basket never becomes a king. He does not become king, but he becomes a leader. What does he bring to the people? Instead of a crown, he brings a law. And not just any law, but a law that sits above every single king who comes after him. Furthermore, that law belongs to the people who carry it wherever they go. If a conquering army comes in and burns your city to the ground, the story and the law walk right out the gates with the people. So one story stuck and one did not. And the one that stuck was the better machine. That is the bet this series makes. History did not keep the best story. It kept the one that fixed what was wrong with the one before.
History of Pistomechanics: the engineering of belief 3:38
This is History of Pistomechanics, the man who brought heaven to Earth. What exactly is pistomechanics? It sounds like a branch of physics. Pistomechanics is the engineering of belief. A pistomechanic is an engineer of belief, a person who figures out how to get a specific belief into other people and more importantly, makes it stay there. What does that actually look like in practice? How do you engineer a belief? Imagine this scenario. A gardener's son walks into a wealthy, powerful city he has just conquered by force. Instead of burning the local temple to the ground to show his dominance, he leaves it standing. He then puts his own daughter in charge of that temple.
By the time the next religious festival rolls around, the ancient hymns coming out of that temple have been slightly altered. They now say that heaven favors his house. That is pistomechanics. And we will watch him do it. This series follows the men who engineered what people believe about who has the right to rule them, from the gods of Babylon to Christ through 10 episodes. And each episode is a fix of what went wrong with the one before.
Is this about your religion? No 4:40
In plain words, it is gods and politics. Gods politics. How leaders use the concept of heaven to install beliefs that cause people to raise towering temples, dig large irrigation canals, march in armies, and write complex laws. And this first part is the man who Invented Empire. It centers on Sargon, one of the very first Pistomechanics of civilization, one of the first engineers of belief. And on how he actually pulled it off. Is this a roundabout way of saying that religion is a conversation? Because if you frame these stories as political tools, people might feel like you are attacking what they hold sacred. No, not at all.
Nothing in these 10 episodes is about God, or about any saint or religious teacher. It is entirely about men, men who needed to be obeyed and what they carefully installed in people so that those people would obey them. Every government that has ever existed in the history of the world has done this. Yours does. And, you know, seeing how a belief got into you does not make it false. It simply tells you who put it there and why they needed you to hold it.
Two great powers, and why Mesopotamia 5:42
So why start this whole investigation in Mesopotamia? Because if you go back to around 2300 BC, there were two great powers in the world functioning much the way the United States and China are the two great powers today. There was Egypt, concentrated along its one great river. And there was Mesopotamia, nestled between its two rivers, which is where writing began. And the Mesopotamians wrote everything down. About half a million of their clay tablets sit in museum archives right now. And on them, the kings say in their own words exactly what they wanted their people to believe. We do not have to guess at how they did it.
The plans are preserved in clay. But there is a large debate among historians about what people that long ago actually believed. Right. One side says they believed entirely fictional things about how the world works, taking myths as exact science. The other side says the myths shouldn't be taken literally, but rather as deep truths about the human mind and society. Both of those sides make the exact same mistake when they look at these tablets. What did they get wrong? If they have the translated texts, how are they misinterpreting them? Well, they forget the economic reality of the time. A trained scribe cost money, and pressing a stylus into wet clay took time and effort.
A king did not pay a premium for his private, personal beliefs to be written down and preserved. He paid for what he wanted his subjects and his enemies to believe. What he actually knew, he kept with his priests. Like the way a government keeps its weapons secret today. Right. So a tablet is an installation, and that is how we read every one of them.
Egypt: a king who is a god 7:10
So to see what Sargon did, you have to see what he did not have. What was the geopolitical landscape like around 2300 BC in Mesopotamia? Each of those cities, like Ur, Uruk, Kish, Lagash, had its own God, its own wall, and its own king fighting the next city over a canal. What was Egypt set up compared to the warring cities of Mesopotamia? Egypt was defined by one river, the Nile, and ruled by one king. By 2300 BC, it had already been a single unified kingdom. For 800 years, Egypt's king ruled everywhere the river ran. The geography itself forced a kind of unity that Mesopotamia's open plains and shifting rivers did not.
With a kingdom that stable and a ruler that powerful. Was the pharaoh appointed by a God the way European kings later claimed divine rights? He was not appointed by a God. He was a God. The Egyptians called him Horus, a God in the physical body and the actual son of the sun. That is the oldest installation on record. In Egypt, the king was a God. In Mesopotamia, a God picked the king. Those are two entirely different machines. And as we will see, they fail in very different ways. What does it actually do to a population to have a God for a king? How does that change the daily psychology of a regular person?
Farming near the Nile, nobody can be. Asked whether the pharaoh should rule, because the question has no meaning. You do not vote on the sun. You do not debate whether the rain should fall. The pharaoh is a fact of nature. What did it look like in an ordinary year on the ground? For the average Egyptian, it meant that. Every facet of existence was tied to divinity. The annual flood came, bringing the fertile mud. The agricultural fields were meticulously measured. The grain harvest was collected and stored, and every single part of it was done in the name of a living God. It buys a kind of total obedience that no appointed mortal king ever gets.
I can see the raw power of that arrangement. If the ruler is infallible, the population is compliant. But surely there is a vulnerability there. What happens when the living God gets something undeniably wrong? A drought, a famine, a bad military decision. You have hit on the exact breaking point. That is the one thing the machine cannot survive. And Egypt found it out the hard way. A living God cannot make a mistake. Which means the model is very fragile when reality refuses to cooperate.
Akhenaten erased 9:31
Around 1350 BC, a pharaoh renamed himself after the disk of the sun. The name he chose is Akhenaten. And he decided rather abruptly that Egypt would stop worshiping its vast pantheon and instead worship that one single God. He ordered the old temples closed. He built an entirely new capital city out in the harsh desert. And he moved the entire royal court and bureaucracy. There was a. How long did that kind of top down disruption last? It lasted exactly as long as he did. Within a generation of his death, the old temples were open again. The old rituals were restored, and the court had moved back to the traditional centers of power.
Who undid him? Who had the power to overturn the orders of living God? The priests of the old gods undid him. They did not just reverse his policies. They initiated a campaign of total erasure. They meticulously cut his face his chosen name and the name of his new God out of every stone monument they could reach. His new desert city was simply abandoned and left to the sand. They scrubbed him from existence. Why go to the trouble of erasing him entirely instead of just replacing him and saying the previous pharaoh made some bad policy choices? Because you cannot vote a God out and you cannot say he was mistaken.
So you can only erase the flawed predecessor and pretend he never was. But despite this vulnerability, Egypt is not the loser of this story. Their model lasted 3,000 years. It is simply the road not taken by the rest of the world. If the Egyptian model provides that level of absolute, unquestioning obedience, why can nobody else take it? Why didn't the kings in Mesopotamia just declare themselves living gods too? Because you need a Nile. The Egyptian belief relied on a highly predictable, isolated environment. A God who is the son of the sun and the master of the reliable annual flood is a God of that specific river.
Now, say you rule a city between the two rivers in Mesopotamia. Your environment is chaotic. The rivers flood violently and unpredictably. You have a mud brick wall, a canal, and a neighbor a few miles away who desperately wants your canal. You could look at Egypt and want that kind of unquestioned obedience, but you cannot have it. The environment will constantly expose your lack of divine control.
Sargon: the cupbearer who took a throne 11:40
A man from the Mesopotamian city of Kish then did something nobody had done, engineering a new way to hold power. His name, or at least the name he is known by, was Sargon. So we arrive at Sargon. Where did he come from? If he wasn't born a God king, what was his background? The ancient list of kings that the Mesopotamians meticulously kept says something quite surprising about his origins. It states that he had been the cupbearer of the king of Kish and that his father was a humble gardener. He was not royalty. What did a cupbearer actually do? To a modern ear, that sounds like a waiter or a servant.
How does someone pouring wine end up positioned to take over a city? Well, you have to look at the access the job requires. A cup bearer carried the king's cup, which means he stood beside the king every single day. He stood in the room for every meeting. He heard what the king heard, knew the king's enemies, and understood the inner workings of the court. It was the closest a gardener's son could possibly get to a throne without being born to one. From that position of intimate access and trust, he took the throne of Kish. Then he set his sights outward and took Uruk, the biggest and most powerful city in the south. Conquering Uruk must been a monumental task.
The inherited claim, and the made name 12:53
Who ruled Uruk at the time, a. Man called Lugalzagesi ruled Uruk. And he had already done something highly significant. Lugalzagesi had made a bold territorial claim on stone. The God Enlil, he publicly stated, had given him all the land from the lower sea to the upper sea. What does that mean on a map. For us today, it means the entire stretch of land from the Persian Gulf in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Now think about the Pistomechanics of Sargon conquering that specific city. How did that work? You have just beaten a king whose people firmly believe that heaven gave him the whole land from sea to sea.
The moment that king is gone, the claim does not vanish. The claim is yours. The belief has been inherited. That is an interesting shift in the mechanics of power. What does that inherited belief do to the kings who come after it? Changes the baseline of ambition forever. Once Sargon claims it, every king after him has to claim it. And what does it do to Sargon himself? It is one thing to claim the world, it is another to hold it. That is the burden of the inherited claim. And once he claims it, he has to prove it. If he does not, the next ambitious man takes the claim and secures it at Sargon's expense.
Sargon proved it relentlessly, taking city after city and holding the empire together for three generations. Yeah, it's a long time. And because he was the first to do it on this scale, he is the one whose method we can clearly read in the historical record. The first thing to know about Sargon's engineering is his name. It's not the name he was born with. In his own language, the name is made of two words, the king and true. The name is Sharru-kin, and it means the rightful king. That sounds like a man who knows very well he is not the true king. If you have to call yourself the rightful king, it usually means there are serious doubts.
What does a deliberately made name actually do for a ruler like that? A man who forcefully takes a throne he was not born to and then insists on calling himself the true king is installing something in every single subject before they ever see his face. It is a bit like a shop that paints the word honest in bold letters over its door. It frames the conversation. He made the name up, and then through pure force and repetition, he made everyone from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea answer to it. The second thing to look at Is where he publicly said that name came from.
His own royal inscriptions say that Enlil, the king of the gods, gave him the land from the lower sea to the upper sea. He does not credit the river for his wealth and he does not credit his army for his victories. He credits the king of the gods. Why does that specific sentence matter beyond Sargon's own lifetime? Why is crediting a God rather than your general such a vital piece of engineering? Because every ruler in this series says it in one form or another for the next 4,000 years. Heaven gave me this. And what does a sentence like that start? In the broader scope of history, it. Starts an arms race over who heaven appoints and who gets to say so. It is never stopped. And to anchor this new divine claim, the empire had a physical center, a name.
Akkad: the capital nobody can find 15:56
His capital was called Akkad. Where is Akkad located today? Nobody knows. What is Sargon's actual legacy if not stones and walls? He is remembered as the first emperor. What he installed in people's minds outlived everything he built with his hands. That is how much of a pistomechanic he was. The name outlived the city, too. The language his court officials wrote in is called Akkadian, named after the city. And for more than a thousand years after Sargon died, kings from Egypt all the way to the mountains in the east wrote their diplomatic letters to each other in it. An empire ultimately is a name that strangers 300 miles apart agree to be called by.
It is a shared mental shape. And the specific thing Sargon did at Ur tells you exactly how he thought about building that mental shape. You mentioned conquering cities earlier. What exactly happened when he arrived at Ur? Ur was the old holy city of the south, a place of immense cultural and religious weight. Its main temple belonged to the moon God. And the moon God's temple had a high priestess. This was the most sacred, respected office in the entire city. Usually an ancient conquest involves demonstrating that your gods defeated their gods. Did he sack the city and burn the temple down? He did not burn the temple. Instead of destroying the focal point of the city's belief, he put his daughter in it.
Enheduanna, and taking the priests 17:15
Her name was Enheduanna. And she became the high priestess of the moon God at Ur. A stone disc with her picture and her name carved on it was dug out of the temple ruins in the 1920s. And ancient poems survive with her name on them. They include hymns to the various temples of the land and deeply personal hymns to the goddess Inanna. So the first author in all of human history. With a verified name on the page is the daughter of the first emperor writing poetry from a job her father handed to her. Exactly. The first named author in history was a political appointment. Stand in the city of Ur for a moment and imagine you are a local citizen and I will tell you what you see.
Your God is the moon God and his grand house is the center of your world, your calendar and your economy. The foreign man who just conquered you did not touch it. He did not tear down your sacred spaces. Your seasonal festivals run exactly as they always have. Your local priests keep their comfortable jobs. The only difference is that now the woman sitting at the very top of the hierarchy is his daughter. And the beautiful new hymns coming out of the temple just happen to be about how the gods deeply favor the house of Sargon. But if he has a powerful army, why go through the charade of writing poetry and installing his daughter?
Why not just execute the local priests and replace them with his own loyal generals? Because the people already believe in these priests. Whoever holds the temple holds what the people already deeply believe. It is cheaper to take the priests than to kill them. Look at what he had done from a mechanical perspective. A gardener's son, with absolutely no ancestral claim to anything stands up and says the king of the gods personally appointed him. He marches into the conquered city's holiest office, carefully puts his iron blood in it, and the religious hymns start coming out in his favor, weaving his political dominance into their daily prayers.
And it worked. The fiercely independent cities obeyed and the empire held together for three generations. What do you call that specific tactic? Taking over the local engine of belief to validate a foreign ruler? That is how empires are made. And Sargon taught the world how. Every empire since has copied the model. A ruler claims to be appointed from above, and the trusted priests of the conquered people are brought in to loudly agree and say so. That is why Sargon is the first pistomechanic of this series. There is a line in the oldest long story in the world that articulates what Sargon and his kind were truly after.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, sets out for the dangerous cedar forest. And he explicitly says why he is taking the risk. He says, I will set up my name. That desire for legacy is something we see often. The Bible's version of the exact same wish is the story of the Tower of Babel, where the builders gather and say, let us make a name for ourselves. Yes, but keep in mind that the biblical version is the critics version. It was Written by people who had walked away from the cities. People who looked at empire building as a sin of arrogance.
Which brings us back to the rivers. Egypt had a river to unify them and justify their living God. These Mesopotamian men had a name and a God who they loudly claimed had given it to them. They did not need a river. They made a name. Sargon laid the foundation, but his grandson took the name one step further than anyone had ever dared.
Naram-Sin: the god who asked to be asked 20:28
The grandson was Naram-Sin, and He ruled around 2250 BC. How do we know what Naram-Sin did? You said the Mesopotamians wrote everything down. But if the capital city of Akkad is still lost, where are we getting the details of his reign? We find pieces of the installation scattered throughout the region. In 1974, road workers in northern Iraq accidentally turned up a heavy copper statue base with a clear inscription from Naram-Sin's own reign stamped right on it. It is sitting in the National Museum in Baghdad now. What does the inscription on the copper base actually say? The inscription boldly states that after he won nine battles in a single year, the citizens of his city, Akkad, formally asked the great gods to make him the God of their city and that they built him a grand temple right in the middle of it.
Think about the reality of that claim. Nine battles in one year means organizing, marching, fighting, and winning a war every six weeks for an entire year. And he won every single one of them. That unbroken streak of violence is what defined the year. He decided he was more than just a mortal king from then on. He took a radical step. What did he do? He wrote the sacred cuneiform sign for God directly in front of his own name. He is the first king in Mesopotamia we have on record who was openly called a God while he was still alive. And the key sentence he chose to carve into the metal is that elevating him to godhood was the people's idea.
Why did he need the people to have asked for it if he just won nine wars in a year? He is clearly the most powerful man on earth. Why not just declare himself a God the way the Egyptian pharaohs did? Because of the different engines of belief. A king who is a God by birth, like the Egyptian pharaoh, does not need anyone to ask for him to be a God. It is a fact of nature. But a king who was originally appointed by the gods operating in the Mesopotamian model needs a formal request on the official record if he wants to change his status. So he put the request on the record, and he cleverly wrote it himself.
But if the logic of the claim relies on the people, there is a glaring weakness. If the people made him a God by asking for it, the people can unmake him by changing their minds. And that is a bad piece of Pistomechanics. Naram-Sin overreached. You can successfully install the fear of a God in people. You cannot install in them the memory of asking for them when they clearly remember that they did not. And the moment you explicitly name the people as the source of your divine claim, you invite the people to answer and challenge you. The installation simply did not hold. Within a generation of his death, the entire empire was gone, collapsing around 2150 B.C.
People from the rugged mountains to the east came down into the fertile plain, and the cities the empire had held so tightly stopped obeying the capital. And because history in this region is recorded, the people who came after him surely wrote down their own version of what happened. Right? Did they write a poem about why the great empire fell? They did. It's a famous text called the Curse of Akkad. And the king it explicitly blames for the devastation is Naram-Sin. It blames him for arrogantly turning on the temple of Enlil, the house of the very same God his grandfather Sargon had originally set appointed him.
The poem says that Enlil was deeply offended and answered by sending the savage mountain people down to entirely destroy the city. From reading that, I can tell you exactly how the first empire was remembered by the people who lived in its smoldering ruins. It was a story of the king who reached too high and a God who reached down and took it all back. So the grand design of the first Empire ultimately collapsed because of a flaw in how the claim to power was made. Sargon's family reached for too much, tried to change the rules of the engine and broke it. What came next? How did later rulers fix the vulnerability of needing the people's approval?
500 Years later, in the city of Babylon, a clever king worked out exactly what had gone wrong with the way Sargon's family held power. What he did about it was so enduring that its echo reaches you when you sit at a red light at three in the morning.
Hammurabi: the law in a stone 24:23
The king was Hammurabi, and around 1755 BC, he had a large stone set up in public. What does this stone look like? We are so used to digital laws, it is hard to imagine a physical monument to legislation. It is imposing. It was carved from black diorite. It stands taller than a man, reaching two and a quarter meters high. And it's currently standing in the Louvre in Paris, where you can walk right up and stand in front of it. When you stand in front of it, what is actually carved on it? At the very top, there's a detailed carving of the sun God Shamash. He is seated on a throne, and he's handing the king a rod and a ring.
Those specific items are the traditional measuring tools of a builder. Below that divine carving taking up the rest of the stone, in column after column of dense cuneiform writing, are about 280 specific laws. What sort of laws? They cover daily, mundane life. They cover wages for laborers. They cover the rules of renting property. They meticulously cover what a husband owes a wife and what a wife owes a husband in a marriage. They fix the exact price of hiring a riverboat. And they spell out what happens to a surgeon whose patient dies on the operating table. If you read the top of the stone, does the king tell you where all these variations, practical laws, came from?
Yes, and this is the vital piece of engineering the great gods called him. He explicitly says, to make justice appear in the land. And he states the purpose so that the strong might not oppress the weak. Now, kings had written legal codes before him. Hammurabi was not the first to legislate. The entirely new thing with Hammurabi is the stone itself. He carved the law where everyone could physically see it, but permanently placing it under a picture of a God handing it down so that it could not be casually changed by the next ruler, and so that the authority of the law did not depend solely on him.
Where did Sargon's claim to power live? Sargon's claim lived inside Sargon. His entire argument was, heaven gave me the land. And Hammurabi's? How does the stone change the location of the authority? Hammurabi's claim lives securely in an object. His argument is, heaven gave us this law, and here it physically is. A king eventually dies. A stone stays. What does a large stone covered in rules like that do to the psychology of a people? It creates an entirely new concept of authority. Before the stone, the law was exactly whatever the king said it was this year, subject to his moods and whims. But for an ordinary citizen, what could a person in Babylon actually do with it?
Most of them couldn't read the cuneiform anyway. They did not necessarily need to read it. They could walk to the public square, stand directly in front of the towering stone, and point at it. That is what a stone in a public place is fundamentally for. A person can point at it to settle a dispute. And people kept pointing at it long after the king died and long after everything else in the city was gone. Did it survive the fall of the city? When Babylon eventually fell, the stone was so deeply respected as an object of power that it was carried off as valuable loot by a conquering king of Elam around 1150 B.C.
And taken back to his own capital, a city called Susa. What did the king of Elam do with it once he dragged it all the way to Susa? He scraped a section of the ancient laws off the face of it, preparing a smooth space to carve his own name and his own victories. But the carving was never finished. The great stone stood in Susa with a conspicuous blank patch on it for 3,000 years. French archaeologists finally dug it up out of the dirt there in 1901. Think about the timeline, 3,600 years after it was first cut and polished in Babylon. That exact stone is the reason you can sit at a desk today and read the Law of Hammurabi.
And it is the oldest surviving ancestor of the thing you obey at a pedestrian crossing in the middle of the night, when nobody at all is watching you. A rule written down, existing above every single person, handed down by something higher than any of them. And here's the part I want you to keep.
Why you stop at a red light 28:14
If you magically transported someone from ancient Babylon to a modern city, nobody in Babylon would have understood the mechanics of an electric traffic light. But you know, every one of them would have understood why you stop. However, the stone still has a flaw. And the flaw is visible right there in the beautiful carving at the very top. The God Shamash is handing the law directly to the king. So he is still in the middle of it. The king remains the vital channel. He still stands above the law. He publishes because the law must go through him to reach the world. And ultimately, the stone is his dynasty's monument, adorned with his name at the top.
And not the people's. The people are merely what the law is about. They are not who the law belongs to. So the law remains above every person in Babylon except one. And it came from a God.
Somebody has to speak for heaven 28:59
If heaven picks the king, somebody on earth has to speak for heaven. The rest of this episode is about the people who speak for the gods and what they did with that in Babylon. That somebody had a job, a building and a calendar. The building was the tallest thing anyone in that city had ever stood next to. Babylon had its own story of how the world began. It is a poem seven tablets long, read aloud in the city Every spring of the new year, in full, we start there because that poem is the installation underneath every other installation in the city. It says that in the beginning, the gods were at war with the sea, which was chaos itself, and none of the older gods could beat her.
Babylon's creation story: even the gods elected their king 29:33
They held an assembly. They sat down together, they ate, they drank, and they voted. They gave the kingship of the gods to a young God called Marduk. And the price of the kingship was that he go out and fight the sea for them. He fought her, he won, and he cut her body in two to make the sky and the earth even the. Gods elected their king. The God at the top of Babylon's world holds his office because the other gods handed it to him before he had done anything in exchange for a job. The poem goes on to say exactly what the gods did.
They made human beings out of the blood of a rebel God so that mankind would do the work and the gods could rest. Well, the first thing the gods built with their own hands was Babylon, its temple and its tower. The city says of itself that the gods founded it in person before there were any kings at all. Think about what that story does to a person living inside it. You were made to work so that the gods could rest. The city around you was built by the gods themselves. Your king is a man they chose,. And the God who chose him was chosen by a vote.
There is no floor to the authority. Every level of authority is a gift from the level above. All the way up, you report to the overseer. The overseer reports to the king. The king reports to Marduk, and Marduk. Answers to the assembly that voted him in. This is Pistomechanics operating on a whole city at once told us the story of how the world was made. The tower in that story was real. It stood in the middle of Babylon. A step tower of baked brick on a base about 90 meters on each side. What was it called? In the city's own tongue, the tower was called the House of the foundation of Heaven and Earth.
A mountain is where heaven touches the earth, and where the land is flat, men build one. But while the tower had one official name, the city around the tower was a different matter. The city's name had three distinct readings. The city itself meant the gate of the God, the door the God comes through. But the Bible tells the story of that same tower from the outside. In Genesis, the people of the plain say, come, let us build a city in a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves. God comes down, mixes their languages, so they cannot understand each other and scatters them.
The tower, and three ways to hear the name 31:40
And the Bible says that is why the place is called Babel from a word that means confusion. So the internal reading is the God's doorway and the external reading is confusion. And there is a third reading which is our own. From our own research at pistomechanics.org, Bel was the title of Marduk. It means the Lord. And in Hebrew, the little word for in is a single letter, a B, stuck on the front of a word Babel in bel inside the Lord. If the God lives in the city, the city must act that out. The New Year festival ran for 11 days. How did the 11 days begin?
The festival began in darkness. Before the sun rose, the high priest went into the temple of Marduk alone. He said the prayers while the city was dark. What happened on the fourth day? The priests recited the entire seven tablet poem to the city. The war with the sea, the assembly voting, the making of men to do the chores, the gods building Babylon. Every person heard exactly why they were at the bottom of the ladder. When did the king enter the temple? The most powerful man alive walked into the temple on the fifth day. He entered to have his kingship renewed. The High Priest of Marduk waited for him near the physical statue of the God.
What did the high priest do when the king approached? We know what happened in that room because the priests wrote the ritual down. The priest takes his scepter, his ring, his mace and his crown and sets the four of them down on a chair in front of the statue of the God. Then the high priest struck the king across the face. He grabbed the king by the ears. He dragged the supreme monarch across the floor. He forced the king to his knees in front of the statue. Why does a king with a standing army submit to being dragged by the ears? If heaven picks the king, the king only has power.
If heaven approves. Without the endorsement of the God, the king is just a man with a sword. There is always another man with a sword willing to take his place. What did the king say while he was on his knees? He said, I did not sin. Lord of the lands, I did not neglect your Godhead.
Eleven days: the king is struck and made to kneel 33:40
I did not destroy Babylon. I did not order it to be scattered. I did not strike the cheek of the protected citizens. I did not humiliate them. He says he did not slap the citizens while he is being slapped. After the confession, the High priest spoke on behalf of Marduk. The priest told the king the God heard the words. The priest handed back the scepter. The Ring, the mace and the crown. The king was reinstalled. Then the priest struck the king across the face a second time. What was the purpose of the second strike? If tears came to the king's eyes, it meant Marduk was content.
The year would be good. If tears did not come, it meant Marduk was angry. An enemy would rise and bring the king down if bad events happened in the coming year. The priests explained it in advance by the king's lack of tears. The priests walked out of the temple holding the certificate of kingship. Who were the protected citizens? The king swore not to strike. They were a specific class of people. In Babylon, these citizens held three old privileges. The king could not force them to do labor on his public buildings. He could not draft them into his army. He could not seize their land. The oath the king took on his knees protected the citizens from the king.
The constitution the whole city watched 34:49
That was Babylon's constitution, and everybody in the city saw it performed. Hammurabi carved his laws into stone. Hammurabi's stone was a constitution for the population. That law went through the king to control the people. The New Year festival was a law that sat above the king. The king was under the constitution. The arrangement required the statue of the God and the body of the king to be in the same room. What happens when the statue is removed? The belief fails.
A god you can carry is a god you can steal 35:15
In 689 BC the King of Assyria, a man named Sennacherib, arrived at Babylon. He destroyed the city. He walked into the temple and carried the statue of Marduk away to his own country. Because the statue was gone, the New Year festival could not be held for 20 years. The city could not renew its king or its calendar until the statue was returned. Hammurabi's stone suffered the exact same fate 500 years earlier. An enemy packed the carved laws into a baggage train and took them to a city called Susa. A God you can carry is a God you can steal. What happens when the king removes his own physical body from the room? Around 553 B.C.
The king who would not come home 35:53
The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, refused to participate. He left the walled city. He traveled deep into the Arabian desert to an oasis called Tayma. He stayed at the oasis for 10 years. He would not come home to kneel. He would not hand over his crown. He would not let the high priest strike his face. How did the priests document his refusal? Babylon kept a chronicle. The priests recorded the events of every year, counted by the years of the king's reign. What does the seventh year of the ledger say? The seventh year says the king was at the Oasis. The king did not come to Babylon.
The God did not go out. The new year festival did not take place. What does the ninth year say? The ninth year says the king was at the oasis. The king did not come to Babylon. The God did not go out. The festival did not take place. What does the 10th year say? The 10th year repeats the exact same four lines. The 11th year says the same four lines. Every year of the chronicle that survives from his time at the oasis repeats this stubborn ledger. The priests had the temple and the tower, but they did not have the man. A foreigner arrived at the walls of Babylon. The year was 539 BC.
Cyrus, and the instrument somebody is holding 36:58
Cyrus, the king of Persia, brought his army to the city. His empire already stretched from the Aegean Sea into the middle of Asia. Did Babylon fight Cyrus? Babylon fell to Cyrus almost without a fight. Within a year of Cyrus taking the city, a clay cylinder was written in his name. It is the size of a rugby ball. It sits in the British Museum right now. A copy of it is kept in the United nations building in New York. It is a priesthood's press release for a new king. Nobody signed the Cyrus cylinder, but it is written in Babylon's own language. It uses the temple's own specific phrases.
They wrote that Marduk looked through all the lands for a righteous king. They wrote that Marduk took Cyrus the Persian by the hand and called out his name. The cylinder states that the God delivered Nabonidus directly into the hands of Cyrus. The priests claimed the whole city rejoiced. The priests handed the divine mandate of Babylon to a foreign invader. Nabonidus refused to be slapped. They put the transfer of power in writing in the God's name. The priests of Marduk executed the same move the biblical prophet Samuel made. Samuel looked for David to replace Saul because Saul would not do as he was told. A ceremony you can refuse one man and grant another is not a ceremony.
It is an instrument and somebody is holding it. What is the point of claiming heaven picks the king if the priests can swap the king whenever they want? If a man says he should rule because he is clever, you can argue with him. If he says he should rule because he is strong, you can gather men and fight him. But if the priests say heaven decided he should rule, you cannot fight heaven. Heaven does not come down to the temple to speak. A man speaks for it. Once you create the office of the one who speaks for heaven, the power belongs to him. The king in the desert learned this. The king of Persia learned this when he arrived at the walls and Received the city. So who is this series about?
The people outside the wall 38:50
The man who speaks for heaven. For the next two and a half thousand years, we are going to watch him decide the fate of kings. What about the people outside the wall? A name draws a wall and outside it you belong to nobody. Around 1350 BC, city governors in Israel and Lebanon, like Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem wrote letters on clay to the Pharaoh begging for archers. What were they facing that required Pharaoh's archers? The threat was the Habiru, people outside the order. Runaways, hired swords men who had left their city and owed nothing to anyone. The governor of Jerusalem wrote to Pharaoh in words close to these.
The Habiru are plundering the lands of the king. If there are no archers this year, the lands of the king are lost. He wrote it more than once. The word Habiru sounds like the word Hebrew. And scholars have argued about that for more than 100 years without settling it. So we will not settle it either. What we can say is what the Hebrews said about themselves, because it is on the record. Their own name for themselves comes from a word that means to cross over. The first man the Bible calls a Hebrew is Abraham. And the old rabbis explained the name this. The whole world stood on one side and he stood on the other.
They turned the empire's story inside out. Their law was given on an unknown mountain. Their founder's grave is unknown to this day. Now think of everything the empire needed. A city built by the gods, a statue you could carry, a tower where heaven touched the earth, and a king who was the channel they did without every one of those. If the king of Assyria comes to take your God away, he finds nothing to pick up. If he looks for your holy mountain to plant his flag on it, he cannot find it. A law that belongs to the people goes wherever the people go. Those are the two kinds of people.
And both of them are still with us. One wants a wall, a name over the gate, a God in a house. That is Babylon and it is every capital city you have ever visited. And the other wants a law in a bag. An untakeable mountain, no wall. That is the people who walked out. And it is every group you have ever seen refuse to be told who it is. The irony is the people who walked out of the city with the name are the ones who held on hardest to who they are. This is 4,000 years ago.
Four things you believe about power 40:56
So what has any of it got to do with me? Here's what it has to do with you. There are things you believe about who is allowed to rule you, that nobody sat you down and taught you. They were installed and here they are. A ruler has to win order and he has to keep winning it or chaos comes back. A ruler can lose the right to rule. There is a mandate and it can be withdrawn. There's an inside and an outside, and the inside has a name. A law is a thing above a man, and it came from somewhere higher than him. You learned all four in Babylon. Every government you have ever lived under runs on them. And so does every argument you have ever had about whether the man at the top of it had any right to be there.
What the next episode answers 41:32
That is the oldest thing you believe about power is 4000 years old. Mesopotamia needed a statue, a ceremony, and a king who would come home and kneel. What if one of the three was missing? Take away any one of the three and the year could not turn. And in Egypt. In Egypt, it needed one thing. A God who was never wrong. One mistake and the priests had to scrape him off the walls. A statue can be carried off. A stone can be loaded onto a cart. A king can stay in the desert. A God can be wrong. What would a belief look like that nobody could carry off?
The people who walked out of Egypt built one. Did they have a king? They tried not to have a king at all, and it did not work. They put the book above the king, and their law needed only its people. Next week, we go one layer deeper. This was the Pistomechanics podcast. What can be studied can be learned.