The land of Babylon had a profound impact on the development of Israel and its faith. Although Egypt is featured prominently in biblical stories, it is generally conceded by scholars that Babylon and its environs had a much greater impact on Jews as a people, as well as on our history.

Archeology can tell us much about this relationship. During excavations in the latter part of the 19th century, in Mesopotamia, where Babylonia was located,  cuneiform tablets were discovered. When the cuneiform was translated, scholars found stories that bore striking similarities to certain biblical stories.

Some of these documents were originally discovered in the palace of the great Assyrian ruler, Ashurbanipal, whose library was one of the greatest collections of documents in antiquity. It was the discovery of this library that alerted scholars to documents, in this case cuneiform tablets that were copies of texts that belonged to a much earlier period.

We would not have been able to read these stories if it were not for our ability to decipher cuneiform. In a great feat of scholarship, cuneiform was first deciphered in the 1850s. Unlike hieroglyphics, which took more than two decades after Napoleon’s soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone imbedded in the walls of Fort Rashid to crack, cuneiform took less than a decade to decipher, after the discovery of the Behistun Inscription, in western Iran, that provided the key to its decipherment.

Once the decipherment had been accomplished, scholars could get to work and translate the myriad documents that were being dug up in various sites in Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq, which at that time was a backwater province of the decaying Ottoman Empire.

As in Egypt, it was the British and French who vied with each other to see who could uncover the most sites. By and large, it was the British who succeeded, but by the end of the 19th century, Americans and Germans had also gotten into the act. In fact, it was the Germans, under Robert Koldewey, who began the systematic excavations of Babylon at the end of the 19th century

What they turned up were myriad documents written on clay tablets, and in the process, they even uncovered hitherto unknown civilizations such as that of the Sumerians, who are generally credited with inventing civilization. This discovery has been celebrated in the book History Begins at Sumer, written by the eminent American Sumerologist and Yale professor, Samuel Noah Kramer.

One of the things the Sumerians invented was cuneiform writing. By the middle of the third millennium BCE, they had used cuneiform to write down the world’s first great story, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In this story, a flood that is similar to the one in the Bible is mentioned. However, this story is at least 1,500 to 2,000 years older than the story of Noah.

In the Epic, a place very much like the Garden of Eden, called Dilmun, is mentioned. The English archeologist Geoffrey Bibby wrote a fascinating book called Searching for Dilmun, in which he attempts to equate the island of Bahrain with this mythical land.

Another fascinating discovery was made by French archeologists at the end of the 19th century at the site of Tello. It was a law code belonging to Hammurabi, king of the first dynasty of Babylon, circa 1750 BCE. The code is now exhibited in the Louvre, in Paris.

Some of the laws bear a striking similarity to biblical injunctions belonging to the lex talonis type (“eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” ). Once again, scholars have dated them to a much earlier period than those found in the Bible.

However, it was the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE, as well as the subsequent captivity of the Jews, that would leave an indelible mark on our history, as we will see in my next column.