Alan Ereira
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Ereira’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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He has a powerful army of horse archers, which again, separates them from the other cultures around. And they are well-trained and very effective. And they're there to protect the market and the merchants. They keep the whole thing in balance. This will become important. in that kingdom.
So to Herodotus' astonishment, the majority of the donors to that great monument to Aliates were women, who Herodotus, being a Greek, assumes they're all prostitutes. But that tells you, you know, how different this is from Greek or Persian or Sumerian culture. women are playing a formidable public role and are part of the commerce of the place. This all works very well.
So the coins themselves contain 40% gold, 60% silver. But the value is not the metal. The value is the stamp. Oh, okay. That's what tells you you can trust this. And you don't have to see what the coin is made of. And in fact, they're gilded to stop them being tested by touchstones. So you can't actually find out what's in the coin unless you destroy it.
And this is a good working system until the balance of value of the two metals moves apart completely.
Now, what has happened, and this has been unclear up to now, what has happened is was that the amount of gold available for the market had changed dramatically. And nobody's really looked at this connection before, but what had happened, the big thing that had happened, was the destruction of Jerusalem.
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, becomes king in 605 and in 587 seizes the Temple of Jerusalem. But it's not a quick and easy process. And it's a very extraordinary one. What's happened is that when Assyria was great, Assyria attacked the northern kingdom of Israel. Israel was split into two parts. The northern kingdom was attacked by Assyria. Its inhabitants fled south.
A lot went to Jerusalem, carrying their treasure and carrying all the religious goods, tons of stuff, which all goes into the temple in Jerusalem, which is already a great golden shrine. And the Bible is very clear about the massive quantities of gold in there. And this is part of the general culture of the area in which the gods are associated very much with gold.
And the space that is created for them of gold allows a special human being who is divinely connected to be in there with the gods. The word, after all, in the languages of the time and in modern Hebrew for a temple is actually the word house. This is the house of a god. And that's why it is spray painted to an incredible scale with gold. It just is.
like an explosion in a gold factory going into Solomon's temple. And then there's more come down from the north. Assyria, obviously, Sennacherib decides that he's got to go on and grab Jerusalem as well. But he can't do it. It's a very well defended place. And that collapses. Then Nebuchadnezzar comes to power after the defeat of Assyria. And he has a great building program.
He wants to rebuild Babylon. To do this, he's going to need a lot of money. And the reason he's going to need a lot of money is because Babylon has no access to the natural resources needed to rebuild it. It's got no timber, it's got no stone, and it's got no metal. What it's got is agriculture, very prosperous and successful agriculture.
And he's going to have to monetize this, but he's got to get hold of more gold from somewhere. so that he can buy the enormous quantities of stuff he wants to rebuild Babylon. Where can he get this gold from?
During the defense of Jerusalem, the king of Jerusalem had invited Babylonian delegation to come and have a look at the temple, presumably because he wanted to show them that he could afford to finance a rebellion by them against Assyria. It didn't go anywhere. But the prophet Isaiah was very annoyed about this having been done, because one day you're going to get into serious trouble here.
You should never have shown them all that. And it means that Nebuchadnezzar now knows where he can go to get the gold. And this is the only possible explanation of his campaign against Jerusalem, I think, because Jerusalem is not on a trade route. It's not on a military road.
The two big roads, one called the Sea Road, which goes up along the coast, the other called the King's Road, which goes up the Jordan Valley, they both avoid Jerusalem.
It is not that sort of... Why would you bother attacking it on a large scale? Nebuchadnezzar makes his first attack. He gets bought off, basically. He goes away with a certain amount of gold. And what he does is interesting. And the Bible is very clear about this. He takes the gold vessels and he cuts them up. He's not treating them as sacred booty. He's having them converted into money.
They are for sale. That's why he chops them up. There's no other reason why you would do that. He's not going to use them. He's not going to show them off. No, he's handing them out to the merchants. And clearly the merchants say it's not enough. So he goes back a year later. And he's got to get it. And he knows there's a lot there. And he can't get it. So this is a siege that goes on.
It looks like 30 months. 30 months of a great empire using its massive army to besiege a place which is of no military significance. And when it finally succeeds, it doesn't just conquer it. It totally destroys it. It takes it apart stone by stone. Where have they hidden the gold? And Jerusalem doesn't exist at the end of this. And he's taken out a hell of a lot of gold.
And we know what the effect of that is, because we have these wonderful tables of prices, this extraordinary set of cuneiform tablets stored in the British Museum, which the temple records every month the prices of six commodities for centuries, including the period we're talking about.
I think these are probably the finest financial records in existence, better than our records of our own economy, better than America's records of its economy. We have hundreds of years of price data of the same things measured in the same currency. And each one of those monthly records includes the positions of the planets.
which is why these are called the astronomical diaries, we can therefore date all the prices.
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