Irving Finkel

There are one or two letters from a chap to a woman about, you know, you are very beautiful and your lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses and things.

But, I mean, there are some things like that.

And there's a kind of street drama in Babylon in 4th century BC, something like that.

when there must have been actors who did this in the street.

And it's Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman.

Marduk's having an affair with this other goddess, and Sarpanitum is jealous, and the women...

fighting in the street and heard insults to one another and, you know, slot bucket and all this kind of stuff.

It's hilarious.

And it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose.

I don't know.

But anyway, it starts off when Salpinitum is in the room and Marduk is in bed with this other goddess on the roof and she can hear...

You could say it was an eternal human issue.

Between deities also.

Yeah.

Because deities are only modeled on human beings after all.

Indeed.

Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods.

So there were three gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil and Ea.

There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses.

And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns had their old ancient gods, and eventually they all worked into a kind of theological system like a phone book.