We Don’t Talk about Persia (in Late Babylonian Literature)
Abstract
How do we incorporate Babylonian literary production into a literary history of the Achaemenid Empire? Two big challenges stand in the way of this project. First, very few cuneiform literary texts can securely be dated to the Persian period. Particularly from the reign of Darius I onwards, we are confronted with a scarcity of cuneiform production which only picks up again by the onset of Hellenistic rule at the end of the fourth century BCE. Second, in these later Hellenistic cuneiform texts, which show a distinct interest in Babylonian history, direct references to Persia and its kings are conspicuously rare. In fact, just like cuneiform production suddenly drops during Darius I’s reign, there are virtually no mentions of kings other than Cyrus or Cambyses in Late Babylonian historiography. In this paper, I will highlight the gap in the literary record, offer some ways to think about the conceptual importance of absence, and describe the implications of each for the broad history of literary production in the Achaemenid Empire.
Citation
Debourse, Céline. "We Don’t Talk about Persia (in Late Babylonian Literature)," Achaemenid Workshop 3 (February 21, 2025).
About the Speaker
Céline Debourse
Harvard University
Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines.
Her research centers around two broad themes. First, she is interested in the final stages of cuneiform history and its reactions to and interactions with foreign imperial rule. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. In her current book project, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform: Reimagining the End of a Culture (331 BCE–224 CE), she seeks to study the latest history of the city of Babylon from a comparative perspective and to contend with the challenges presented by the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the cuneiform record.
The second main theme in her research is ancient ritual. She is currently working on a monograph preliminarily titled Rethinking Ritual: Mesopotamian Ritual in Text and Context, in which she analyses processes of ritual textualization in cuneiform tradition. In this study, she puts the texts at the forefront of investigation, with particular attention to how they exerted agency by reflecting, responding to, and transforming their historical context. This agency of the text relates strongly to historical and religious change, and gained in power and authority towards the end of cuneiform culture. The book will include updated editions and extensive analysis of the corpus of Late Babylonian temple ritual texts. Debourse is a member of the RITM study group (https://ritualsinmesopotamia.com (https://ritualsinmesopotamia.com/)) and has co-edited a volume on Ceremonies, Feasts, and Festivities in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean World (Zaphon, 2023).