ANST-401 Lessons

Good afternoon, students! I cannot believe that this is our second to last class for Year Four. How quickly the time has flown by! I truly hope that you have enjoyed our discussions on ancient Africa and the Middle East this year! Today we will finish up our discussion of ancient Mesopotamia, and briefly look at magic use in other parts of ancient Africa.

Remember that your final will be attached to our next lesson, so be sure to start reviewing your notes and tests from this past year in preparation for the exams! Before you all start panicking about finals, however, let us have a look at a fascinating piece of history: the fabled Tower of Babel.

A Towering Trouble

The very basic legend of the Tower of Babel is as follows. After the Great Flood, humans settled in the land of Shinar, and spoke only one language. Given that they had no difficulty in communicating with each other, they decided to build a gigantic tower so that they could reach the heavens. This angered God, and He confused their language (ie. they all started speaking different languages) so that they would be unable to understand each other and therefore unable to reach Heaven. The change in language caused the construction of the tower to cease, and the people living in that area scattered throughout the globe. Various interpretations of the story also depict God destroying the tower in part or in full.

What part of these tales is true and what part is fiction is where things start to get complicated. No one knows exactly where the Tower of Babel was. However, because of etymological links and a few other hints, our best guess is that the tower was built in Babylon. Exactly when it was constructed is also unknown, but we do know that King Nebuchadnezzar II, who you should recall from last class, was at least partially responsible for rebuilding a tower named Etemenanki which translates to “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth" that seems to match up with the description of the famed Babel (at least, after said tower was damaged). While some parts of the Muggle story are technically true -- for example, obviously we all no longer speak the same language -- some of the story seems to be more of an allegory, other parts have slightly changed over time, and it’s suspected that some of it was hidden or changed to cover up the use of magic in the disaster. It’s difficult to track the development of myths, stories, and legends, so it’s unclear when this “cover up” happened. However, it almost certainly occurred centuries (if not millennia) after the fact. All this to say, it’s unclear exactly which parts are solid fact, but we fortunately do have an earlier retelling (which dates to roughly the 5th century CE) that differs greatly from the accounts we hear today, which points to the use of magic as the reason for the catastrophe.

Before I explain what happened to the tower, let us look at a few more historical facts. It was damaged at some point between 1,000 and 600 BCE. As you well know from History of Magic, there were already hundreds if not thousands of languages spoken by various civilizations around the globe at this time. As is normal with languages, people who live in a specific area generally speak the same language, but as time and distance passes, regional differences start to magnify and multiply, until the same language becomes two, three, or more separate languages that are unintelligible to other speakers. A fantastic example is Latin. The “romance languages” found in Europe, such as Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French (and others) all developed from Latin, though if you speak any of these, you’ll know they’re all quite different from each other, and a Spaniard who ran into a Frenchman would not be able to understand his compatriot. Over time, geographical regions simply create their own dialects. 

So, why is there a story of doom (and language dispersion) related to the tower if a) languages were already changing and b) language change is a normal process? Well, magianthropologists and historians believe that this tale is meant to preserve a sense of warning evident in the original versions of the tower, implying something very troublesome happened there. I know, I know. You’re wondering what exactly it was and wanting me to get to the point, so I shall. It may very well be that an overeager wizard is to blame.

Babbity Rabbity and the Babbling Tower

During its time, the Tower of Babel was one of the most common places in ancient Mesopotamia to study magic. Wizards trained their apprentices there and all learned from each other in a rather harmonious manner. That is, until Melech came along.

Melech was a very talented wizard, of this there was no doubt. He was most fascinated with the human ability to learn language, but frustrated with language barriers and the time it took people to overcome them, or even learn a full, new language. And so, he decided to see if he could speed up the process of learning a new language with a spell. Due to his hubris and confidence in his abilities, he hurriedly jotted down a few ideas about how a spell like this might work, and then cast his first attempt on a few wizards passing by in the hallway of the tower.

As I’m sure is not surprising, it backfired. Horribly. The shock wave that spread through the tower and surrounding area crumbled walls and flattened trees. Anyone caught in the blast wave was either killed or had a form of brain damage inflicted upon them from the spell. From descriptions, we understand the brain damage to likely be a type of aphasia, or a general loss of the ability to understand or produce speech.  The words they tried to say came out wrong, no matter what they did. The whole area was in utter chaos for months, as both Muggle and magical healers tried everything in their power to heal the minds of the wounded, and others without the talent of healing worked tirelessly to rebuild the city.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), Melech himself was severely injured in the blast. Completely humbled and sorrowful over his actions, Melech survived for about four months after the disaster, and then finally succumbed to his injuries. With his death, the aphasia caused by his spell dissipated and the affected population regained the use of their normal speech.

We believe that so traumatizing was this accident, that this story was told far and wide to warn us against pride and taking short cuts. However, somewhere down the line, embellishments occurred, and were perhaps encouraged to sound less and less magical so it did not sound like a warning against the use of magic instead, though, you’ll notice that the moral of the original magical version is almost exactly the same as the one the Muggle story version teaches.

Ancient Magic Scrolls

And while that concludes our discussion of ancient Mesopotamia, there does remain one more topic to discuss this lesson. While your History of Magic professor goes into plenty of detail on magic in Africa (in fact, touching far more on ancient roots than normal), there are a few topics I’d like to add to augment what you’ll learn in your O.W.L. year. African civilizations at this time had some truly fascinating magical practices.

I’m talking, of course, about the famed ancient magical scrolls. Now, magical scrolls are certainl not a uniquely African practice. In fact, we will also talk about one South Arabian civilization whose scrolls are uniquely interesting. However, ancient African magical scrolls are some of the most fascinating examples of their genre. To start, we’ll be looking at the kingdom of Aksum (or Axum), which went on to influence later civilizations, like Ethiopia. Now you’ll hear your fair share about the Aksumite Kingdom later on in History of Magic, so I won’t go into too much detail about them, but suffice it to say these scrolls are just the tip of the iceberg.

The magical scrolls in question were initially all meant as healing scrolls (as you can see, healing was a common area of magic in ancient times). There were many different methods based on the type of scroll needed, but some basics include painting the scrolls with magically infused paints. The paints, serving as a pseudo-potion or proto-potion, were created by mixing various magical and non-magical ingredients, usually from plants, and then applied to the scrolls to not only write out the invocation, but to also include talismans and figures that the illiterate could use as a means to focus their own magical energy on healing themselves (if the afflicted did indeed have magical ability). While the goal was to relieve the sufferer’s physical symptoms, much like in ancient Mesopotamia, these physical symptoms were believed to be caused by spiritual issues, such as demons, therefore, these scrolls were often paired with other medicines, with the scrolls attacking the spiritual attacker and the medicines attacking the disease’s symptoms.

So popular was the production of magical scrolls, that it did not just take place in Africa, such as in the Aksumite Kingdom as well as the ancient Egyptian empire, but in other areas of the Middle East, particularly Saba, a kingdom in South Arabia populated by the Sabeans. It’s pertinent to note here that there is some argument about Saba and its location. Some say that Saba was another name for Sheba in Southern Arabia (the Middle East), whereas Saba (also called Seba) was also a location in Ethiopia.  It is confirmed that this tradition of magical scrolls existed in both civilizations, but it is not entirely clear based on these similar names which civilization developed the tradition first. And, in some cases, practices specific to the Middle East are suspected to have become mixed with African practices, whether because of real life mixing, or a simple translation error is unknown. 

What we do know of the scrolls for sure is that the practice of making them took place through much of ancient Ethiopia and parts of the Middle East. Use of these scrolls peaked during the Sabean civilization in what is now modern day Yemen, around the 5th century BCE. Sadly, in both the Middle East and Africa, the use of magic in preparing these scrolls dwindled over time as religion exerted a greater and greatest influence on the population. While these magic scrolls are still being created to this day in Africa, all of their magical aspects have been lost, and the painted images are now primarily of religious figures and events, with the knowledge of its prior magical components now lost to the sands of time.

Closing

And that concludes our lesson for today! Our next lesson will be your final lesson for Ancient Studies this year. I know, I can hardly believe it myself! To help give you enough time to prepare for your finals, you will have a simple quiz today, plus the opportunity to share any feedback you have about the class this year and myself as your instructor. Enjoy the rest of your day!

Image credits here, here, and here
Original lesson by Professor Liria Morgan