For example, it has been suggested that the painting may be read as a subtle reflection of the Victorians’ own version of the marriage market. This piece of painting may be interpreted in several ways. Clay Tablet Reveals Ancient Babylonians Used Calculus to Track Jupiter 1,500 Years before Europeans.Ancient Babylonian use of the Pythagorean Theorem and its Three Dimensions.This allowed Long to produce something that was closer to what the real Babylon would have looked like, as compared to his predecessors. As the painter was able to gain access to the Assyrian collections of the British Museum, he could incorporate a huge amount of detail from those objects into his artwork. During that time, archaeological expeditions were being carried out in Mesopotamia, and artifacts from that region were being brought back to London. The palace halls were nothing less than harems of polygamy.”Īpart from Herodotus’ writings, Long also consulted ancient artifacts in order to paint his masterpiece. Everything that ministered to the craze for adornment, appetite, and sensualism was supplied and indulged to the highest degree possible. Fathers and brothers with their daughters and sisters stood ready to barter for money the pleasures due only to love. And on regular occasions maidens were brought in large numbers and sold at auction in order that the wealthy princes and libertines of surrounding nations might be drawn to their unscrupulous market. Every woman must once in her life appear in public before the temple of Beltis, as by this means crowds of strangers were drawn to the city. ![]() Even domestic virtues were flung recklessly away for financial gratification. “The Babylonians became avaricious to an overwhelming degree. All the well-off Babylonian men who wanted wives would outbid one another to buy the good-looking young women, while the commoners who wanted wives and were not interested in good looks used to end up with some money as well as the less attractive women.”įragment from Herodotus' Histories ( Public Domain )įranklin Edson Belden in ‘Historic Men and Scenes’ (1898) writes: ![]() They were being sold to be wives, not slaves. He used to start with the most attractive girl there, and then, once she had fetched a good price and been bought, he would go on to auction the next most attractive one. An auctioneer would get each of the women to stand up one by one, and he would put her up for sale. A crowd of men would form a circle around them there. They used to collect all the young women who were old enough to be married and take the whole lot of them all at once to a certain place. Once a year, in every village, this is what they used to do. “I now turn to their customs, the most sensible of which, in my opinion, is also practised, I hear, by the Illyrian tribe. Towards the end of ‘Book 1’, Herodotus wrote: Long drew his inspiration for this painting from Herodotus’ Histories, more specifically, from ‘Book 1’ of that piece of writing. ![]() The Babylonian Marriage Market depicts women being auctioned off as brides (as opposed to, for example, slaves). Long’s other works Queen Esther (1878) ( Public Domain ) The Finding of Moses (1886) ( Public Domain )
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