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Céline Debourse, Postdoctoral fellow, Mandel Scholion Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Céline Debourse studies history and cult in the city of Babylon during the Persian, Seleucid, and Parthian periods. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mandel Scholion Research Center in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also an active member of the Center of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires at the University of Helsinki.
Her research is largely concerned with the ways in which cuneiform culture reacted to and interacted with foreign imperial rule. In her book, “Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture” (Brill, 2022), she discusses how the priests of Hellenistic Babylon developed a new discourse that substantiated their existence under foreign rule. In her current project she further contextualizes this argument by aiming to gain a better understanding of the mechanics, logistics, and rationale behind the rebuilding of Babylon’s temple community after its destruction by the Persian king Xerxes in 484 BCE.
In 484 BCE, Xerxes crushed several Babylonian revolts against his rule. One of the results was an almost complete disruption of Babylonian temple life as it had existed up until that point. While in most places the cult never resumed, in the city of Babylon the worship of the gods was eventually reinstated and even flourished again. In this talk, I ask how Babylon’s community undertook this process of rebuilding the temple, both in terms of how the worship of the gods was actually organized and how the rebuilding process was ideally envisioned and legitimized. After all, these people’s undertaking was not so straightforward, as the foreign kings who ruled over them no longer cared for the gods of Babylon.