Astral Codex Ten

Babylon

13 min read

Babylon

Article

Babylon is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 03, 2023 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “We would lose Babylon, Rome, and most of Egypt”; “Ancient states like Babylon and Egypt are gradually coming alive”; “Babylon and Egypt on the other”. It most often appears alongside Egypt, China, Persia.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: March 03, 2023
  • Last seen: October 22, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
Areas likely above water during the Ice Age are in orange-brown (source) What would happen to the ancient civilizations we know about if sea level rose an additional 120m? We would lose Babylon, Rome, and most of Egypt. But: The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.
Inline links: source
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept. Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World. The earlier past is moving into the light, too. Ancient states like Babylon and Egypt are gradually coming alive: Hammurabi and Gilgamesh get more play relative to Solon and Achilles. And before that, the real prehistory of the first cities, the Neolithic, the growth of agriculture, the end of the Ice Age at 10,000 BC, modern humans around 100,000 BC, the first humans at 1mya (million years ago)… these dates are gradually getting fixed in the mind as turning points in the story of us.
Inline links: story of us
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
Inline links: book, 1
Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
When Alexander [said his last goodbye to his horse Bucephalus], the whole army howled, making a tremendous noise. The treacherous slave who had prepared the poison and who had plotted against their lives thought that Alexander was dead, and came running to see. When Bucephalus saw him, he cast off his morose and dejected look, and, just as if he were a rational, even a clever man - I suppose it was done through Providence above - he avenged his master. He ran into the midst of the crowd, seized the slave in his teeth, and dragged him to Alexander; he shook him violently and gave a loud whinny to show that he was going to have his revenge. Then he took a great leap into the air, dragging the treacherous and deceitful slave with him, and smashed him against the ground. The slave was torn apart; bits of him flew all over everyone like snow falling off a roof in the wind. The horse got up, neighed a little, and then fell down before Alexander and breathed his last. Alexander smiled at him. Then the air was filled with mist, and a great star was seen descending from the sky, accompanied by an eagle; and the statue in Babylon, which was called the statue of Zeus, trembled. When the star ascended again to the sky, accompanied by the eagle, and had disappeared, Alexander fell into his eternal sleep.
Book Review: Cyropaedia
January 10, 2024 · Original source
Lots of ancient civilizations started as city-states, and - even after reaching imperial glory - were still in some sense city-empires. Rome, Carthage, and Babylon are all obvious. But even the less obvious ones still fit the pattern. Assyria was centered around the city of Assur. Egypt shifted imperial centers over the dynasties, but it was usually either Memphis or Thebes. So what city did Persia start out as? What was the urban seed of Cyrus’ conquests?
Amorites taking over Babylon: Okay, but the Babylonians could hardly go into the hills to wipe them out, so they got basically unlimited chances.
Amorites taking over Babylon: Okay, but the Babylonians could hardly go into the hills to wipe them out, so they got basically unlimited chances. The way I would frame this is that settled decadent people do win more often than they lose, but unsettled barbarians still seem to punch above their weight given the material disadvantages they face. In one of his few concessions to the Fremen, Devereaux has a soft spot for Ibn Khaldun’s theory of asabiyyah - that small tribes can maintain camaraderie and a “family” type atmosphere as their larger neighbors spread themselves too wide and get involved in satrapial backstabbing. The tightly-knit small tribe can then conquer the large but fragmented empire, benefit from its camaraderie for a generation or two until it fades away, and then become the next fragmented decadent empire in turn. Xenophon hints at this in Cyropaedia. Cyrus and his childhood friends form a tightly-knit cadre for the Persian army; their bonds of trust are unbreakable. Meanwhile, Assyria and all the Persians’ other enemies are collections of backstabbing vassals held together with gum and duct tape, who fragment at a mere poke from the crystalline perfection of the Persian machinery. In one of his few other concessions, Devereaux agrees that the Mongols were very impressive, but says this was because of very specific aspects of their society rather than general Fremenness. For example: Steppe warriors battled with tactics learned from the hunt and engaged in operations with logistics they used for every day survival. But it isn’t the ‘hardness’ of this way of life that provided the military advantage (if it was, one might expect non-horse cultures on similarly marginal lands to be equally militarily effective and – as we’ve shown – they were not), it was the overlap of very specific skills (namely riding, horse archery and the logistics of steppe pastoralism) that led to the military advantage. Okay, but one of Xenophon’s points is that Cyrus was a great warrior because he and his friends learned tactics from hunting constantly, and their foil the Medes didn’t do this because they were too civilized and decadent. So my model of Xenophon’s response to Devereaux would be that Devereaux is accurately recognizing various features of non-decadent societies, and judging each of them a contingent exception, rather than Directly The True Effect Of Non-Decadence. But non-decadence, if it’s valuable as a concept at all, will be made of things like “camaraderie among tribe members” and “a tradition of learning tactics from hunting”. Is it useful to think of all of these things as coming from a central concept of “non-decadence” rather than as a bunch of separate things? Here I think about Zvi’s review of Moral Mazes, a book about (essentially) corporate decadence, the difference between a bloated megacorporation and a nimble startup. On average, a bloated megacorporation beats a startup - the next-generation smartphone is more likely to be developed by Apple than by three people in a garage. But everyone agrees startups have advantages of their own, and are sometimes able to beat the megacorporation despite how unlikely this seems. Moral Mazes posits that the bloated megacorporation has so many layers of middle management that the average leader is dealing entirely with social reality - trying to manipulate the beliefs of other middle managers, who are themselves concerned mostly with the beliefs of other middle managers, and so on. Meanwhile, the startup is concerned mostly with physical reality. Either you’re working on real business things (like engineering the product, or looking for customers, or even managing the budget) or you’re at least managing someone who’s doing those things rather than living entirely in some giant house of mirrors. Megacorporations have high volume and low surface area - most points are far away from any boundary with the outside. Startups have low volume and high surface area - most parts of them are being constantly tested against reality and honed into some useful form. One reading of Cyropaedia portrays Cyrus the Great as a guy in touch with physical reality. Part of that is that he goes hunting (and later, goes into battle). But part of that is that his friends are real people, who are his friends for specific reasons, and not ten layers of courtiers and flatterers and vassals. Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality (read Zvi if you don’t believe me). I think this is enough to link Ibn Khaldun, Xenophon, and the Western tradition of decadence (this is just a possibility proof, not an “I’m definitely right” argument). Then you could use that to explain why barbarians seem to punch above their weight (eg rule China 20% of the time even with 1% of the population). Did Cyrus The Great Invent Niceness? This is a claim I’ve sometimes heard. Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared. The history of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages is a history of fearmaxxing. Kings would torture their rivals and slaughter their enemies, then erect steles saying “I massacred the Vorgundians, laid waste the land of the Hapidians, enslaved the Gargulians . . . “ etc etc etc. The story goes that Cyrus was the first to get Machiavelli’s perfect balance of fear and love. I don’t know how true it is - some of this comes from the Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus’ own propaganda about himself. Still, it has to mean something that when every other king erected steles about how many people he massacred or enslaved, Cyrus chose to write about how many people he had liberated, helped, or given rights back to. Wikipedia says: A comparison of the Cyrus Cylinder with the inscriptions of previous conquerors of Babylon highlights this sharply. For instance, when Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BC) captured the city in 690 BC after a 15-month siege, Babylon endured a dreadful destruction and massacre. Sennacharib describes how, having captured the King of Babylon, he had him tied up in the middle of the city like a pig. Then he describes how he destroyed Babylon, and filled the city with corpses, looted its wealth, broke its gods, burned and destroyed its houses down to foundations, demolished its walls and temples and dumped them in the canals. This is in stark contrast to Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder. Sounds pretty easy to get a reputation as “the nice tolerant guy” when this is your competition! Xenophon follows the Cylinder and the invented-niceness side of the story. In fact, he hits you over the head with stories of how Cyrus was nice to people and it ended out helping him. For example: When the Armenians rebel against their master the Medes, the Medes send Cyrus to pacify them. Cyrus wins, but the Prince of Armenia argues that Cyrus should spare the life of his father the king, because this will be so over-the-top unexpectedly nice that his father will be a more grateful and helpful vassal than anyone else Cyrus could put in his place. Cyrus agrees and the Armenians are loyal to him forever.
Inline links: Moral Mazes, Cyrus Cylinder
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
We can do better. Earlier this year, at the Manifest forecasting conference in Berkeley, I gave a presentation titled “Forecasting Transformative AI Using The Book Of Revelation”. Given the renewed interest in this topic, I repost it below, in written form, with slight edits. The first two-thirds, including the section on the Antichrist, is free. In deference to the injunction by prior researchers on this topic not to “cast one’s pearls before swine”, the last third (including the Whore of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon, and the New Jerusalem) will be paywalled.
Inline links: Manifest forecasting conference
Winged Lion = OpenAI, founded by Sam Altman (Jewish). The winged lion would have been recognizable to Daniel’s audience as a symbol of the Babylonian Empire; Daniel was writing during the Babylonian Captivity, when there was no independent Israeli state and all Jews lived in Babylon.
The final three sections of this post - one on the Whore of Babylon, one on the New Jerusalem, and a section on the Battle of Armageddon that summarizes the other and presents my blow-by-blow theory of how the Apocalypse happens - are part of the secret teachings, ie below the paywall.