âeffectivenessâ or âmagicâ. Without it you had speech or an idea or something written on a page. With it you had creative power. Pythagoras and his followers would later assign that creative role to numbers, though, by some interpretations, Pythagoreans would understand numbers to be the idea in the mind of the creator, and the creation, and the link between the two.
At Thebes, where Porphyry thought Pythagoras finally spent a long period and was accepted by the priests into their most secret mysteries, Egyptian theology had a monotheism close to that expressed in the Christian concept of the Trinity, but with more âmembersâ. The god Amun (meaning âHiddenâ) was the greatest among the gods â âunknowableâ and transcendent. The others were different manifestations of him.
Porphyry had Pythagoras returning to Samos from Thebes, but Iamblichus wrote an exciting addition to the story: Pythagoras was taken captive by âsoldiers of Cambysesâ and brought from Egypt to Babylon. If Iamblicus was right, Pythagoras arrived there during the reign of the Chaldean dynasty, which began in 625 B.C., in the century before Pythagorasâ birth, and lasted until 539, well into his lifetime. During this period, Babylon enjoyed the second golden age in its long history â an age scholars call neo-Babylonian. However, Iamblichusâ timing, as implied by the words âsoldiers of Cambysesâ, is a problem. Cambyses I was a Persian prince in a royal line ruling in the southwestern part of present-day Iran. He was the father of Cyrus the Great, to whom Babylon would later fall, and whose empire would far exceed hers. Cambyses reigned from about 600 to 559 B.C. Pythagoras was probably only eleven years old in 559. There were frequent clashes between the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and Babylonian soldiers surely took some captives, but not until after 529 (when Pythagoras was already in southern Italy) did Cyrus the Greatâs son Cambyses II conquer Egypt.
Iamblichus estimated that Pythagoras lived in Babylon for about twelve years. Any adventurous young man would have envied him this opportunity, for Babylon was a splendid, exotic, cosmopolitan city at the height of her power and wealth, far older than Samos, and far more worldly and sophisticated than Egypt. A period of supreme success and prosperity a thousand years earlier â the era of the 1894â1595 B.C. âDynasty of Babylonâ and especially the reign of Hammurabi â had been one of the pinnacles of ancient civilisation. In the millennium that had passed between that period and Pythagorasâ lifetime, Mesopotamia had experienced wave after wave of migration, military clashes, and dynastic shifts, and one city after another had grappled for its moment in the Mesopotamian sun. Now it was again Babylonâs turn. If Iamblichusâ dates were near correct, Pythagorasâ visit probably caught the wake of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, when Babylon was ruled by lesser, short-lived kings of the same dynasty. Nebuchadnezzar had died in 562 B.C., when Pythagoras was about eight years old.
Pythagoras would have arrived in Babylon either by caravan across the plain or by boat on the Euphrates. 2 Either way, the towering seven-level ziggurat was visible long before the city came into view. Though young in comparison with the Giza pyramid (and no match for it in height â the ziggurat was about 300 feet high, the pyramid 481 feet), the ziggurat nevertheless was an exceedingly ancient monument, a relic of Babylonâs earlier golden age. Nebuchadnezzar had made sure that it was splendidly restored to connect his own reign with that former glory. The principal approach to the city from the north was an avenue sixty-six feet wide, built of giant limestone paving slabs covering a foundation of brick and asphalt. On either hand, sixty lions â fashioned of red, white, and yellow tile on the