Was the Baghdad Battery Actually a Battery?: An Archaeologist Demystifies the 2,000-Year-Old Artifact

Image by Ironie, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The aver­age Open Cul­ture read­er may well be aware that there is such a thing as Archae­ol­o­gy YouTube. What could come as more of a sur­prise is how much back-and-forth there is with­in that world. Below, we have a video from the chan­nel Arti­fac­tu­al­ly Speak­ing in which Brad Haf­ford, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia archae­ol­o­gist, gives his take on the so-called Bagh­dad Bat­tery, an ancient arti­fact dis­cov­ered in mod­ern-day Iraq. He does so in the form of a response to an ear­li­er video on the Bagh­dad Bat­tery from anoth­er chan­nel host­ed by a young archae­ol­o­gy edu­ca­tor called Milo Rossi. At some points Haf­ford agrees, and at oth­ers he has cor­rec­tions to make, but sure­ly both YouTu­bers can agree on the fas­ci­na­tion of the object in ques­tion. After all: an ancient bat­tery?

Even those of us with­out any par­tic­u­lar invest­ment in archae­ol­o­gy may find our curios­i­ty piqued by the notion that some long-van­ished civ­i­liza­tion had man­aged to har­ness elec­tric­i­ty. The name Bagh­dad Bat­tery was grant­ed in the first place by Wil­helm König, who was the direc­tor of the lab­o­ra­to­ry of the Nation­al Muse­um of Iraq in the nine­teen-thir­ties, when the object was orig­i­nal­ly dis­cov­ered.

Giv­en that it con­sist­ed of not just a ceram­ic pot but also a cop­per tube and an iron rod, all attached to one anoth­er with bitu­men (a sub­stance present in crude oil used today in asphalt), the idea of its being used for pow­er stor­age was log­i­cal, in its way, if also fan­tas­ti­cal­ly anachro­nis­tic. Not that König sug­gest­ed the Bagh­dad Bat­tery was used to pow­er, say, a grid of street­lights; rather, he sup­posed that it could have been involved in some kind of elec­tro­plat­ing sys­tem.

httppv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZBsNGPVK2s

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for König’s hypoth­e­sis, none of the oth­er gild­ed arti­facts recov­ered from ancient Iraq, no mat­ter how fine their craft, were actu­al­ly elec­tro­plat­ed. More prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, the Bagh­dad Bat­tery has no means of con­nec­tion to a cir­cuit, a neces­si­ty to charge it up in the first place. As of now, the pro­fes­sion­al con­sen­sus holds that it must have been cer­e­mo­ni­al: a default, as Rossi frames it, when­ev­er archae­ol­o­gists throw up their hands at a lack of dis­pos­i­tive evi­dence about an arti­fac­t’s orig­i­nal pur­pose. Though Haf­ford acknowl­edges that ten­den­cy, he also lays out the rea­sons he believes the mys­ter­ies don’t go quite as deep as pop­u­lar­iz­ers tend to assume. Like any good YouTu­ber, archae­o­log­i­cal or oth­er­wise, Rossi respond­ed with anoth­er video of his own, in which he address­es Haf­ford’s crit­i­cisms, and also keeps the Bagh­dad Bat­tery — as well as its new­ly cre­at­ed name­sake cock­tail — fir­ing up our imag­i­na­tions a lit­tle longer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Old­est Writ­ten Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Cir­ca 3500 BC

20 New Lines from The Epic of Gil­gamesh Dis­cov­ered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Sto­ry

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

A Visu­al­iza­tion of the His­to­ry of Tech­nol­o­gy: 1,889 Inno­va­tions Across Three Mil­lion Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.