One day, according to the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, when he exclaimed, “Is this not the great Babylon I built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” Nebuchadnezzar, who reigned from 605 BC to 562 BC, certainly had grounds for satisfaction: from his vantage point, he could contemplate a vast city, perhaps then the greatest urban centre in the world, rebuilt and embellished by himself. Babylon, subject of a new exhibition at the British Museum, was then capital of an empire that stretched from Gaza in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east, from Armenia in the north to the Arabian desert in the south. Variously known as Babel, Babil and Babilu, to its inhabitants it was the “Sacred City” — site of dozens of shrines and temples, and location of the great ziggurat of Etemenanki — “the foundation platform of heaven and earth.” The latter, rebuilt and beautified by Nebuchadnezzar, climbed 70 metres above the flat plain of the lower Euphrates, its top decorated with glazed blue bricks, flashing in the sun.
Babylon’s misfortune was that its historical reputation was largely created by the captive labour force who constructed that great ziggurat and the other monuments of Nebuchadnezzar’s city: the Jewish craftsmen and workers taken captive from Jerusalem in 587 BC and 598 BC. For them, Babylon was a place of imprisonment. “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion.” In the Bible, Babylon became the emblematic location of vainglory and injustice: the archetypal sinful city. The sacred ziggurat of Etemenanki was transformed into the Tower of Babel. Babylon was where Daniel was thrust into the lion’s den, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into Fiery Furnace. Babylon was where Belshazzar — like Nebuchadnezzar, a historical person — saw the writing on the wall. As a punishment for his pride, Nebuchadnezzar was sent mad and ate grass like a cow, his hair grown like the “feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird”.
In the eyes of the ancient Greeks, Babylon was less wicked and more impressive. No fewer than three Babylonian structures feature on some lists of the wonders of the world: the Hanging Gardens, the mighty walls, and a gigantic stone obelisk. But the Greek sources, though more admiring, were less well informed. The accounts of those such as the historian Herodotus are somewhat garbled, with — as Julian E Reade puts it in the BM catalogue — “a touch of fairy tale about them”.
The Biblical writings about Babylon, though understandably hostile and not always accurate, contain many convincing touches. The self-congratulatory tone of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel is similar to that of his surviving pronouncements. A tablet describes his summer palace, built outside the city to the north as “a building to be admired by the people, a linking point of the land, a gleaming sanctuary, my royal abode.” The Biblical texts show detailed knowledge of Babylonian building techniques, not surprisingly as the Israelites were part of the labour force who did the hard work. The plan for the Tower of Babel is described thus: “They said to each other, ‘Come let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens.’” In fact, by a historical irony not known in Biblical times, it was the very excellence of Nebuchadnezzar’s building materials that led to the almost complete destruction of his great monuments. Almost all of them have been recycled because of the quality of the brick he used. Much of medieval Baghdad was said to consist of reused bits of Babylon. Stone is not obtainable in the low-lying regions of southern Iraq where Babylon was sited, nor is firewood plentiful. The high-quality fired bricks used so lavishly by Nebuchadnezzar — and described in the Bible — were therefore valuable. Consequently, of the huge ziggurat, nothing remained when archaeologists arrived on the scene but a series of water-filled holes in the ground. The last of the foundations were removed in 1880s by local people who were digging a well. However, sections of Babylon have been reconstructed twice in the past century. First, the processional way and part of the Ishtar gate were removed and recreated on Museum Island in Berlin by German scholars who excavated the site. So it is now possible once again to walk part of the route down which Nebuchadnezzar passed annually on sacred processions, and to see some of the hundred of lions, bulls and dragons — animals sacred to various gods — that decorated this tremendous structure. Then in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein had sections of the city re-erected, brand new, as a monument to himself as successor of Nebuchadnezzar. If that was bad, archaeologically speaking, what happened next was inexcusable in the opinion of John Curtis of the British Museum. After the second Gulf War, a vast military camp was established in the centre of the site, an act of which Curtis says, “It is impossible to overstress the insensitivity.” Babylon, though largely vanished, was the origin of much that is still familiar. The Ishtar gate is visibly the ancestor of the turquoise-tiled architecture of the Middle East. From the Babylonians we inherit our division of time into units of 60, the Zodiac signs and many concepts still used in astronomy. But, above all, Babylon has became a symbol for an ambivalence we still feel about the big cities that succeeded it — Rome, Paris, London and New York. So alluring and yet, to their critics, so corrupting.
© The Daily Telegraph