Babylon

Legend, History and the Ancient City

Michael Seymour

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion antique

Babylon: for eons its very name has been a byword for luxury and wickedness. 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept', wrote the psalmist, 'as we remembered Zion'. One of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Babylon has been eclipsed by its own sinful reputation. For two thousand years the real, physical metropolis lay buried while another, ghostly city lived on, engorged on accounts of its own destruction. More recently the site of Babylon has been the centre of major excavation: yet the spectacular results of this work have done little displace the many other fascinating ways in which the city has endured and reinvented itself in culture. Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian myth to associate himself and his regime with its glorious past. Why has Babylon so creatively fired the human imagination, with results both good and ill? Why has it been so enthralling to so many, and for so long? In exploring answers, Michael Seymour' s book ranges extensively over space and time and embraces art, archaeology, history and literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, via Strabo and Diodorus, to the Book of Revelation, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Voltaire, William Blake and modern interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Gore Vidal, the author brings to light a carnival of disparate sources dominated by the powerful and intoxicating idea of depravity. Yet captivating as this dark mythology was and has continued to be, at its root lies a remarkable and sophisticated imperial civilization whose complex state-building, law- making and religion dominated Mesopotamia and beyond for millennia, before its incorporation into the still wider empire of the Achaemenid kings.

CHAPTER 1

A CITY AND ITS GHOSTS

Working on behalf of the recently formed Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), Robert Koldewey began excavations at Babylon in March 1899. By the standards of his British and French contemporaries in Mesopotamia, the excavation techniques he applied were slow and conscientious; nevertheless, they quickly revealed monumental buildings and vivid glazed-brick reliefs. Before the first year was out, it was clear that Koldewey had succeeded: after 2,000 years Babylon was emerging from the dust.

In their methods, German excavations between 1899 and 1917 resembled modern excavations far more closely than those of any predecessor. Crucially, they succeeded in identifying, tracing and recording the mud-brick architecture of the city. (The failure of nineteenth-century excavators in this respect is still visible in the enormous pits dug into some of Iraq's most important urban sites.¹) Beyond the technical success, however, lay a more emotive achievement. This first year of excavations at Babylon could be seen as the end of a search that had begun in classical antiquity. Two millennia of fantastic and diverse visions of the famous city were in one sense ended by the excavations. Koldewey had uncovered Babylon itself. When the cultural significance of this action is appreciated, it is easy to understand the excavator's famous devotion to his excavation. He spent the vast bulk of the project's eighteen years at the site and would readily have spent more, as his first words in The Excavations at Babylon attest:

It is most desirable, if not absolutely necessary, that the excavation of Babylon should be completed. Up to the present time only about half the work has been accomplished, although since it began we have worked daily, both summer and winter, with from 200 to 250 workmen.²

Despite the difficulties presented by the site, the results were spectacular. Brightly glazed brick reliefs showing dragons, lions and bulls quickly appeared as Koldewey's team excavated the monumental Ishtar Gate complex and the great Processional Way that ran through this, Babylon's grand northern entrance. The excavations also revealed the remains of temples, vast palaces and even the location of Babylon's ziggurat, the original Tower of Babel, but it was the blue-glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate that would remain the strongest image to emerge from the ancient city. The discoveries culminated in Walter Andrae's painstaking reconstructions of the Processional Way and Ishtar Gate, displayed in Berlin's Vorderasiatisches Museum from 1930.³ The original excavation of these vividly coloured reliefs, the actual decoration of ancient Babylon in its prime, was a powerful and exciting experience for the archaeologists, as their eventual display in Berlin was and is for the public.

The German excavations transformed modern knowledge of Babylon, and could be held to represent the moment at which legend was superseded by physical reality and the city entered the empirical, scientific domain of archaeological research. The moment, however, is incomplete. Though of huge archaeological importance, Koldewey's discoveries patently did not consign existing ideas about Babylon to the scrap heap. They might more accurately be said to have joined the existing cacophony of interpretation with a certain authority of voice, yet even the basis and extent of that authority are hardly simple matters. This book aims to explore what such moments mean in practice. If not immediate and total transformation, what is the effect of archaeology on the identity of a place people already know through other channels? Is there any way in which the archaeological moment of discovery is absolutely different from others – the traveller's visit and account or the artist's representation, for example? How do multiple, sometimes conflicting forms of knowledge co-exist and interact in the understanding of a single place? To ask these questions it is necessary to adopt a broader cultural and historical perspective on archaeological work itself: to view the development of archaeological approaches in their cultural context, and to consider the roles played by other, non-archaeological ways of engaging with the ancient past.

Human interest in antiquity and origins is a phenomenon far older and more varied than the academic disciplines of history or archaeology. We might even consider it universal, an aspect simply of being human, since ideas about the past are to be found everywhere and amongst everyone. The forms that our interest takes vary greatly, however, and such diversity produces its own challenges for the researcher. There are inherent difficulties to address in investigating a topic so broad, ranging widely over time and space and taking in a riot of disparate sources that includes fine art, poetry, theatre and music as well as history and archaeology. One approach to the problem is to follow the biography of a specific subject, idea, person or place, as is the case here; another is to focus on a broader topic (a field of scholarship or culture) at a particular time. In either case it is necessary to work across multiple subject areas, and to seek out connections that disciplinary boundaries in the present might tend to obscure.

Babylon is a city buried under its own mythology, transported through biblical and classical accounts into new worlds, and an afterlife that is sometimes so strange as to obscure an origin in any real place at all. The city has travelled, spread and transformed, which is precisely what makes it so interesting. The subject of this book then is not primarily the gradual rediscovery of Babylon archaeologically, though this certainly forms an important part. Rather, it is the history of that broader interest that continued to sustain Babylon in culture many centuries after the city itself had faded into obscurity. Much of the appeal is rooted in myth, but the aim of this book is not to establish simply that much of what has been written about Babylon over the centuries bears little relation to the realities of life in the ancient city itself. Instead its purpose is to explore the ways in which the stories created around Babylon in later times, with their varied and sometimes obscure connections to historical reality, can shed light on our own complex relationship with the ancient past. From an anthropological perspective legend and myth are useful, functional and necessary. One of the needs that they fulfil is that for frameworks into which present events can be fitted, and through which they might be understood. In this sense, historical narrative itself frequently plays a mythic role, selecting and drawing meaning from the mass of events with an eye to their understanding in the present.

A wider perspective may also help to address a recurring problem in studying the history of archaeology. It is common practice, particularly when writing of areas outside Europe, to treat the history of archaeology principally in terms of a succession of travellers and explorers, and if we are interested in Babylon we must certainly look at the people who visited and described the site. At the same time, however, it is important to recognize that the history of archaeology is one of intellectual development as well as physical exploration. We seek to understand why descriptions of Babylon by European travellers were written in the first place; why these changed over time; why, at a certain point, observation began to be supplemented by more formal survey and even excavation. The answers to these questions are often to be found not in the accounts of travellers themselves, but in the broader currents of European intellectual and cultural history. From this perspective, archaeology is a late arrival on a crowded stage, emerging only in the nineteenth century to vie with long-established traditions on the ancient past whose roots lay in theology, classical history, art, literature and more. Two millennia of accumulated thought, tradition, speculation, fantasy, philosophy and above all fascination preceded the first archaeological excavations at Babylon, and have since continued to flourish alongside archaeological approaches.

To explore a topic so rich imposes its own constraints: I have had to be selective in the material discussed, and even then to treat too briefly a great many interesting individuals and stories. Some compensation, I hope, will be found not only in the breadth of the subject matter but also in the strange and revealing experience of following a city all the way from antiquity to the present day. Most of the journey takes place among ghosts and echoes: the fragments of the living city that in various ways survived its end. This, however, is no funereal procession. Babylon's ghosts are colourful and oddly creative – they take on lives of their own. Frequently they find new forms unimagined in the ancient Iraq where their journey begins. One wonders what the inhabitants of ancient Babylon would have made of the warlike Queen Semiramis of later tradition, or of the ‘marriage market’ of prospective wives described by Herodotus. They would certainly have been confused by talk of ‘hanging’ gardens, and much more so to discover that their city had gained a permanent association with the end of the world! Even the city's cataclysmic fall is a myth: the great destruction of popular imagination was for the Babylonians nothing more dramatic than a change of government. Yet all of these ideas have survived and developed in culture over the centuries, and even the most fantastic can contain echoes of a world with which the ancient Babylonians would have been much more familiar. As distant from the original as they might sometimes appear, they are still very much Babylon's ghosts.

Most ancient Mesopotamians, as far as we are able to tell, held rather pessimistic views on the next life. Myths describe a grey netherworld with no pleasures, whose inhabitants live in darkness and for whom the only food is dust. It is comforting to think that in one case at least they were mistaken: for the great city of Babylon itself, the afterlife has proven astonishingly rich.

CHAPTER 2

ANCIENT BABYLON

Very little is known of Babylon’s earliest history. The city first appears in texts in the later third millennium BC,¹ one among many then thriving in southern Iraq. References of any kind to Babylon before the final century of the third millennium are very rare, but records of large offerings made to the temple of Enlil in Nippur during this century (while Babylon was part of an empire ruled from the southern city of Ur) suggest a city already of some size and wealth.² In the middle of the eighteenth century BC Babylon would emerge from relative obscurity to become the political centre of southern Mesopotamia, a position it was to maintain almost continuously for the next 1,400 years.

The site of Babylon lies on the Euphrates, approximately 85 km south of Baghdad. It is located towards the northern end of the great alluvial plain of southern Iraq, a landscape made of silts deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a vast trough created by tectonic movement as the Arabian plate slips slowly east and north below the neighbouring Eurasian plate. The same collision is responsible for the creation of the Taurus and Zagros mountain ranges that define the northern and eastern borders of an area including all of Iraq as well as parts of modern Syria and Turkey. This area, known as Mesopotamia, thus incorporates several environmental zones, but it is in the flat alluvial plain of southern Iraq itself that Babylon is located. Home to the world’s earliest cities,³ the plain is subject to several important environmental constraints that have, since long before the foundation of Babylon, shaped its human occupation. The area is subject to very high temperatures and lies well beyond the reach of rain-fed agriculture. Even the small amount of precipitation this part of Iraq does receive is unevenly and unpredictably distributed: the bulk of a season’s rain can fall in a single downpour, itself as harmful to crops as severe drought.⁴ Human habitation is therefore entirely dependent on the two great rivers, and permanent settlement requires a system of irrigation. Once established, however, such a system could reap the benefit of rich alluvial soils and support extremely productive agriculture on the levees of canals. Most explanations of the region’s early urban and associated economic development assume that the ability to produce large agricultural surpluses played an important role, though in quite what way is hotly disputed.⁵ Herodotus was certainly impressed. In his fifth-century BC description he writes that:

As a grain-bearing country Assyria [meaning Mesopotamia] is the richest in the world. No attempt is made there to grow figs, grapes, or olives, or any other fruit trees, but so great is the fertility of the grain fields that they normally produce crops of two-hundredfold, and in an exceptional year as much as three-hundredfold. The blades of wheat and barley are at least three inches wide. As for millet and sesame, I will not say to what an astonishing size they grow, though I know well enough; but I also know that people who have not been to Babylonia have refused to believe even what I have already said about its fertility. The only oil these people use is made from sesame; date-palms grow everywhere, mostly of the fruit-bearing kind, and the fruit supplies them with food, wine and honey.⁶

The infrastructure underpinning such abundance required constant maintenance, both of the system of irrigation canals and of a parallel system of drainage, since water can also bring salts to the surface by capillary action, rendering land too saline for agriculture. Although the requirements for organization of labour this need creates do not seem to have been the primary driving force behind the earliest urbanization during the fourth millennium BC, where the canal systems employed are relatively modest, it is clear that by the middle of the third millennium BC a great deal of labour must have been organized to maintain major canals.⁷ This very flat landscape is also subject to changes in river courses, natural or artificially induced. As is the case today, when dam projects and the competing water demands of Iraq and its upstream neighbours Turkey and Syria are of great political importance, in the ancient world control of water was a significant source of power and conflict. Again there is some echo of this in ancient Greek stories about Babylon, where massive engineering projects to change water courses figure as an important aspect of military strategy.⁸

Although there have been excavations at the site before and since, our archaeological picture of Babylon derives primarily from work conducted by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in the years 1899–1917. These excavations of necessity concentrated on the later phases of occupation, and particularly on the centre of the city as it was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BC) in the sixth century BC. The high water table at Babylon has largely prevented direct exploration of its earlier history. Some older monuments, including the famous eighteenth-century BC Code of Hammurabi, were actually excavated at the Iranian city of Susa; they had been looted from Babylon and carried there in antiquity by the army of the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte (c.1185?1155 BC) in the twelfth century BC. More outrageous items of booty from the same invasion were the cult statues of Marduk, chief god of the city, and his consort Zarpanitu. Nebuchadnezzar II, the most famous king of Babylon, took his name from the illustrious predecessor who at the end of the twelfth century BC was able to recover the statues and with them Babylon’s honour and prosperity.⁹

The Old Babylonian period

Over the course of the third millennium BC, Mesopotamia changed politically from a world of city states into one of larger polities, even empires. First Akkad (a city whose exact location archaeologists have so far been unable to establish), then Ur, then the rival powers of Isin and Larsa held sway over multiple cities in southern Iraq in the later centuries of the third millennium. Babylon’s rise to a position of central political importance dates to the reign of Hammurabi (more accurately Hammurapi, 1790–1752 BC), the most famous of a dynasty of kings, sometimes called Amorite in reference to their likely tribal origin, who ruled from the early nineteenth century BC. Following a period of competition for territorial control that had been dominated by the cities of Isin and Larsa, Babylon managed to gain the upper hand, first at the head of a coalition, and later as sole power. By the end of Hammurabi’s reign in the mid-eighteenth century BC, Babylon had achieved hegemony over not only southern Iraq but also a considerable area to the north. By this time the urban, literate world of Mesopotamia was already well over a millennium old, as in some form were the civic institutions that underpinned urban life. Certainly the latter include some legal framework, and so Hammurabi’s modern epithet of ‘lawgiver’ is not quite deserved; it is rather his political and military successes that make him the most important figure of the period. His conquest of Larsa allowed him to claim the title of King of Sumer and Akkad (i.e. all of southern Iraq), and was followed by the acquisition of Mari to the north and eventually the Assyrian cities of Ashur and Nineveh.¹⁰

Once achieved, the pre-eminence established for...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• 1. A city and its ghosts
• 2. Ancient Babylon
• 3. Tyrants and wonders: The biblical and classical sources
• 4. The Earthly City: Medieval and Renaissance approaches
• 5. Discoveries and fantasies: Enlightenment and modern approaches
• 6. The German experience: Excavation and reception
• 7. The Library of Babel: Babylon and its representation after the excavations
• 8. Culture and knowledge
• Postscript: The Babylon exhibitions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate Section
• Back cover