It's a sin, what we've done to this place

The British Museum's fascinating show upturns the notion, set in stone by centuries of myth-making, that
Babylon was mankind at its worst
Neal Ascherson
Sunday 16 November 2008 00.01GMT

he memory of Babylon is like the remains of a ziggurat. Hidden below ground level lay
almost all the millennia of the Mesopotamian empires, a gigantic span of human history
almost totally forgotten and unknown until the excavations of the 19th century. Projecting
above the sands was only the tip, the last seven or eight centuries BC when the Assyrian and
late Babylonian empires towered over the Middle East. But this tip was visible across the
ancient and medieval worlds, its bulk overgrown with the thickets of fantastic myths, the tales
of great religions and the origin-stories of peoples, its sides riddled with caves in which lived
monsters of the human imagination.
This ground level is the spread of writing, the moment at which travellers and chroniclers
began to record their Babylons. The Bible's Old Testament, above all, transmits a mass of
legend and history from the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, a period witnessed
by the Jews of the 'Babylonian Exile' after the great king sacked Jerusalem in 597 and 587BC
and deported its elite to Babylon. Herodotus wrote about Babylon, as did many other Greeks;
the Koran described it, and so did Arab travellers and medieval rabbis. The Greeks were the
rst to mention the Hanging Gardens (still unidentied, if they ever existed). But the Bible
remained the main source for some of the most powerful images: the Tower of Babel; the
ordeals of Daniel; the madness of Nebuchadnezzar reduced to a naked, crawling creature
eating grass; Belshazzar's Feast and the writing on the wall; the Whore of Babylon and the
sinful city's cataclysmic destruction.
The show in Bloomsbury is the last of three European exhibitions, in which the Louvre, the
Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the British Museum shared their treasures. The rst two
covered the whole span of ancient Mesopotamian history. But the British Museum, boldly and
brilliantly, decided to concentrate on that 'exposed tip', on Nebuchadnezzar's late Babylon,
whose memory contributed so much to the imagery and fantasy of the whole Eurasian world,
Christian, Muslim and Judaic. The result is an exhibition in which archaeology dances expertly
with myth. The reality of that Babylon (the material evidence revealed by excavation and
above all the political and spiritual culture which emerged as scholars learned to read the
cuneiform script) is confronted in every room with the other reality - the wild things that
human imagination did to Babylon in the next two and a half millennia.
The material bits are stunning enough. The Germans carried out the main exploration of the
site in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Berlin museums - whose vast halls
contain the reconstructed Ishtar Gate and part of the Processional Way - have lent whole panels
of glazed blue and gold tile on which bulls, lions and the famous 'Mushussu' dragons stride
around the visitors. From the old German archaeologists, Robert Koldewey and his team of
artists and surveyors, come magnicent paintings of how the Ishtar Gate quarter must have
looked, and models of the whole city straddling the Euphrates. The British Museum
contributes many of the spectacular cuneiform inscriptions. Here is the 'East India House' slab,

which is Nebuchadnezzar's own commemoration, in great detail, of his majestic rebuilding of

the city's sacred districts, the Babylonian 'world map' on baked clay, and the tablet describing
the creation of the world by the supreme god Marduk. The 'Cyrus Cylinder', inserted into the
base of a ziggurat after the Persian conquest in 539BC, is a piece of Persian propaganda
explaining (in terms Messrs Putin and Medvedev might use today) why King Cyrus was obliged
to invade Babylon in order to protect the human rights of its inhabitants. Another tablet (this
one from Berlin) records the generous oil rations allotted to Jehoiachin, the captive king of
Judah, and nicely conrms parts of the same story in the Second Book of Kings.
The rst wave of archaeologists, like many of the travellers before them, were preoccupied
with verifying the biblical and classical accounts. This often skewed their vision; they tended
to nd what they were looking for. The Germans wrongly thought that they had found the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Enormous eorts went into seeking the Tower of Babel, which
has now been safely identied in the colossal foundations of the Etemenanki ziggurat,
dedicated to Marduk.
Here, the exhibition's interlace of fact and legend comes triumphantly into play. There are clay
tablets recording the building of the ziggurat by Babylonian kings, together with its
measurements (it was nearly as high as St Paul's) and a superb Berlin model reconstruction.
But then come the dreams and visions - paintings of the Tower beginning with 15th-century
manuscripts and continuing through Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Maarten van Heemskerck,
down to haunting versions by MC Escher (1928) or Michael Lassel's melancholy tower of shoes
and family photographs. Julee Holcombe's Babel Revisited (2004) makes the Tower look like
downtown Houston, Texas, but in a state of perpetual demolition and construction.
There is no question about it: the Old Testament has won the myth battle over Babylon. For
2,000 years, Babylon has meant vanity, idolatry, monstrous luxury and vice, the hubris not
only of great kings but of the whole human species as it reaches upwards for the stars. Every
doom-merchant, from Jeremiah down to the Rastafarians, has enjoyed taking a kick.
And yet so much of the myth is nonsense. Jeremiah became a pampered Babylonian
collaborator after the fall of Jerusalem, while the deported Jews ('by the rivers of Babylon we
sat down and wept') were respected as a talented elite; many of them stayed in Mesopotamia
until modern Iraq drove them out. Babylonian science contributed the basics of astronomy and
mathematics, and the division of time into sixtieths. Semiramis, the queen supposed to have
built Babylon and beheaded all her one-night-stand lovers, was really an Assyrian queen called
Sammu-Ramat who had nothing to do with the place. The city was not destroyed for its sins,
but faded slowly into insignicance.
This exhibition ends with modern barbarities: Saddam Hussein's cult of himself as the new
Nebuchadnezzar, and the damage done to Babylon since 2003 by American and Polish troops
based among the ruins. Babylon: Myth and Reality is the third in a series of grand British
Museum shows about departed emperors and empires. Shi Huangdi's China, Hadrian's Rome
and Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon will be followed by Shah Abbas in 17th-century Persia. If only
this 'Ozymandias' programme ('look on my works, ye mighty, and despair') could run on to the
recent empires of Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, including Queen Victoria's, we would learn even
more about how legend grows over the giant rubbish dumps of history.
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