Of all the world’s lost cities, none surely can compete for evocative splendour, age or mystery with Babylon.
Land of the Fertile Crescent, bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this is successively the realm of Sumer and Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Iraq. Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden is said to have been nearby.
If Mesopotamia is the cradle of urban civilisation, Babylon is its firstborn child. First mentioned in the 23rd century BC, it looms larger in the records from around 1792 BC, the beginning of the reign of Hammurabi, the famous king is remembered for his uncompromising code of laws – many ending with the ominous phrase: “He shall be put to death” – which sit today in the Louvre on an eight-foot stela of carved black diorite.
But the Babylon that elicits a thrill in anyone with a passing interest in history is the city of that Old Testament anti-hero: the Jew-slaying, temple-smashing, gold-loving despot Nebuchadnezzar II, who succeeded to the throne in 605 BC.
Nebuchadnezzar plunged into a monumental building programme which resulted in the largest, most glorious city of the ancient world. It was a dazzling urban vista of towering temples, shrines and palaces clad in blue-glazed tiles, resplendent in gold, silver and bronze; all encircled by city walls so massive that two chariots, each drawn by four horses, could pass each other with ease on the road that ran atop them, according to the Greek geographer Strabo.
Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial frenzy of construction also produced the city’s most celebrated monument, a construction so hubristic in ambition it became the most famous building in the world, a byword for mankind’s god-rivalling arrogance. Babylonians knew it as the 91-metre tower – or ziggurat – of Etemenanki on the top of the temple of Marduk, the “house of the frontier between heaven and earth”. The rest of the world, starting with Old Testament readers, knew it as the Tower of Babel.
Nebuchadnezzar attacked and seized Jerusalem “carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even 10,000 captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.”
It takes little imagination to see his prisoners pressed into forced labour on his megalomaniac construction projects. When he was not having enormous gold images of idols set up for popular worship on pain of death by incineration, the Babylonian king was embellishing his capital with the most opulent buildings.
Babylon is the story of slaughter and mercy, war and peace, a microcosm of human history. It is a tale of greed, hubris, empire and religious persecution.
Source: Lost cities #1: Babylon – how war almost erased ‘mankind’s greatest heritage site’
Land of the Fertile Crescent, bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this is successively the realm of Sumer and Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Iraq. Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden is said to have been nearby.
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| The city walls of Babylon, surrounding the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel. Source: The Guardian |
If Mesopotamia is the cradle of urban civilisation, Babylon is its firstborn child. First mentioned in the 23rd century BC, it looms larger in the records from around 1792 BC, the beginning of the reign of Hammurabi, the famous king is remembered for his uncompromising code of laws – many ending with the ominous phrase: “He shall be put to death” – which sit today in the Louvre on an eight-foot stela of carved black diorite.
But the Babylon that elicits a thrill in anyone with a passing interest in history is the city of that Old Testament anti-hero: the Jew-slaying, temple-smashing, gold-loving despot Nebuchadnezzar II, who succeeded to the throne in 605 BC.
Nebuchadnezzar plunged into a monumental building programme which resulted in the largest, most glorious city of the ancient world. It was a dazzling urban vista of towering temples, shrines and palaces clad in blue-glazed tiles, resplendent in gold, silver and bronze; all encircled by city walls so massive that two chariots, each drawn by four horses, could pass each other with ease on the road that ran atop them, according to the Greek geographer Strabo.
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| The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563). Source: The Guardian |
Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial frenzy of construction also produced the city’s most celebrated monument, a construction so hubristic in ambition it became the most famous building in the world, a byword for mankind’s god-rivalling arrogance. Babylonians knew it as the 91-metre tower – or ziggurat – of Etemenanki on the top of the temple of Marduk, the “house of the frontier between heaven and earth”. The rest of the world, starting with Old Testament readers, knew it as the Tower of Babel.
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| The Burning Of Jerusalem By Nebuchadnezzar's Army By Juan De La Corte |
It takes little imagination to see his prisoners pressed into forced labour on his megalomaniac construction projects. When he was not having enormous gold images of idols set up for popular worship on pain of death by incineration, the Babylonian king was embellishing his capital with the most opulent buildings.
Babylon is the story of slaughter and mercy, war and peace, a microcosm of human history. It is a tale of greed, hubris, empire and religious persecution.
Source: Lost cities #1: Babylon – how war almost erased ‘mankind’s greatest heritage site’
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