David Tresilian tours the Louvre's new Babylon exhibition and laments a major oversight Located in a strategic region of southern Iraq, the site of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon, like so much Iraqi heritage, has been in the news over recent years because of the threats posed to it first by the US-led invasion and then by the on-going violence and instability in Iraq. Last month, an exhibition dedicated to Babylon opened at the Louvre museum in Paris. However, missing from the presentation is any mention of the state of the site five years after the invasion of Iraq. The Louvre's new Babylon exhibition brings the historical city closer than ever to the written record and gives an overview of ancient Babylon's extensive afterlife, which has now lasted almost as long as the real history of the city itself. Old Testament writers saw Babylon as a byword for decadence, while the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who visited the city at its height, praised its power and grandeur. Such attitudes have continued into the present, forming the basis of Babylon's lasting fame. The original of the Tower of Babel was in Babylon, destroyed by God, according to the Old Testament writer of the Book of Genesis, because of the hubris of its builders. The city's famous "hanging gardens" were one of the wonders of the ancient world, and western artists, and latterly Hollywood film directors, have long turned to Babylon, or to imaginative reconstructions of it, in search of images of "oriental" excess. While modern excavations at the ancient site, located on the Euphrates River some 88 km south of modern-day Baghdad near the town of Al-Hillah, have not been able to confirm such Cecil B. DeMille-style visions, they have not gainsaid them either. Spread across a large area, the remains of ancient Babylon point to what must have been a city of exceptional wealth and power, and it is these historical remains, or rather the finds from them, that the Babylon exhibition at the Louvre seeks to bring into contact with the written and iconographic record and with the city's long afterlife in (mostly) western culture. In Paris until June, before moving to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and then to the British Museum in London, the exhibition is a fascinating tour of the historical city and the ideas that have collected around it. Drawing on objects from the Louvre's own large collection of Mesopotamian antiquities, including the celebrated Hammurabi law code, one of the world's oldest, as well as on collections elsewhere in Europe, it is hard to imagine that any more comprehensive collection of Babylonian artifacts will ever be put together for public exhibition or that any visitor to Paris will not enjoy seeing it. The exhibition's properly historical section is divided into three parts, dealing chronologically with episodes in Babylon's long history from the Old Babylonian period (2nd millennium BCE) to the city's fortunes following its conquest first by Persian forces in 539 BCE, after which Babylon became one of the richest satrapies in the Persian Empire, and then by Alexander the Great in 330. Between these first and third periods in the city's history came the New Babylonian Empire, during which Babylon inherited the power of the Assyrian Empire and ruled over an area that extended down through the Fertile Crescent and to the borders of Egypt. Dominating the exhibition's first room is the Hammurabi law code itself, which, carved on a shaped granite block eight feet high, is named after the Babylonian king that commissioned it (ca. 1792 -- 1750 BCE). The code contains some 280 judgments on civil and criminal law, including matters of contract, personal status and tax, and it provides evidence of the comprehensive administrative machinery that was pioneered in ancient Mesopotamia. Unsatisfactory to modern eyes, since it does not seek to abstract from particular judgments to the principles that lie behind them, the Hammurabi code has sometimes been seen by modern authors as epitomising features of ancient Babylonian civilisation, as well as of Mesopotamian civilisation more generally. There is a desire to record and classify without reducing to a system, also a feature of Babylonian science, and there is an emphasis on written record-keeping, giving rise to what seems to have been a formidable Babylonian bureaucracy. Stone was in short supply in ancient Babylon, as were wood and metals, and the hot and humid climate meant that organic remains quickly disintegrated. Clay, however, was abundant, and the ancient Babylonians used it both as a building material, constructing vast mud-brick structures the remains of which can still be seen in the form of earthern mounds, and as a support for writing. Tens of thousands of baked clay tablets have been found from all periods of ancient Mesopotamian history, inscribed with the characteristic wedge-shaped cuneiform writing made by impressing a stylus into wet clay. The contrast could not be greater than with the ancient Egyptians, for whom stone could apparently always be found for impressive monuments, and whose more elaborate hieroglyphic writing system was well adapted both for papyrus sheets and for the interior walls of desert tombs. While nothing as grand as the Pyramids survives from ancient Babylon, it seems that the Tower of Babel, originally the tiered ziggurat structure built as part of a temple to the god Marduk, was once at least as impressive. While the mud-bricks of the ziggurat have largely disintegrated into the surrounding soil, Babylonian baked clay tablets survive intact in their thousands, and a selection can be seen in the exhibition's second and third rooms. Among these are tablets recording scientific and mathematical calculations and texts that have a religious and literary character. Babylonian science was heavily technological, necessary for building large-scale architectural structures, and the religious texts give the impression of a system of rituals and divination with the king at the centre. However, in addition the tablets also include historical and literary texts that seem to have inspired the writers of the biblical Old Testament. There are also medical texts, records of dreams and their interpretation, parables and "wisdom literature". Babylonian historical writing took genealogical and chronicle form, perhaps inspiring the shape of the Old Testament's historical books, and the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, written at least 1,500 years before Homer in cuneiform characters on clay tablets, contains episodes that have clear biblical parallels, among them the story of the flood. Much more survives from the Babylon of the New Babylonian Empire, when the city was extensively rebuilt and fortified by the greatest Babylonian king, Nebuchadrezzar (or Nebuchadnezzar). It is from this period, too, that much of the Greek and biblical material on Babylon comes, Herodotus giving a detailed description of the city and claiming that its splendour surpassed that of any other. For the authors of the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the Psalms, this was the period of the Jews' Babylonian captivity following the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, and it was during the famous episode of Belshazzar's Feast, described in Daniel, that the city's doom was spelled out in letters on the wall. Such historical material provides the basis for the exhibition's second section, which traces Babylon's considerable afterlife. The Tower of Babel is amply represented, for example in an early version of the well-known painting by the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, specially lent for the occasion, as are episodes like Belshazzar's Feast, shown in versions by the 19th-century artist John Martin. For the Old Testament writers, Babylon was a kind of anti-Jerusalem, a city that had rejected God and was given over to the enjoyment of worldliness and immorality, and as such it seems to have got muddled up with early Christian views of Rome. In the New Testament Book of Revelation, for example, St. John the Divine makes famous reference to the "whore of Babylon," perhaps a reference to pagan Rome. Yet, whatever the religious meaning of Babylon might have been, the city also provided obviously cautionary material for later painters and iconographers: Babylon was a favourite among 19th-century artists and writers looking for magnificently doomed panoramas, for example, and for tales of folly and excess. When the American director DW Griffith made his epic film Intolerance in 1916, he began with Babylon's fall to the Persians in 539 BCE, claiming that this was the result of religious intolerance, and the exhibition includes some striking footage from the film. Research into ancient Mesopotamian civilisation, like that into ancient Egypt, began in the 19th century in the work of European archaeologists. Before British and French expeditions uncovered the remains of the cities of ancient Assyria, for example, located in what is now northern Iraq, there was no way of knowing whether references in the ancient authors were fictional, or whether they preserved at least a kernel of truth. Before the decipherment of cuneiform, achieved in the 1850s, it was impossible to know what the ancient Mesopotamians had written about, a situation analogous to that prevailing in Egyptology before Champollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics. However, once the research process got underway progress was swift, and at the end of the century a German archaeological team, led by Robert Koldewey, began excavations at Babylon, uncovering the plan, fortifications and gates of Nebuchadrezzar's city and vindicating much of Herodotus's account. A reconstruction of one of the inner gates, the Ishtar, decorated with blue terracotta bricks and animal designs, is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and the present exhibition includes several of the astonishingly well-preserved brick panels. Finally, the accompanying catalogue for the Babylon exhibition is comprehensive and beautifully produced, containing essays by an international team of scholars on every aspect of ancient Babylon and its afterlife. Yet, without wanting to sound churlish after so magnificent an exhibition one could have wished that the Louvre curators had had as much consideration for the general audience visiting the exhibition as they evidently had for the much narrower one reading the catalogue. While the exhibition's general historical texts are in English and Arabic as well as in French, they are difficult to read, being printed in light-ish characters on a light ground, and they are written in a mandarin curatorial style that will be largely incomprehensible to anyone who has not read up on the subject beforehand. It was pointed out to me that the Arabic translations were not well done, and the English and Arabic texts are in any case swiftly dropped, individual exhibits being labeled only in French. For some reason the exhibition's designers have mounted these labels at waist height, meaning that one soon gives up the struggle of bending down to read them. A solution might have been to provide translations on the accompanying audioguide, but this was unnecessarily complicated for what it was aiming to achieve, and it is, in any case, only available in French. But these are minor caveats. They can easily be rectified before this fascinating exhibition settles down for the rest of its run in Berlin and London. Babylone, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 14 March-2 June 2008. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Babylon today At the end of a meeting of the International Coordination Committee for the Safeguarding of the Cultural Heritage of Iraq, held at UNESCO in Paris in November last year, a grim warning was issued about the challenges still facing Iraq's heritage, particularly from looting and the smuggling of antiquities. In its 2007 report, the New York- based World Monuments Fund placed the whole of Iraq on its watch listout of concern at the threats still confronting the country's sites and monuments. It would have been useful, as part of the Louvre's history of Babylon, to learn about any initiatives that have taken place since 2005 to restore and protect the archaeological site. These threats are not mentioned in the Louvre exhibition, which has nothing to say about the present condition of the Babylon site. This is an astonishing oversight, since the condition of the site has long been the subject of international concern, with southern Iraqi sites having been badly affected by looting and Babylon in particular having been damaged by the US decision to use it as a military base shortly after the March 2003 invasion. In a report compiled in late 2004, shortly before the site was returned to the Iraqi authorities by occupying US forces, John Curtis, Keeper in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum in London, wrote of his regret that a large military camp should have been established on one of the most important archaeological sites in the world tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain. As a result, much of the archaeological site had been flattened, covered with gravel, or chemically contaminated, and trenches cut into archaeological deposits. Material from the site had been scooped up and used for sandbags, making it useless for future investigation, and the site had been irrevocably contaminated by the US decision to bring in sand, earth and gravel from elsewhere in order to construct parking areas and helicopter landing pads. Heavy vehicles had been driven across the site and along the 6th- century BCE Processional Way, breaking the original bricks, and even more worrying [was] the extent to which heavy vehicle movements on the surface will have damaged fragile archaeological remains below in a way that had yet to be quantified.
