Ruins of Babylon
(click to enlarge)
The following is a description of Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Hit as recollected by Gavin Young from his book "IRAQ Land of Two Rivers."
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Ruins of Babylon (click to enlarge) |
When George Keppel made an expedition in 1824 from Baghdad to view the ruins of Babylon he took armed and mounted guards, although it was not a long journey. It was, he said, 'a precaution more than usually necessary, from the circumstance of a caravan having .been plundered only two days previous'. Keppel's party even had a fireman (order) from the Pasha of Baghdad that they be supplied with whatever they required for such a trip.
Today a car will get you there in no time and at no risk, of course, from bandits. The drive is flat and not very interesting and when you approach Babylon you are not immediately impressed by this great city, 'the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees'. You see ahead of you little more at first glance than a small range of dusty hills or mean slag heaps; as someone said of it, it looks 'like a shelled town'.
The only traces of the Babylon of that great Amorite soldier, law-giver and administrator who reigned for forty-two years (Hammurabi), are a number of bricks discovered some sixty feet under the earth. The Amorites were Semites-Arabs from southern Syria or Palestine. Under Amorite kings, Babylon rose like a city meteor to deal the coup de grace to Sumerian authority in Mesopotamia. Babylon itself became a major city-state, with a code of common law, and a king with genuine concern for the well-being of his subjects- an unusual feature in those times.
A contemporary of Abraham, Hammurabi's lasting monument is the Code. It was inscribed on eight-foot steles, like the eight-foot black diorite stela, pillaged from Babylon by an Elamite King and found in 1901 by French archaeologists in Susa, the ancient Elamite capital (to the east of modern Amara). The French transported it to the Louvre where you can see it and read, in Babylonian cuneiform writing, the three thousand lines of the Code.
Excavated Ruins of Babylon (click to enlarge) |
Among other things the stela reveals that Babylonian society was divided into three classes: Babylonians were either freemen, commoners or slaves. The Code of Hammurabi naturally favored the freemen, as can be seen in warnings of this sort: 'If a surgeon should perform a major operation on a freeman with a bronze lancet and cause the death of this man . . . they shall cut off his hand.' Other laws, however, were designed to protect women and children against exploitation and poverty. Roux points out that punishments could be exceedingly severe. For example, adultery was punishable by death, the lovers being bound together and thrown into the Euphrates. But a husband could forgive his errant wife and the King might pardon her lover, so the death penalty could be neatly avoided. A profiteering architect who put up so jerry-built a house that it fell down and killed its owner would himself be put to death. Yet, in a less severe vein, a husband, although allowed to divorce a woman on the grounds of her chronic ill-health, was obliged to keep her in his house and look after her, even after he had married someone else. The Code, Roux concludes, throws a sharp light on a rough but highly civilized society of that period. Sadly, that stela is on view in Paris. At Babylon itself, Hammurabi's only memorial is that handful of once deeply-buried bricks.
This Babylon is not the old, old Babylon of Hammurabi (c. 1800 BC). The Babylon you see flourished very briefly- for about seventy years- after the fall of Assyrian Nineveh to the allied Babylonians and Medes in 6 12 BC. As Seton Lloyd has said, it was the final flowering of Mesopotamian culture. But the conquering Kings Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar built armies as well as temples and ziggurrats. And by force, Babylon became once more the center of the world and an imperial metropolis 'against which the Old Testament Hebrew prophets directed the bitter invective of their exile'.
Ishtar Gate (click to enlarge) |
The first distant impression of bleak mounds of earth is misleading. The excavated ruins are considerable enough to clamber about in; and digging organized by the Iraqi Director-General of Antiquities is going ahead at top speed. The main focus of attention is a deep-dug Babylonian thoroughfare which is invisible at a distance. This is Procession Street, along which all the principal public buildings were disposed; it ran into the main area of temples which included the Tower of Babel. Walking through it must have been rather like walking between two cliffs, for the wails on either side- as you can see in the reconstruction in the museum on the site- were very tall.
Ishtar Gate (click to enlarge) |
Keppel says that he found 'a more complete picture of desolation' than could well be imagined. He noted, however, the large footprint of a lion, and 'an enormous wild boar of a reddish color started up from among the ruins', prompting him to recall that a prophecy of Isaiah, that Babylon should be inhabited by wild beasts, was fulfilled when the Parthians succeeded the Seleucid Greeks and turned the city into a park and stocked it with wild beasts for the purpose of hunting. The only lion of Babylon today is the famous stone monster depicted standing over a recumbent body.
What you see of Babylon is from the second phase of the city's glory-from the time of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus, the pious and peaceful archaeologist. It is all that is left- or, rather, all that has so far been rescued-of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and of the forty years of Nebuchadnezzar's rule which constituted 'one of the most glorious reigns in human history'.
Nebuchadnezzar was both soldier and builder. It was he who captured Jerusalem and carried away seven thousand armed men and a thousand 'workers in iron' as well as the King of Judah to captivity in Iraq. It was also Nebuchadnezzar, however, who patronized the arts and industries of Mesopotamia, and encouraged the study of astrology. Bricks stamped with his name and unearthed by archaeologists all over southern Iraq show that he built temples and palaces in a great man. y cities. He also outdid the work of the Assyrian Kings in Nimrud and Nineveh by his beautification of Babylon.
His is the Ishtar gate dedicated to that goddess. Inside the gate rose the imperial palace and administrative buildings and the terrace structures, layer upon layer, on which lush, tropical vegetation formed a gigantic roof-garden the size and splendor of which were numbered by the Greeks among the Seven Wonders of the World. It was Nebuchadnezzar, too, who promoted the prophet Daniel to be 'chief of the governors of all the wise men of Babylon'.
The extent of the metropolis of Babylon was about twenty-five square miles and its outermost defensive wall, the Median Wall, ran right across Mesopotamia, from the Tigris to the Euphrates. Inner walls are now being excavated, some very deep indeed. When I last visited Babylon no fewer than eight hundred Iraqi workers were on the site, hard at the job of digging and reconstruction under the eye of the Inspector of Antiquities, Mr. Wahbi Abdur Razak. New bricks inscribed by Nebuchadnezzar are still constantly being turned up. You can see asphalted streets. You can also see the great problem the Babylonians had with the seepage of water from the river- a problem which bedevils the archaeologists today. Seleucid (Greek) and Parthian (eastern Persian) necklaces have been found. A large temple has been reconstructed with its original walls. On the other hand, the great temple of Marduk, the city's chief god, is nothing but a plantation of date-palms.
Alexander died here. He had intended to rebuild Babylon, but his successor Seleucus Nicator I, founder of the Seleucid dynasty, decided to move the capital and Seleucia was the result. The days of Babylon were not prolonged. The little town of Hilla nearby was built from the bricks of Babylon in the twelfth century. There, even in the eighteenth century, there was a bridge of boats as at Baghdad, and it is recorded that the Euphrates in those times was four hundred and fifty feet broad. A visitor remarked that Hilla is 'surrounded by a number of gardens, which produce rice, dates and grain. The soil is very productive.' Today the soil is still wonderfully productive along the banks of the Euphrates- 'the beloved river'.
A short excursion from Baghdad takes one to what is, I suppose, the best-known antique sight in Iraq after Ur and Babylon: the arch of the great banqueting-hall of Sapor at Ctesiphon. When the Muslim soldiers of Khalid ibn Walid- men from the bare desert- saw the immense wealth of the place (says Edward Gibbon) they exclaimed, 'This is the white palace of Chosroes! - This is the promise of the Apostle of God!' Soon, however, they received a court order from the ascetic Caliph Omar in Medina to move out of all this luxury, and their generals built austere new military bases in Kufa and Basra.
The area round Sapor's arch is now a pleasant place of trees, named after Salman Pak, the Persian convert who, in AD 638, led the Muslims across the Tigris from Seleucia 'to Ctesiphon. Salman Pak was the patron saint of barbers, and at one time barbers trooped out from Baghdad in annual procession to visit his tomb.
Village of Hit (click to enlarge) |
Ctesiphon was built by the Parthian Persians on the opposite side of the Tigris from Seleucia. The two cities were joined by a bridge, and the Arabs coupled them together, calling them jointly Medain (the Two Cities). Ctesiphon was originally a convenient camping-ground of the Parthian Kings during the last centuries BC. Roman armies sacked Ctesiphon from time to time; Trajan captured the daughter of the Persian King Osroes (not to be confused with the later King Chosroes who rebuilt the arch at Ctesiphon) and sent the golden throne of Parthia back to Antioch. But Trajan was obliged to withdraw and the Parthians returned to Ctesiphon. Other Romans took the road south- all in vain. The murderous Roman Caracalla even massacred most of the people of Ctesiphon whom he had invited to attend his 'wedding' to the daughter of one of their Kings; a vivid piece of treachery. But it was the Sassanian Persians, not the Romans, who super-ceded the Parthians. The first Sassanian. King, Ardashir, reigned from AD 224-241, reorganized the state and revived Zoroastrianism. Later Kings revived the conflict with Rome. A major result of this was the appearance of yet another Roman army- that of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who marched on Ctesiphon from Antioch. He brought sixty-five thousand troops and a fleet of eleven hundred ships and flat-bottomed barges in which he transported his men down the Euphrates and later the Tigris. Ana fell; then Hit; other towns were destroyed and looted.
At Ctesiphon, Julian was so taken with the 'Roman fashion' of the architecture that he left it alone, although a menagerie he found there full of wild beasts of every description was broken open. A picturesque battle, full of clanging armor, ensued between Roman legionnaires and Persians who as usual brought up elephants, bearing armed men in howdahs, that trumpeted about among the gleaming armor like 'so many walking hills'. The battle had a bizarre outcome: Julian lost very few men, but shortly after it he decided, to his officers' amazement, to withdraw from the siege of Ctesiphon which he had begun. He marched his army away across the Jebel Hamrin, but there the Sassanian King Sapor intercepted him and inflicted heavy losses on the Roman troops in an engagement in which Julian took a fatal spear-thrust in his liver. So ended what Seton Lloyd calls 'one of the most vainglorious and futile exploits in the history of Iraq'.
It was left to the Persian King Chosroes, who reigned from AD 531-579, to make peace with Rome. Mighty Chosroes, the King of Kings, restored the prosperity of the Persian Empire. He built a university, encouraged poetry and philosophy, had the work of the best Roman writers translated into Persian, and introduced the game of chess from India. Ctesiphon became his winter capital, as Susa (in western Persia) was his summer capital. He rebuilt Sapor's wonderful palace and the arch we can see today is part of its main banqueting-hall. Unfairly for Sapor, it is called in Arabic Tak-Kisra, the Arch of Chosroes.
Arch of Sapor (click to enlarge) |
The arch is, experts say, the widest single-span vault of un-reinforced brickwork in the world. It is about seventy-five feet wide and about one hundred and ten feet high. Standing directly under it and contemplating its flat middle, you wonder why it doesn't fall and crush you. But each brick leans into its neighbor as securely as if it were in an upright wall. One wing of the facade fell in a Tigris flood in 1909, but it is being restored. The remaining walls are immensely thick. Here Chosroes received the ambassadors of the kingdoms of the world. But it was at Dastagerd, on the road from Baquba (east of Baghdad) to Khanaqin near Muqdadiya (on the Iranian frontier),-among the silver columns of yet another palace, that destiny laid a cold finger on Chosroes and his invincible empire. There, news arrived of strange goings-on in an obscure City called Mecca in the wilderness of Arabia. Soon more authoritative messengers arrived. They had the unbelievable gall to suggest that Chosroes, King of Kings, should accept that someone called Mohamed ibn Abdullah was the Apostle of God. Naturally, he didn't take the faintest notice . . .
Behind the arch is the little town in which the tomb of Salman Pak is to be seen- the blue dome on the octagonal base is the tomb of the first Persian Muslim. It is a good place to loiter: the arch of Chosroes looms, grandiose, in the background; flowers and families in holiday garb enliven the garden, which is also a popular picnic place; a large goat-hair tent has been erected for tourists to play at being Bedu; old men lounge in cafes on broad streets. God hath numbered Ctesiphon, as he did the Babylon of Belshazzar, and finished it.
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