Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms Read Online Free PDF Page B

heaven itself. Among these unprepossessing ruins language was supposedly invented. “Therefore is the name of it called Babel,” says the Bible, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.”
    In their ceremonial religious processions, Babylonians carried effigies of the lion, the animal form of the sun god, Shamash, and of the dragon, the form of the moon god, Sin. Ishtar, goddess of love (whose name survives today as Esther), was symbolized by the dove. A temple almost as large as St. Paul’s Cathedral was dedicated to the city’s chief god, Marduk; its doors were decorated with motifs of dragons, mythical creatures that were half goat and half fish, and dogs. The city was reputedly home to the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was here that Daniel and his companions escaped from the fiery furnace, Belshazzar was weighed in the balance and found wanting, and Alexander the Great died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, thwarted in his ambition to conquer the world.
    It is now four thousand years since Babylon was founded, and for more than half that time it has lain abandoned, exposed to rain, flood, and the pillaging of later generations. After Alexander’s death in 323 BC his huge empire was split between his squabbling lieutenants. Their civil war devastated Babylon’s economy, and the city entered a period of decline. Apart from sporadic sacrifices, we hear no more of its great temples. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon disappeared, and today no trace of them can be found. One grandiose project exists among the ruins—but it is new, not old. It is one of the ancient city’s palaces, reconstructed. Its bricks bear an inscription: “In the era of President Saddam Hussein, all Babylon was reconstructed in three stages. From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Babylon is rising again.”
    All around, Ozymandias-like, is an expanse of decaying mud brick. Saddam’s reconstruction of Babylon was pastiche, derided and deplored by serious archaeologists. Most of what had remained of the actual Babylon was taken long ago as building material for the city of Baghdad, or plundered or bought for a song by foreign archaeologists and shipped to museums in London, Berlin, and Paris. Saddam’s new palace was not built to please archaeologists, though. By building it, Saddam was laying claim to Iraq’s ancient past, which could help to legitimize Iraq’s existence as a country and his own rule over it. Instead of being a set of Turkish provinces wrested from their Ottoman rulers in the aftermath of World War I, unified by neither religion, language, nor ethnicity, he could present his oppressive police state as the successor to the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Conveniently, in that glorious past, it had been ruled not by Muslim clerics, whom Saddam hated and feared, but by capricious and brutal monarchs—just like Saddam.
    By 2006, Saddam was under American guard and Iraq was in chaos. The time when it was a capital of world civilization could not have seemed more distant. Once Christian patriarchs in Iraq had signed their letters “From my cell on the river of the garden of Eden” because they believed that it was the site of the original paradise where Adam and Eve had lived. Now that same river carried the bodies of the dead down toward the sea, past Abu Nawas Street, where Baghdadis in happier days used to sit, eat fish, and smoke narghileh pipes. Most Iraqis tried simply to stay safe: they headed home as quickly as possible after work and then stayed indoors. If they wanted to try to live as they had before the war and sit at one of the city’s cafés, they had to harden themselves. One woman told me how she and a friend had been drinking tea from the elegant tea glasses that Iraqis call istikhana s—wide at the rim, thin at the waist; similar examples survive from the fifteenth century—when they heard a man blow himself up further down the street. They looked