Travel back in time to ancient Babylon

British Museum exhibition on Babylon: Myth and Reality.

In many ways Babylon is more an idea than a real place. There were other city states in Mesopotamia but you don’t see Sumer as a major preoccupation of art through the centuries. So what does Babylon have that the others don’t?

The answer is easy of course. Firstly, there’s the biblical connection. The Jews were exiled in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem to King Nebuchadnezzar. In the Old Testament, God saw people building the Tower of Babel and thwarted their ambitions by giving each of them a different language and scattering them all over the Earth.

Secondly, there’s the Greek connection. Both the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Walls of Babylon appear on various versions of the original list of the Seven Wonders of the World, though the gardens are better remembered today. Curious really, since the walls were real and it’s debatable what the gardens actually were and even if they were real.

The British Museum in London currently has a special exhibition on Babylon exploring the city state and our ideas about it through both art and archaeology. It was right up my alley since I find art and fable just as inspiring and interesting than the hard facts of history. (Perhaps more interesting if I’m honest – give me the Greek Gods over the Peloponnesian Wars any day).

In reality the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are most probably based on the Ziggurat – a giant, stepped pyramid about six storeys high. They think it had plants and trees on the terraces, hence its reputation as a garden. There was a scale model of the Ziggurat in the exhibition with little people on the ground and this thing was enormous in both height and surface area.

Some of the highlights on the archaelogical side included mosaics from the walls of the palaces such as the Lion of Ishtar Gate (left), assorted stamps and seals, clay tablets with cuneiform writing and bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar. The clay tablets were accompanied by written or audio translations – including Babylonian legends, a dream manual, official letters and proclamations, and a list of plants in the royal gardens with an intriguing mix of familiar (such as shallots) and unfamiliar (I’m still pondering what ‘Slave Girl’s Buttocks’ means in botanical terms). Apparently the bricks were hard-baked for ultimate durability and ironically this contributed to the destruction of Babylon, since the city was quarried for bricks for new building projects for centuries.

On the art side, we had some of the most famous images throughout history, from William Blake’s famous image of Nebuchadnezzar crawling along the ground like a beast to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut print of the Whore of Babylon (left). We only saw a reproduction of the most famous Babylon image of all – the Peter Brueghel painting at the top of this post – but we actually saw this recently at the Prado in Madrid. The artistic theme continued to the present day with a list of songs about Babylon – the theme is particularly prevalent in reggae songs – and modern art works including a painting showing the Tower of Babel made out of shoes and a collage showing it made out of real-life modern buildings from around the world.

Babylon is in modern-day Iraq. The exhibition included propaganda from the Saddam Hussein regime such as coins and postage stamps likening Saddam to Nebuchadnezzar and the glorious past. There was also a set of playing cards showing ancient Babylonian wonders – issued to US soldiers serving in Iraq to try to educate them about what not to blow up.

Babylon: Myth and Reality is on at the British Museum until 15 March 2009. Entry to the museum is free and tickets to the special exhibition cost £8 for adults, with discounts for students and families.

Can’t come to London? You can still travel back in time to ancient Rome.

Copyright note: The images above are not mine but are in the public domain due to the fact that the artworks are hundreds or even thousands of years old.