Babylon: Visions of Vice

The Bible paints an unflattering portrait of Babylon as a corrupt civilization cursed by ambition, excess and power-hungry kings. In the Book of Genesis, its residents build the Tower of Babel in a vainglorious effort to reach heaven — and God strikes it down, angered by man’s overweening pride. By the time of the New Testament, Babylon’s image is even more sinister: the Book of Revelation personifies it as a whore seated on a dragon, condemning the city as “the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.”

Reviled and admired, envied and feared, Babylon — the remains of which lie some 50 miles (80 km) south of modern-day Baghdad — has for centuries been shrouded in myth. Despite its description by Greek historians as a center of political power, the fables tend to overshadow any sense of what the city was actually like. “Everyone knows the name and the legends of Babylon,” says Francis Joannès, a professor of ancient history and Mesopotamia at the Sorbonne. “But what people don’t necessarily know is its reality.”

“Babylon,” a stunning exhibition at the Louvre in Paris from March 14 to June 2, seeks to re-establish that reality. It deftly illustrates how 2,000 years of Babylonian history gave rise to manifold myths, and how European artists and thinkers responded to and transformed them. Put on jointly by the Louvre, Berlin’s Staatliche Museum (where the exhibition moves on June 26) and London’s British Museum (where it will open on Nov. 13), it’s an unprecedented collaboration that brings together nearly 400 artifacts and pieces of art. Béatrice André-Salvini, a curator at the Louvre, says it marks the first major exhibition devoted to Babylonian history, an omission that owed in large part to practical considerations. “The essence of Babylon is scattered,” she says, noting that museums in 13 countries from Austria to Saudi Arabia loaned items for the show. Noticeably missing are treasured artifacts from Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities, which are currently locked away in underground steel vaults.

Arranged chronologically, “Babylon” unpacks some of the world’s most iconic artifacts to explain the shifting motives of the city’s rulers. By the early 18th century B.C., Hammurabi, the sixth King of Babylon, had used an aggressive military policy to conquer rival city-states and to establish Babylon as Mesopotamia’s political heart. But Hammurabi was concerned about more than expansion, as demonstrated by the magnificent Code of Hammurabi stela, a 7-ft.-high (2 m) column of basalt upon which he inscribed 282 codified laws and punishments in cuneiform, the Babylonian script that predates even hieroglyphics. Although its prescriptions sound cruel today (“If a man commits a robbery and is caught, that man will be killed”), it helped him craft his image as a just ruler: the stela was displayed publicly, so nobody, regardless of status, could plead ignorance of its laws. As Hammurabi says in the lower part of the stela, “I am indeed the shepherd who brings peace, whose scepter is just.”

This sense of justice was informed by a sense of the divine. The Queen of the Night, a terra-cotta tablet that is the only other artwork to have survived from the period, displays a naked goddess wearing a horned headdress and carrying a rod — symbols of divinity and justice.

Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts — in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus — describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel to the river. Between 1899 and 1917, German archeologists unearthed decorative elements that demonstrate the importance of Nebuchadnezzar’s cosmic vision. Along Babylon’s main thoroughfare, the Processional Way, there were palaces whose glazed bricks were adorned with 120 images of lions to honor Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. The road terminated at the Ishtar Gate, a massive structure encompassing the five fortification walls and rising more than 75 ft. (23 m). On its vivid blue, glazed-brick façade appeared 150 bulls and dragons, alternating in yellow and white, to honor Adad, the god of wind, and Marduk, Babylon’s chief deity. Panels also depicted the mushhushshu, a dragon-like creature covered in scales — its front legs feline, its hind legs belonging to a bird of prey, its tail resembling a scorpion’s stinger.

Nebuchadnezzar’s magnificent city required abundant cheap labor, much of it provided by Jewish captives. In 601 B.C., Jehoiakim, King of Judah, forged an alliance with Egypt, which was embroiled in ongoing skirmishes with Babylon; as retribution, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, raiding Solomon’s Temple and seizing 10,000 Jews to help build his city. This brutal history would later color the portrayal of Babylon in the Bible. “In Christian culture, Babylon was quite deliberately developed as a broad symbol of the city of sin,” says Michael Seymour, a curator of the British Museum’s Middle Eastern collection. Indeed, over the centuries, Judeo-Christian texts would consistently imbue Babylon with a sense of evil. A 14th century Flemish manuscript of Saint Augustine’s “City of God” contrasts Babylon with God-fearing Jerusalem; the former is invaded by diabolical creatures that embody the city’s vices.

The show at the Louvre also offers intriguing insights into how Babylon was viewed by European artists from the 15th century onwards. Drawing on eight renderings of the Tower of Babel, the exhibition traces evolving perceptions of the city, with the various artists updating and reshaping the myth of Babylon according to their own era’s religious and philosophical concerns. During the second half of the 16th century, a time marked by the disintegration of Christianity and the beginning of religious wars, they used the tower to reflect a sense that their own world was descending into chaos, a salient theme of Cornelis Anthonisz’s Destruction of the Tower of Babel (1547), in which the heavens breathe fire onto the collapsing structure. Peter Bruegel the Elder’s The Little Tower of Babel (1563), portrays the myth more metaphysically. The tower dominates his painting and is obscured from nature; its striking resemblance to the Colosseum in Rome could testify to human achievement, but dark clouds suggest impending misfortune and perhaps serve as a warning to the papacy in Rome about the perils of its own sinful ways. By the end of the 17th century, the myth had reemerged in a more utopian form, as scientists and artists exalted man’s ability to conceive and carry through grand projects: the tower becomes a unifying force, and images show people holding hands around the unwavering structure.

After 539 B.C., when Babylon finally fell to the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, Babylon’s brightly colored temples and mud-brick walls slowly crumbled, vanishing from view until German archaeologists began unearthing their foundations at the end of the 19th century. World War I halted their efforts, and today conflict once again threatens the rediscovery of Babylon. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army built a helicopter pad on the site of the city’s remains. A report by the British Museum claims soldiers have crushed ancient paving stones with tanks, carelessly filled construction sandbags with precious artifacts, and dug trenches — one of them 560 ft. (170 m) long — through archaeological deposits. All of this may rob the world of Babylon’s final treasures, but, as the Louvre exhibition attests, the civilization will live on — in myth, if not in matter.