Imagining Babylon

The Modern Story of an Ancient City

Mario Liverani

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781614516026
• eBook ISBN: 9781614519584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Ever since the archaeological rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, generations of scholars have attempted to reconstruct the "real Babylon, " known to us before from the evocative biblical account of the Tower of Babel. After two centuries of excavations and scholarship, Mario Liverani provides an insightful overview of modern, Western approaches, theories, and accounts of the ancient Near Eastern city.

1Rediscovery and perplexity

1.1The ruins and the biblical curse

There is a Jewish legend which describes the fate of the ‘Tower of Babel’, the building symbolic of human presumption and divine punishment, destroyed by God, before it was completed, to stop man from reaching the sky, not under divine benediction but in an act of arrogant insubordination. The story goes: ‘One part was plunged into the earth, another was consumed by fire, and only a third remained standing. The place where it rose retains to this day one peculiarity: whoever passes it forgets everything he knows’.1 So no one, even if he had been there, could ever ‘remember’ and say where it was. There is a somewhat similar Arab-Islamic story, transmitted to us by the great Ibn Khaldun (whose intention was to destroy its historicity), but certainly much older, of the mythical city of ‘Iram – a story inspired by the visible ruins of the ancient south Arabian cities: ‘When Shaddad [a mythical king] heard a description of Paradise, he said, “I shall build something like it”. And he built the city of ‘Iram in the desert of Aden over a period of three hundred years. He himself lived nine hundred years. It is said to have been a great city, with castles of gold and silver and columns of emerald and hyacinth, containing all kinds of trees and freely flowing rivers’.2 But then when the king and his followers went there to live, God destroyed them all, and of the city we know only that it is still there, but no one has ever seen it again.

In both the Jewish tradition, of Old Testament origin, and the Islamic (which also owes much to the biblical tradition), the ancient world’s cities in ruins are the outcome and mark of a divine curse against civilizations and kingdoms that had rendered themselves culpable: in Islamic tradition because they predate the true faith, going back to the period of ignorance (jahilīya), and in the biblical tradition because they were opponents of Israel. In the Qur‘an (XI 117) the principle of ‘presumption of guilt’, even in the absence of definite information, is stated unequivocally, inasmuch as, ‘Your Lord would not destroy any town without cause if its people were acting righteously’,3 a promise placed after a long series of images (with clear biblical echoes) of the great flood and pre-Islamic cities and civilizations in ruins, the legendary ‘Ad, Thamud and Madyan.

In the biblical tradition, while the lesson told by the myth of the Tower of Babel concerned all humanity, the fate of genuinely historical peoples and cities – as described by the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah on the destruction of Babylon (Is. 13, 21, 47; Jer. 25:8–13; 50; 51:34–58) or in Nahum’s rejoicing at the destruction of Nineveh4 – concerned the tragic history of the ‘chosen people’. Assyria was guilty of the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel (with the consequent scattering of the ‘ten lost tribes’) and of the attempted siege of Jerusalem at the time of Sennacherib. Babylonia was guilty of the destruction of Jerusalem and her ‘first temple’ at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar II, and of the consequent exile of the Jews in Babylonia itself. Just as an incomplete ruin had to remain of the Tower of Babel, because the divine prohibition brought to bear during the ‘confusion of tongues’5 had stopped it thus, just so must these capital cities of the ‘empires of evil’, which had been Nineveh and Babylon, find themselves in a state of complete ruin, which would confirm and realize the outcome of the divine curse. Had they been able to excuse themselves, Assyria and Babylon could surely have said that they were simply carrying out a divine order, from that same Yahweh who was God of Israel and who had used them to punish his people. But it is so much more comfortable to be the order-givers than the executors: the giver of orders can change his mind and forgive (giving proof of his magnanimity), while the executor of the order remains ‘enmeshed’, more cursed than the victim himself. And besides, Assyria and Babylonia had been so over-zealous and had so much relished their punitive missions that their curse was more than justified.6

Biblical memories of the ancient kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia were therefore deeply marked by moral and theological implications, which made them rather more than snippets of information or occasional curiosities, and which identified allusive, and even fundamental, symbols and principles of shared values. And yet commitment to the faith – be it Judaic, Islamic or Christian – implied that these ruins should remain as such, or, even better, be so obliterated as to be no longer known, not even the places where they had stood. The desire to know and find the ruins of antiquity, therefore, and to reconstruct the images and values of these remote worlds (leaving out the theological worth of their story) belongs rather to the slow and gradual formation of a historicist, and largely secular, vision in the European world.

The western world’s interest in antiquity, including that of the Ancient Near East, had developed slowly over the centuries, and then underwent significant acceleration with the Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century, within the context of the great cultural and historiographical changes that heralded the start of ‘modernity’; these changes had their roots in the great geographical explorations of the sixteenth century, which had widened our knowledge of our planet, and in the beginnings of modern astronomy, which had widened the dimensions of the universe, and which was then followed by the beginnings of geology, to widen the dimensions of time. As is well known, this enormous spatio-temporal expansion met with censure and resistance from the Church, since it contradicted the biblical text, but it nevertheless sparked off growing awareness of the fact that there exist – in time and in space – worlds different from our own, and that their recognition (be it rediscovery or reconstruction) serves also to enrich our vision of the world, and possibly strengthen our control over it.

As an initial formulation, the antiquity that men wanted to know and revisit in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was obviously the classical world of Greece and Rome. Of this world there remained not only abundant historical and literary sources but also remarkable monuments and entire cities that, in the form of ruins, occupied the European/ Mediterranean world, not to mention movable objects of art, which served to enrich the growing collections of private and princely individuals (or cardinals). The ‘antiquarian’ reconstruction of the world will break out in the movement of Neo-Classicism, with its ideals that were not purely aesthetic but also ethical (the ancient heroes as models of virtue), and finally political (on opposite sides: the Greek city-state and the Roman Empire).7 The start of the Bourbon excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii may signal, more symbolically than definitely, this vision,8 which young members of the European nobility and growing middle classes acquired in their ‘Grand Tour’ of the antiquities of Rome, Sicily and Greece. Besides, as well as the ‘public’ excavations of the two Neapolitan sites, there were numerous ‘private’ initiatives undertaken by the grand families of the Roman nobility, each on their own land in the city and outside, in order to supply their collections of antiquities.9

The rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, on the other hand, although parallel in time was a very different event, both in the availability of written material and in the values that people sought to attribute to this world. On the documentary front, while direct knowledge of the classical world (literary and material) had always been maintained, nothing remained of the Ancient Near East, though considered the ‘cradle’ of our civilization, beyond, to use Johann Gottfried Herder’s words at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘stories about stories, fragments of history, a dream of the world before us (ein Traum der Vorwelt)’.10 And on the ethical front, while the classical world was perceived as ‘our’ western world, as a privileged place in which to set inspirational value models, ours by sharing (however discontinuously), eastern civilizations were perceived, even before being rediscovered, as models of the anti-values that were personified above all by the Ottoman Empire: and so, culturally interesting, but also ethically-politically by antithesis. And, as we know, antithesis is a primary instrument of self-identification.

To come to the actual question of the city, we can begin with a fact that is obvious, but pregnant with consequences. While great monumental complexes and indeed entire cities of the classical world (particularly of the time of the Roman Empire) were clearly visible in the Mediterranean and Near-Eastern landscape (enough here to think of Ba’albek and Palmyra, of Leptis Magna and Sabratha), the monuments and cities of the pre-classical Near East remained hidden under stratified mounds, actual artificial hills, known by the name of tell in Arabic (and as hüyük in Turkish, tepe in Kurdish and Persian).11 And I open here a brief parenthesis to note that the Arabic word tell comes from the Assyro-Babylonian tillu, which means precisely ‘a heap of ruins’, and also to recall the passage (already cited in the Preface) in which the Assyrian king Esarhaddon takes up the story, with Tacitean brevity, of the advance of his conquering and destroying army, boasting (he speaks of himself in the third person), ‘before him (is) a city, after him a heap of ruins’, precisely, a tell.12 Modern archaeologists of the Near East could boast of the contrary, of transforming a tell into a city returned to life. Now, stone ruins are legible remains that allow us to add to and mentally reconstruct the building or the city as it must have been; but collapsed unfired brick presents an unformed mass, a non-ruin apparently unimportant and illegible.13 By applying the distinction dear to Marc Augé,14 we can say that true and real ‘ruins’ remain of the classical world, while of the Eastern only ‘rubble’. Already in Strabo (16.1.5) the definition ‘the great city is (by now) a great desert’15 fitted Babylon even better than Arcadian Megalopolis, and Lucan’s lament (Bellum Civile 9.969) comes to mind, etiam periere ruinae, ‘even the ruins have now perished’, which, however, refers to Troy and Pergamum.16

Alongside, therefore, theological considerations, technical factors took substance (the different resistance of unfired brick compared to stone) to explain how it came about that the Near East, although strewn with Graeco-Roman monuments, had preserved no visible remains of the ‘accursed’ Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Over and above Mesopotamia, the landscape of Palestine, a land of Old Testament and Gospel par excellence, was also scattered with remains and tell, which had given rise since antiquity to moral explanations (or ‘aetiologies’): from Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed for their sins (Genesis 19) to Jericho and ‘Ay destroyed, accursed, reduced to heaps of ruins ‘even unto this day’ for having been opposed to the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land (Joshua 6 and 8).17 If the Mediterranean classical world had valuable and wonderful ‘ruins’ that gave rise to positive aetiologies,18 the world of Mesopotamia and the Levant had only ‘rubble’, which could only provide aetiologies of guilt and eternal punishment.

The more acute European travellers in the Near East remained struck and perplexed at seeing the plains strewn with tell, and at first had difficulty in understanding their origin – even although their nature as a mine of ancient objects was well known to the local population, who had long been accustomed to bore into them in search of something to sell. The majority of travellers were driven by religious motives and remained content with the theological explanation (human guilt and divine punishment) but those inspired by a secular spirit sought human, political or socio-economic explanations. A writer of the Enlightenment such as Volney, who crossed Syria in 1785, was struck by the numerous tell in the area south of Aleppo, and drew from them a historical and political lesson. These remains of ancient settlements, so frequent in a region now desolate but once clearly fertile and populated, demonstrated to Volney the weight of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface to the Italian Edition
• Contents
• List of figures
• Abbreviations
• 1 Rediscovery and perplexity
• 2 Acceptance and modification
• 3 The season of theoretical models
• 4 The new models in practice
• 5 Modernity: new approaches and new settings
• 6 Post-modernity: computerization and deconstruction
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes