Babylon

In 1902, the men digging into a mound near Hillah did not know what they were looking at: pieces of glazed brick the size of a palm, broken at every edge, the blue on them still bright. Robert Koldewey, the German architect running the dig, decided they belonged to a wall, and that the rest of that wall had to be somewhere in the ground. He was right. Over the next fifteen years, tens of thousands of fragments came up.

The problem Koldewey faced was less archaeological than arithmetical. He had the pieces of a jigsaw and no picture on the box. The fragments were numbered, crated, and shipped to Berlin, where museum workshops began an assembly that would take years. When the gate opened to visitors in 1930, a portion of Babylon was in Germany, and it is still there.

The City That Held Both Banks

Babylon sat on both sides of the Euphrates, a flat city cut through by canals. Its name appears in records going back more than four thousand years, but the Babylon we picture is largely the work of one king: Nebuchadnezzar II, who came to the throne in 605 BC and spent a reign of over forty years rebuilding it.

Mud brick was Mesopotamia's opportunity and its limit. There was no stone in the region. There was mud, and mud dissolves in rain. Nebuchadnezzar's answer was to face anything that mattered in fired and glazed brick. The glaze kept the water out, and it also made colour possible: a blue leaning toward lapis, carrying figures in gold and white.

The processional way that entered the city from the north ran for roughly half a kilometre between those walls. Lions walked along them in single file — the animal of the goddess Ishtar. The gate at the end of the road was dedicated to her, and across its face two creatures alternated: the bull of the storm god Adad, and Marduk's scaled, long-necked dragon, the mushhushshu. Once a year, at the new year festival, the statues of the gods were carried down this road.

Just beyond the gate stood Etemenanki, an enormous ziggurat rising in narrowing stages. Nothing remains of it now but the foundation, though the Tower of Babel of the Hebrew texts is generally thought to have grown out of this building.

A City That Kept Changing Hands

In 539 BC the Persian king Cyrus took the city, by most accounts with barely a fight. Two centuries later Alexander arrived and planned to make Babylon the eastern capital of his empire. In 323 BC, at thirty-two, he died there before he could. In the centuries that followed, trade moved north, the canals silted up, and the mud-brick walls went slowly back into the ground. At some point Babylon stopped being a city and became a rise in the plain.

It was rebuilt a second time in the twentieth century. In the 1980s the Iraqi government raised new walls on top of the old ones. Some of the bricks used were stamped with the name of the man who ordered the work. The strange part is that Nebuchadnezzar had done exactly the same thing. His bricks carried his name too. Twenty-five centuries apart, both men arrived at the same solution — write your ownership into the material itself.

The Gardens Nobody Wrote Down

The thing that makes Babylon famous is probably the thing that was not there: the hanging gardens. They are counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world and described as terraces of planting fed by some system of irrigation — and they appear in no surviving Babylonian text.

That silence is worth noticing. Nebuchadnezzar was a king who had his works written down in detail; he listed walls, gates and temples one by one. A garden like that in the middle of his own city would be a hard thing to leave out. Every source that describes the gardens is a much later Greek writer, and none of them seems to have seen Babylon.

One explanation is that the gardens belonged to a different city altogether. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley argued that the description fits Nineveh to the north and its king Sennacherib, where there are records of a terraced garden and the waterworks that fed it. If she is right, we have had the wrong city's name on it for two thousand years.

Today

Babylon was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2019. The site is in a difficult state: after 2003 part of it was used as a military base, heavy vehicles crossed it, and the layers were disturbed. Rising groundwater is rotting the mud brick from below. Pipelines and roads nearby are a running argument.

The gate is still in Berlin. Anyone who wants to see it travels to Germany rather than Iraq, and what they see is not a copy but the real bricks, put back in order. At Babylon, where the gate once stood, there is now a smaller model of it.