Return to the demonised and fascinating Babylon
Submitted by coldrum on Friday, 31 October 2008 Page Views: 2571
Other ArchaeologyCountry: Iraq No city has been demonised quite like Babylon, nor any king so denounced as the incarnation of evil as Nebuchadnezzar. Neither the scriptures nor the myths have spared them: for more than 2,000 years Babylon has been a byword for vice, excess and well-deserved ruin while legend has created a ruler consumed by pride, folly and cruelty.Yet Babylon was once the cultured capital of a flourishing empire, majestic in its architecture, rich in works of art and peopled by thinkers who pioneered mathematical and astronomical concepts still valid today. Nebuchadnezzar, its greatest and most ambitious king, was a man who changed the course of world history from a capital whose ruins remain in the parched Iraqi desert.
The name Babylon still has the power to fascinate. We think of the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel, the Babylonian Captivity and the city’s infamous fall. For more than 1,000 years, painters and story-tellers have embellished the biblical denunciations of the city in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation with vivid warnings to the Western world. In 1498 Albrecht Dürer depicted the “Whore of Babylon” as a harridan riding a seven-headed beast.
Nearly 140 years later Rembrandt showed us the fear and horror on the faces of all those present at Belshazzar’s feast as a mysterious hand traced the ominous Writing on the Wall. Oh, and let’s not forget Boney M’s pop hit of 30 years ago, The Rivers of Babylon.
Babylon, the exhibition that opens in the British Museum next month, explores the myths and relates them to historical reality. What is astonishing is the richness of both legacies: the archaeological treasures excavated from the ruins barely a century ago reveal a magnificent capital, while the myths have engendered an equally powerful legacy in art, thought, paintings, film and music. Cuneiform clay tablets, coloured tiles and brick friezes, papyruses, cylinder seals, sculptures and zodiac inscriptions testify to Babylon’s former glory while paintings, engravings, medieval manuscripts and maps show the preoccupation of later ages with this vanished city.
Babylon: Myth and Reality, British Museum, London WC1, Nov 13-March 15
Read more in The Times
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