All eight towers can be climbed by a spiral way running round the outside, and about half-way up there are seats and a shelter for those who make the ascent to rest on. “The temple is a square building, two furlongs in each way, with bronze gates, and was still in existence in my time it has a solid central tower, one furlong square, with a second erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight. Herodotus also provides a graphic description of the temple of Marduk, the dominant feature of the city on what was then the east bank of the Euphrates. It was said the tower would be built tall enough to reach heaven. The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563).
#WALLS OF BABYLON FULL#
“It is surrounded by a broad deep moat full of water, and within the moat there is a wall 50 royal cubits wide and 200 high.” “Babylon lies in a wide plain, a vast city in the form of a square with sides nearly 14 miles long and a circuit of some 56 miles, and in addition to its enormous size it surpasses in splendour any city of the known world,” he begins. In his one-volume masterpiece the Histories, he devotes 10 pages to the city, a typically Herodotean blend of fact, probable fantasy and a dollop of sex to keep his audience interested.
Herodotus provides one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of Babylon. What we know about Babylon comes from a combination of classical scholars – Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian of the fifth century BC, foremost among them – archaeological excavations and the evidence of cuneiform texts. Great cedars which were on Mount Lebanon in its forest, with my clean hands, I cut down, and placed them for its roof.”
In the words of its royal inscription:Īs to Etemenanki, the ziggurat of Babylon, of which Nabopolossar, king of Babylon, my father, my begetter, had fixed the foundation – and had raised it 30 cubits but had not erected its top, I set my hand to build it. The rest of the world, starting with Old Testament readers, knew it as the Tower of Babel. Babylonians knew it as the 91-metre tower – or ziggurat – of Etemenanki on the top of the temple of Marduk, the “house of the frontier between heaven and earth”. Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial frenzy of construction also produced the city’s most celebrated monument, a construction so hubristic in ambition it became the most famous building in the world, a byword for mankind’s god-rivalling arrogance. It was a dazzling urban vista of towering temples, shrines and palaces clad in blue-glazed tiles, resplendent in gold, silver and bronze all encircled by city walls so massive that two chariots, each drawn by four horses, could pass each other with ease on the road that ran atop them, according to the Greek geographer Strabo. Photograph: Raymond Kleboe/Getty Imagesįlush from a whirlwind of military conquest in Egypt and Syria, Nebuchadnezzar plunged into a monumental building programme which resulted in the largest, most glorious city of the ancient world. Wall carvings in the ruins of Babylon in 1950. Hammurabi was the first to fashion Babylon into the capital of a kingdom encompassing southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria in northern Iraq.īut the Babylon that elicits a thrill in anyone with a passing interest in history is the city of that Old Testament anti-hero: the Jew-slaying, temple-smashing, gold-loving despot Nebuchadnezzar II, who succeeded to the throne in 605 BC.
#WALLS OF BABYLON CODE#
First mentioned in the 23rd century BC, it looms larger in the records from around 1792 BC, the beginning of the reign of Hammurabi.īabylon’s second most famous king is remembered for his uncompromising code of laws – many ending with the ominous phrase: “He shall be put to death” – which sit today in the Louvre on an eight-foot stela of carved black diorite. If Mesopotamia is the cradle of urban civilisation, Babylon is its firstborn child. Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden is said to have been nearby. Land of the Fertile Crescent, bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this is successively the realm of Sumer and Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Iraq. Here on the desert plains 60 miles south of Baghdad, where the sun turns horizons into flashing pools of mercury, is where so much human history began. Of all the world’s lost cities, none surely can compete for evocative splendour, age or mystery with Babylon.