In The Shadow Of Babylon

The Guardian (UK) ^ | 6-14-2004 | Neil MacGregor

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In the shadow of Babylon

If you want to understand Iraq, the British Museum's collection of its treasures offers some crucial clues

Neil MacGregor
Monday June 14, 2004
The Guardian (UK)

The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed. The result was bleak incomprehension. Ambitious technology defying the natural order was punished as the tower that tried to reach the skies collapsed. Irreligion and promiscuity inevitably conjured the apocalypse.

Unlike Egypt, which in popular imagining continued serene through the centuries, Babylon is seen to have flourished and fallen again and again, the reading of each episode informed and deformed by those that went before. Mythical or historical, they go on and on: the Tower of Babel; the conquests of Nebuchednezzar and the invasion of Babylon by Cyrus and then Alexander; the glorious court of Haroun-Al-Rashid; the devastation of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, where the Tigris ran black with the ink of the manuscripts from the ransacked libraries. Is there any other culture for which the distant past, real or imagined, still wields such power?

If you want to understand day by day the turmoil of Iraq now, you can of course gorge on newspapers and television bulletins. But if you have any energy left, you should go to the British Museum and see a different kind of reportage.

The antiquities of Mesopotamia reveal the constants of Middle Eastern politics. Endlessly fluctuating frontiers and proliferating religions mean endless wars. Here, in the sculptured reliefs, are the cities bombarded, the hostages taken, the aggressive displays of military power, the puppet rulers installed, the brutality of militaristic regimes.

Baghdad fell last year, but Babylon falls every day in the National Gallery. In Rembrandt's Balshazzar's Feast, painted in Amsterdam in the 1630s, a corrupt and doomed ruler is about to be deposed by foreign armies, all apparently in the name of a God that he has disparaged. The writing on the wall announces (for those with eyes to see) that Balshazzar has been found wanting and that his kingdom will be divided among foreign occupiers. In a few hours divine retribution will strike. It is the biblical story as shaped by the Dutch 17th century.

If the National Gallery shows the night before the debacle, the morning after is at the British Museum. In 539BC, Cyrus, the King of the Persians, entered Babylon and overthrew the tyrannical regime. The event is well known from Hebrew scriptures. But the British Museum has evidence from the other side - a cylinder of baked clay about 30cm long, known as the Cyrus cylinder. It is an extraordinary document, in which Cyrus, using the script and language of his new kingdom, decrees that the cults of the different gods are to be restored and honoured, and that the deported populations are to be allowed to return home. Unlike the Hebrew scriptures or Rembrandt's painting, this is the story as it seemed in Mesopotamia itself.

The Iran-Iraq war of 539BC introduced a new order to the Middle East. A great Persian empire ultimately spread from the borders of China to the Bosphorus. For modern Iranians, Cyrus's great victory and the empire are the basis of a national myth. Under Persian protection the Jews returned from Babylonian exile to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (though many remained in Baghdad until the 1950s). For the Jews, this became a crucial memory that remains alive in modern Israel.

If Babylon has this enduring topicality for Iranians and Israelis it need hardly be said that its resonance for Iraq is enormous. Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

The new interim government in Iraq will have to consider how it defines Iraq's identity. And it will be surprising if it does not turn, as every other government in the Middle East has turned, to historical precedents to define the wished-for future. There is nowhere better to survey those precedents than the British Museum.

What is most striking is the astonishing continuity of creative energy. The great achievements of Sumeria, Babylon and Assyria follow each other over thousands of years and encompass the whole country, from south to north, crossing the modernreligious divides. Like the Islamic and Ottoman works that follow, they show how quickly this region surmounts destruction and reasserts its cultural traditions.

Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese historian, has demonstrated how different the history of the Crusades appears if we read it only from Arab sources. The objects of the museum can do something comparable: show us the history of Iraq through the eyes of those who lived it. They are incomparable evidence of how the world has looked from the Land of the Two Rivers itself.

· Neil MacGregor is the director of the British Museum; he is one of the speakers at Babylon to Baghdad: Can the past help build a future for Iraq? - a public forum organised by the Guardian and the British Museum tomorrow at 7pm at the British Museum; tickets £10, tel: 020 7323 8181

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Please add the 'w' to 'shadow' in the title. Thanks.

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