Word: babylone
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Arranged chronologically, "Babylon" unpacks some of the world's most iconic artifacts to explain the shifting motives of the city's rulers. By the early 18th century B.C., Hammurabi, the sixth King of Babylon, had used an aggressive military policy to conquer rival city-states and to establish Babylon as Mesopotamia's political heart. But Hammurabi was concerned about more than expansion, as demonstrated by the magnificent Code of Hammurabi stela, a 7-ft.-high (2 m) column of basalt upon which he inscribed 282 codified laws and punishments in cuneiform, the Babylonian script that predates even hieroglyphics. Although...
...Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts - in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus - describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel...
Nebuchadnezzar's magnificent city required abundant cheap labor, much of it provided by Jewish captives. In 601 B.C., Jehoiakim, King of Judah, forged an alliance with Egypt, which was embroiled in ongoing skirmishes with Babylon; as retribution, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, raiding Solomon's Temple and seizing 10,000 Jews to help build his city. This brutal history would later color the portrayal of Babylon in the Bible. "In Christian culture, Babylon was quite deliberately developed as a broad symbol of the city of sin," says Michael Seymour, a curator of the British Museum's Middle Eastern collection. Indeed...
...show at the Louvre also offers intriguing insights into how Babylon was viewed by European artists from the 15th century onwards. Drawing on eight renderings of the Tower of Babel, the exhibition traces evolving perceptions of the city, with the various artists updating and reshaping the myth of Babylon according to their own era's religious and philosophical concerns. During the second half of the 16th century, a time marked by the disintegration of Christianity and the beginning of religious wars, they used the tower to reflect a sense that their own world was descending into chaos, a salient theme...
After 539 B.C., when Babylon finally fell to the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, Babylon's brightly colored temples and mud-brick walls slowly crumbled, vanishing from view until German archaeologists began unearthing their foundations at the end of the 19th century. World War I halted their efforts, and today conflict once again threatens the rediscovery of Babylon. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army built a helicopter pad on the site of the city's remains. A report by the British Museum claims soldiers have crushed ancient paving stones with tanks, carelessly filled construction sandbags with...