Vandals at large in Babylon
When I first visited Babylon it was a deserted ruin; the nearest village was a mile away and the nearest town was Hillah, where the British had built a barrage largely out of bricks taken from Babylon - a deplorable action, but one that may be excused by the ignorance of the times. After all, an earlier British general had built a road out of Hadrian's Wall and people were still demolishing Welsh castles to build houses down to the 20th century.
Mind you, the isolation of the place didn't stop the ruins swarming by day with shifty-eyed Arab youths who would sidle up to you, hoarsely whisper "Hey, mistar! You like buy somesing? Hammurabi and his wife, eh? Very old. Genuine antique. Only one dollar", and then exhibit a fairly crude clay plaque depicting two figures in an intimate pose that would have scandalised Hammurabi! Amram, our guide, who in his youth had worked with Professor Robert Koldewey, made ineffectual attempt to shoo them away and warned us that the factory where the figures were produced was in the nearby village.
When we asked Amram for permission to spend the night outside the little museum in our caravan, he readily assented, but seemed curiously vague when we asked about the night watchman. When we pressed him for something in writing that we could show to the night watchman to save the bother of being routed out in the middle of the night, he finally admitted that there was no night watchman - because the locals firmly believed that the ruins were haunted and never ventured into them after dark. We noted it down as a curious fulfilment of the prediction made by the Biblical prophet Isaiah that the Arab would not pitch his tent there!
Alas, Saddam Husein, the mad dictator of Iraq, decided that he was a reincarnation of Hammurabi and/or Nebuchadnezzar and not only had himself depicted alongside those two men of blood, but decided to rebuild Babylon - though not as the capital of Iraq, merely as a pleasure garden. Three huge conical mounds were constructed over the ruins and an aerial ropeway was planned to run between them, carrying visitors over the ruins.
Those plans came to an end after the first Gulf War, when Saddam was too busy trying to cope with the aftermath of defeat, and archaeologists breathed a sigh of relief that the vandalism had stopped. Alas, we breathed too soon: the Americans were yet to come!
At the close of the second Gulf War we got a foretaste of American cultural sensitivity when American troops stood guard over the oil ministry, while a couple of hundred yards away mobs of unruly Arabs looted the world-famous museum undisturbed. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that an American general, looking for somewhere to build an army base, should have settled upon the ancient ruins of Babylon as the ideal spot.
One wonders what went through the cretin's mind - if one can refer to a perfect vacuum with that word. Did he think he was scoring a point over Saddam by camping on his derelict pleasure park? Did he consider all the ancient bricks merely as convenient building materials? Was he, in his turn, consumed by delusions of grandeur and intend to take on the mantle of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar by camping in the ruins of their city?
Whatever the febrile agitations that passed for thought in his head, the result was disastrous. As UNESCO said in its report, "The use of Babylon as a military base was a grave encroachment on this internationally known archaeological site."
Tanks and bulldozers rumbled down Procession Street, crushing the ancient bricks - each one engraved with the name of Nebuchadnezzar - beneath their treads. Army lorries and armoured cars roared past ancient walls, scraping the amazing embossed bulls and sirrush off the bricks. Grunts - an oddly fitting term for American infantrymen - blithely dug defensive trenches in sites where archaeologists work with bated breath and camel-hair brushes. Meanwhile their colleagues filled sandbags with ancient rubble and carted them off to other bases on other sites, providing an archaeological nightmare that will puzzle stratigraphists for centuries to come.
UNESCO particularly singled out an American contractor, KBR, for criticism, noting that it "caused major damage to the city by digging, cutting, scraping, and leveling." A po-faced KBR spokeswoman blandly assured the press, "Our commitment to provide the military with high-quality service, and conduct our operations in Iraq in that regard, remains."
That "high-quality service" included driving steel stakes into ancient walls, constructing a helicopter pad and access roads, laying out parking lots and similar acts of vandalism.
Of course, those who believe in Bible prophecy will receive the news of this new destruction of Babylon with greater equanimity. "Babylon ... will be heaps of ruins," the prophet Jeremiah intoned and the heaps are now bigger and the ruins more ruined as a result of American activities. The rest of us will bemoan the loss of those fabulous ruins and of the information that still remained to be discovered. No longer will it be possible to stroll down Procession Street and dream that the last people to do so were priests of Marduk or Nebuchadnezzar and his entourage - because you will know from the lines of broken bricks that the last people to pass that way were gum-chewing Yanks in tanks.
Alas, now that the Americans have finally departed, the Iraqis have taken over and minor vandalism continues. While the Ministry of Archaeology is working with UNESCO to turn the site into a World Heritage Sitein the hope "that what happened to Babylon can't ever happen again" (according to Francoise Riviere, UNESCO undersecretary for culture), the officials of the Governorate of Babil had called in the bulldozers to level a section of the site to create a picnic area for the hoardes of tourists they hope will soon flood in, bringing wealth and prosperity in their train.
It does not seem to have occured to the idiots that tourists, especially Western ones, will come to Babylon to see the ruins, not the picnic area!
Still, a "Future of Babylon Project" has been set up, a partnership between the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and the World Monuments Fund. WMF experts toured the site recently and came away tearing their hair out over the problems they observed. Some are even the result of well-intentioned but ill-informed attempts to preserve the site by coating ancient walls with a thick layer of plaster. "On some walls, the plaster was too thick and fell off, pulling down part of the wall with it," reported Gina Haney, a WMF expert on the tour.
Still, we must hope that something can be retrieved from the mess. "War," said Ambrose Bierce , "is God's way of teaching Americans geography." It would be nice to think that vandalising ancient sites might end up by teaching Americans about history - but if so, what a price!
Biblical prophet Isaiah Isaiah 13:20 Return
Saddam Husein Mad and paranoid he may have been, but he also perfectly fulfilled the ancient dictum that every nation gets the government it deserves. The people of Mesopotamia have always been a turbulent lot and their modern descendants carry on the tradition. Paranoid about foreigners, we were constantly stopped and searched in case we were spies - though what the idiots searching thought they would find, I really do not know. Violent against each other, the Shias fight the Sunnis, the Sunnis fight the Shia, and if there are no handy Shias or Sunnis against whom to fight the two factions fight among themselves as bloodily as possible. Return
the result was disastrous When challenged on the subject American army spokesmen respond by claiming that things would have been much worse if looters had been allowed free rein. Frankly I don't believe him. A few pits dug by Arabs cannot compare with the wholesale destruction caused by a tank manoeuvring around before settling down for the night - and in any case, you can't dig too deep in Babylon or the excavation gets flooded with water.
If the Americans had truly been concerned about the welfare of Babylon they could have set up their camp outside the ruins and posted sentries to keep out the looters. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
