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Kriwaczek - Babylon: mesopotamia and the birth of civilization

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Kriwaczek Babylon: mesopotamia and the birth of civilization
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Civilization was born eight thousand years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place. In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period and explores the political and social systems, as well as the technical and cultural innovations, which made this land extraordinary. At the heart of this book is the story of Babylon, which rose to prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi from about 1800 BCE. Even as Babylons fortunes waxed and waned, it never lost its allure as the ancient worlds greatest city. Engaging and compelling, Babylon reveals the splendor of the ancient world that laid the foundation for civilization itself.

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Contents Acknowledgements My thanks are due to my brother Frank Kriwaczek - photo 1

Contents Acknowledgements My thanks are due to my brother Frank Kriwaczek - photo 2

Contents
Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to my brother, Frank Kriwaczek, for his help in accessing documents and journals that would otherwise have been unavailable to me, and as ever to my literary agent and good friend Mandy Little, for her invaluable support and wise guidance.

List of Illustrations

Maps

  1. Ancient Mesopotamia
  2. The Fertile Crescent
  3. The Sumerian City-States
  4. The Empire of Akkad
  5. Third Dynasty of Ur
  6. The Old Babylonian Empire
  7. The Assyrian Empire
  8. The Neo-Babylonian Empire

These maps are purely indicative and omit many lines and landmarks for the sake of clarity.

List of Photographic Illustrations

  1. Frieze from Al Ubaid, c. 4000 BCE / British Museum
  2. Sumerian pull-along toy from the fourth millennium BCE / Oriental institute, University of Chicago
  3. Sumerian Cylinder seal from around 3000 BCE / British Museum
  4. Uruk era stamp seal and its impression, fourth millennium BCE / British Museum
  5. Bevelled-rim bowl fourth millennium BCE / British Museum
  6. The first known signature / Schyen Collection, Oslo and London
  7. The Lady of Uruk, c. 3100 BCE / Bridgeman Art Library
  8. Upper tier of the Warka Vase, c. 3100 BCE / Bridgeman Art Library
  9. Royal cemetery at Great Death Pit at of Ur, c. 2500 BCE / Illustrated London News , Mary Evans Picture Library
  10. Servants cemetery at Great Death Pit at of Ur, c. 2500 BCE / Illustrated London News , Mary Evans Picture Library
  11. King Sargon of Akkad, c. 2300 BCE / Bridgeman Art Library
  12. Gudea of Lagash, c. 2120 BCE / British Museum
  13. The Weld-Blundell Prism, c. 1800 BCE / The Ashmolean Museum
  14. King Naram-Sins Victory Stele, c. 2200 BC / Muse du Louvre
  15. The Stele of the Vultures, c.2500 / Muse du Louvre
  16. Monument showing Shamash the Sun God, c. 1700 BCE / Muse du Louvre
  17. Wall panel from the North Palace at Nineveh, c. 345 BCE , British Museum
  18. Wall panel in Sennacheribs palace at Nineveh, 701 BCE / British Museum
  19. The Lion Hunt from a wall panel in Sennacheribs palace at Nineveh, seventh century BCE / British Museum
  20. Detail of above

History which does not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism

Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History
at Cambridge University, Inaugural Lecture, 1997

Lessons from the Past An Introduction They hanged Saddam Hussein on the - photo 3

Lessons from the Past: An Introduction

They hanged Saddam Hussein on the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid ul-Adha, 30 December 2006. It was not a dignified execution. Reading the newspaper reports of that grisly and botched act of barbarism, more revenge than justice, and seeing the mobile-phone video images distributed immediately afterwards, I cannot have been the only one to feel that the language of daily journalism was inadequate to encompass such extravagant, larger-than-life events.

The cruel tyrants army crumbles away. He himself escapes, disappears from sight for a time, but is eventually discovered, filthy and heavily bearded, cowering like an animal in a hole in the ground. He is taken captive, publicly humiliated, held in solitary confinement for a thousand days and put on trial before a tribunal whose verdict is a foregone conclusion. Hanging him, his exultant executioners almost tear off his head.

As in biblical times, God took to speaking to men again, instructing the makers of history. At a secret meeting between senior army officers in Kuwait during the run-up to the First Gulf War, Saddam had explained that he had invaded Kuwait on heavens express instructions: May God be my witness, that it is the Lord who wanted what happened to happen. This decision we received almost ready-made from GodOur role in the decision was almost zero.

In a BBC documentary, broadcast in October 2005, Nabil Shaath, Foreign Minister of the Palestinian authority recalled that President Bush said to all of us: Im driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did; and then God would tell me George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq And I did. And now, again, I feel Gods words coming to me.

It would have come as no real surprise had the conflict begun with a voice booming out from heaven, crying O President Saddam, and continuing, as in the Book of Daniel, 4:31: to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. It takes the language of the Old Testament, the Book of Kings perhaps, to depict the details of Saddam Husseins end in their full, almost mythic, dimensions. Thus:

It was the morning of the Sabbath, before the sun rose. And they brought him into the city, even unto the place of execution.

And they bound his hands and his feet as was the custom among them in the way of execution. And they reviled him saying, how are the mighty fallen, and may you be cursed by the Lord.

And they placed the rope about his neck and they reviled him again, praising the names and titles of his enemies, and saying, may God curse you, may you go down to hell.

And he replied, saying, Is this your manhood? This is a gallows of shame.

And again they spoke unto him, saying, prepare to meet God. And he prayed to God, saying, there is no God but the Lord.

And so they hanged him. And a great shout went up in the place of execution and in the streets and in the markets. It was the morning of the Sabbath, as the sun rose over the walls of Babylon.

Seeing George W. Bushs Iraq War through biblical eyes is not just a writers conceit, the reaction of someone like me, introduced as a child to Middle-Eastern history by the Bible. Saddam too saw himself as a successor to the rulers of antiquity. He particularly modelled himself on Nebuchadnezzar II (605562 BCE ), conqueror and destroyer of Jerusalem and its temple, describing him, in a multiple anachronism, as an Arab from Iraq, who fought, like Saddam himself, against Persians and Jews. (Nebuchadnezzar was not an Arab but a Chaldean, there would be no Iraq for another two and a half millennia, and Judaism as we know it did not yet exist.) The emblem of the 1988 Babylon International Festival showed Saddams profile superimposed on Nebuchadnezzars; according to a New York Times journalist, the outline of his nose was lengthened to make him resemble the Mesopotamian king more closely. Saddam also honoured Hammurabi ( c. 17951750 BCE ), the ruler of the Old Babylonian Empire renowned for his eye-for-an-eye legal code, and named the most powerful strike-force in the Iraqi army the Hammurabi Republican Guard Armoured Division; another unit was the Nebuchadnezzar Infantry Division.

The Iraqi leader was, said the BBCs John Simpson, an inveterate builder of monuments to himself, undertaking great construction projects in conscious emulation of his illustrious predecessors. Giant images of the Iraqi leader showed him, like an ancient Sumerian monarch, carrying a building-workers basket on his shoulder, although the ancients would have been pictured bearing the first load of clay for brickmaking, while Saddam was represented bearing a bowl of cement. He began a massive reconstruction of the site of ancient Babylon, although his rebuilding, said one architectural historian, was poor quality pastiche and frequently wrong in scale and detail Like the monarchs of antiquity, Saddam had the bricks inscribed with his name; thousands bore the rubric: The Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein. Never one to display unnecessary good taste, he had the text written in modern Arabic rather than Babylonian cuneiform.

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