“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). “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.
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