Travelers rediscover Babylon

Babylon remained an emblematic name in Western tradition, but knowledge of the location of the site where it had blossomed—and where its ruins survived—was lost. The Arabs and Jews of Iraq, however, preserved this knowledge.

Two Jewish travelers, Benjamin of Tudela (who returned to Spain in 1173) and Petahia of Regensburg (who visited the site prior to 1187) were the first to deliver accounts in the high Middle Ages. But the scorpions and snakes inhabiting the ruins kept the former at a respectful distance from the sinister site of Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace, while the latter was more drawn to relics ascribed to the prophet Daniel.

From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onward, many accounts were published by voyagers who had traveled Mesopotamian routes for commercial, diplomatic, or scientific reasons, or simply from a desire to see the world. But Babylon was off the main track; instead, travelers usually took a route passing near the ruins of the ziggurat at Aqar Quf, which they mistakenly identified as the tower of Babel, an error that became widely accepted, and was reinforced by the spread of humanist culture that led to the identification of Baghdad as (New) Babylon. The nearby existence of the ruins of a great ancient city, an old bridge, and a seasonal branch of the Euphrates that, flowing from Fallujah joined the Tigris at Baghdad, seemed to confirm it all.

Pietro della Valle re-established the truth in 1616. He visited Tell Babil, which he identified as the tower of Babel (we now know that that it was Nabuchadnezzar’s so-called “Summer Palace”). Although disappointed by the small size of the ruins, he studied them in a scientific spirit that was already highly modern, and he had two paintings done (subsequently used by Athanasius Kircher for his Turris Babel). Valle was the first traveler to Mesopotamia to take a professional artist with him, expressly hired to record the archaeological sites and monuments visited. The constant historical considerations informing Valle’s meticulous study were in no way inferior to his refined observations, which could already be described as archaeological. Employing the survival and evolution of place-names to provide evidence that the site was ancient Babylon, he applied modern principles of linguistics to show the correspondence between Babel/Babil in Arabic and Babylon in Greek.

Cartographical knowledge concerning the site of Babylon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not differ from written accounts; indeed, maps by the great cartographers of the sixteenth century consistently and uniformly confused Babylon with Baghdad and the Euphrates with the Tigris. Seventeenth century maps, however, displayed decisive progress in showing Mesopotamian topography and hydrography. It was Guillaume de l’Isle (died 1726), who permanently established the accurate relationship between Baghdad, Al-Hillah, and Babylon. Once established, the bases of modern cartographic representation were pursued by Jean Bourguignon d’Anville, whose observations were published in 1779 in a book devoted to the Tigris and Euphrates, in which he compared ancient sources, Oriental sources, travelers’ accounts, and modern cartographers’ work, to which he contributed a detailed geographic map.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, France was a pioneer in historical and archaeological research into ancient Oriental sites, Babylon in particular. Joseph de Beauchamp, astronomer, scientist, and papal assistant in 1782, explored Babylon and other archaeological sites by questioning nearby residents and watching excavations done by local peasants to salvage ancient fired bricks. He learned that “by digging up the earth, they found a chamber that had a wall where a cow was formed from glazed bricks… which might shed some further light on the ancient religion of Chaldea.” Beauchamp was the first the make a connection between the cuneiform lettering on Babylonian bricks and the monumental writing in Persepolis.

At that point, a growing interest in antiquities, history, and linguistics opened the way to the early archaeological explorations, begun by the English at the start of the nineteenth century and pursued after 1850 by Paul Emile Botta, which brought to light the grandeur of the Assyrian civilization.


The English and French in Babylon in the 19th century

In 1801 a large stone tablet arrived in London. It had been dispatched by Sir Harford Jones Bridges, the East India Company agent in Baghdad, who donated it to the company museum. From that moment onward, the British became seriously interested in Babylon. Claudius James Rich began a brilliant career as a diplomatic when assigned to Baghdad in 1808; in 1811 he visited Babylon and drew up the first accurate topographic map of the site. In subsequent years he undertook minor excavations and found a series of archaeological items that he sent back to England, notably the Nabonidus stela (BM 90837) but also inscribed bricks, clay tablets, and cylinder seals bearing inscriptions. He published his discoveries in 1815 as Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon, followed in 1818 by Second Memoir on Babylon. Rich died early, aged just thirty-five, and his collection was bought by the British Museum.
Sir Robert Ker Porter visited Babylon in 1818. He painted the ruins there, as well as the ones at Borsippa, located not far away (and thought by many to be the site of the tower of Babel). In 1822, Ker Porter published a highly popular illustrated volume of his Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia.

Carl Bellino, whom Ker Porter hired as a guide at Babylon, was none other than Claudius Rich’s young German secretary. In a letter dated 1819, Rich described Bellino as an extremely zealous young man always at work in his office, unwilling to be coaxed into getting some exercise—but that is how Bellino became a living encyclopedia, acquiring a thorough mastery of the art of copying inscriptions. His copies, published in books by Rich, Ker Porter, and Grotefend, were remarkably accurate, something all the more surprising in that cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered at that time.

Captain Robert Mignan carried out digs on two occasions in the 1830s. In 1850, Austin Henry Layard found many late tombs and a whole series of artifacts, including bowls bearing Aramaic inscriptions and a few fragments of glazed bricks from Nabuchadnezzar’s palace; the significance of those fragments would nevertheless remain an enigma for several decades. Layard dispatched the pieces he found to the British Museum, but soon gave up his search; compared to his spectacular finds in Assyria, Babylon produced few pieces worthy of interest.
The objects discovered by early archaeologists wound up in the British Museum’s Department of Antiquities, where Samuel Birch was assistant keeper. In 1860, when a Department of Oriental Antiquities was founded, Birch was named keeper, assisted by George Smith, Theophilus Pinches, and Wallis Budge, all of whom would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in this field.

In 1879, Hormuzd Rassam, from a Christian Chaldean family in Mosul, began digging in Babylon once more, in order to save what tablets he could, since the site was subject to looting. He had learned the trade from Layard, with whom he worked. In Babylon Rassam found the Cyrus cylinder (BM 90920) and many tablets that now help us to understand everyday life in the ancient city. Rassam was the first to draw up the plan of a classic Babylonian temple, namely the temple to the god Nabu in Borsippa.

In 1851, a French expedition led by Fulgence Fresnel, backed by epigraph-specialist Jules Oppert and architect Félix Thomas, was stuck for long months in Baghdad (after an interminable voyage to get there), until it was safe to travel to Babylon. Although the outcome of the expedition was disappointing, the site of ancient Babylon was finally identified and established once and for all. Texts in hand, the expedition proved that the Kasr was the famous Palace of Wonders described by Herodotus and Ctesias; it had exhumed texts and a peerless collection of glazed bricks that vanished, alas, in a shipwreck in 1855. It was left to Oppert, as a prelude to his own glorious career, to present the results of the expedition in the form of an atlas, illustrated by a few etchings by Thomas, of a body of epigraphic documents and an account of the voyage.

Henri-Pacifique Delaporte, assigned to the French consulate in Baghdad in October 1862, soon undertook a full-scale archaeological excursion across Mesopotamia. It was a productive one in so far as he discovered a significant set of Assyrian reliefs at Nimrod and, fortuitously, an undisturbed Parthian tomb in Babylon, which he described as “Greco-Babylonian.”
Subsequently, although Babylon no longer drew French archaeologists for extensive digs, they would occasionally visit the site.


German excavations at Babylon and the “Babel–Bible dispute” (Der “Babel-Bibel-Streit”)

Germany got a rather late start to archaeological exploration of Mesopotamia. And yet German scholars made a decisive contribution to the discovery of Mesopotamian civilization, notably in 1802 when G. F. Grotefend first deciphered cuneiform writing. By 1855 a collection of Oriental antiquities acquired on the art market was being assembled in Berlin. The scholarly context was still lacking, however, which obliged German specialists in cuneiform to work largely in London until the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1887, at the request of Prussian museums, Robert Koldewey organized an initial expedition to Mesopotamia in order to locate potential ruins to excavate. Koldewey’s preference went to Babylon, a site charged with symbolism; up to that point, no one had risked undertaking true archaeological excavations because of the scope of the ruins and the lack of easily identifiable buildings like the ones in Assyria. But the decision was made, and so Babylon was the site of digs commissioned by the Berlin museums. The first pick broke ground on March 26, 1898. There were twenty-four workers to start with, everyone being housed in tents. With only a few brief interruptions, digging would continue until March 1917.

No main goal had been established in advance. It was decided that the expedition, “in addition to scholarly knowledge that will benefit Assyriology and art history, should bring back sculptures and other antiquities for the royal museums in Berlin.” The remains of buildings that were uncovered were to be documented to serve as the basis of later publications; particular care was also to be taken with photographs.

The excavation journals, like the publications, are filled with references to accounts by Greek authors and to the corresponding Biblical passage when it came to discussing finds that seemed to defy all concordance, to the great perplexity of the diggers. The exhumed buildings did not seem to match the descriptions of ancient authors. On the other hand, the German excavations attested to the historical existence of the tower of Babel, and the overall results elicited surprise and admiration in Europe.

(New German excavations were begun in 1962 by the Baghdad section of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in cooperation with the Iraqi antiquities administration. The goal was to determine the still-vague connection between the tower and the surrounding buildings, and to date the surviving core of the terraced tower. These investigations, along with a comparison with the Borsippa ziggurat excavated by Austrian archaeologists, produced complementary research that yielded a better reconstruction of the tower in 1981—a new model is now on display at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.)

In 1875 English Assyriologist George Smith had published a book titled, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Time of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods, from the Cuneiform Iinscriptions. The promise of the title was a little ambitious: ancient Mesopotamia literature contains no mention of original sin, no history of the building of the tower, no Biblical patriarchs or Nimrod. However, the parallel of the deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh with the Biblical Flood was itself sufficiently interesting, an interest that would only grow as exaggerated links between Babylon and the Bible were asserted.

In 1898, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG, German Oriental Society) was founded in Berlin. Its primary purpose was to finance and organize archaeological digs in Mesopotamia. The society’s founders included not only scholars but also leading business people and political figures. Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself highly interested in archaeology, agreed in 1901 to become the society’s Protektor (Patron), leading to major grants from the empire’s “available funds” as well as the Prussian ministry of finance. Excavations, which had begun in Babylon by 1899, were soon followed by other campaigns, notably at Ashur.

Each year the DOG organized a formal lecture at the Sing-Akademie in Berlin, regularly attended by the kaiser. The lecture was designed to provide benefactors with an assessment of excavations and the major results of research in a form accessible to the general public, all in glamorous surroundings. The board of the DOG invited Friedrich Delitzsch, head of the royal museums’ new Near East Department, to give the annual lecture on January 13, 1902. He chose the title, “Babel and Bible.” Delitzsch was certainly the most esteemed and renowned Assyriologist of his day, even beyond specialized circles. He was convinced that one of the major goals of Mesopotamian archaeology and Assyriological studies was a better understanding of the Bible; he was sure that contemporary research represented “a new era […] in our understanding of the Old Testament.” Delitzsch asserted that primal Semitic monotheism had waned over time, to the benefit of a polytheism long anchored in Babylonia. He added that the Babylonian elements of the Bible, such as the tale of the Flood, were part of a secondary, poorly understood tradition originating out of Babylon, which meant that “many Babylonian elements remained attached, via the Bible, to our religious thought.”

On publication, that same year, of a printed version of Delitzsch’s lecture, a public controversy broke out, fueled by countless pamphlets and newspaper articles. Satire weighed in, and the title page of a 1903 issue (no. 6) of the Lustige Blätter, a satirical review founded in 1885, pictured a courtroom scene: in the dock, seated, was Moses; the plaintiff, labeled Delitzsch, pointed to the Ten Commandments and claimed that Moses hadn’t received them on Mount Sinai but had stolen them from the royal library in Babylon; the defense lawyer, dressed as a Protestant minister and perhaps alluding to the conservative politician and former court chaplain Adolf Stoeker (1835–1909), pointed to the heavens and claimed he would call a key defense witness. One year after the first lecture, Delitzsch gave a second lecture on the same subject, in the same place and once again in the presence of the kaiser, but this time before a crowd of nearly a thousand people including the Reich chancellor. The virulent public discussion that followed placed the emperor in a delicate situation. As Summus Episcopus (Supreme Bishop) of the Lutheran Church of Prussia, he had to consider his position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The situation became even trickier when Delitzsch went beyond the Old Testament and brought the New Testament into the discussion.

On both right and left, a connection was made between Delitzsch’s positions and the ones defended by Social Democrats; the kaiser therefore decided to write a private letter to retired Admiral Hollmann, the deputy director of the DOG, making clear his differences with Delitzsch, at least as far as allusions to the New Testament were concerned; he also accused Delitzsch of “raising the question of the Revelation in a highly polemical manner, and having more or less rejected it, or, more exactly, having claimed he was able to reduce it to purely human historical facts.” Intended for publication, this letter was widely discussed and helped to calm things somewhat.

From Delitzsch’s own perspective, the rejection of the Old Testament acquired anti-Semitic connotations, which would totally dominate his argument in his 1920 publication, Die Grosse Täuschung (The Great Deception).

During the famous Babel-Bible dispute, Babylon increasingly became a symbol that no longer had any direct relationship to archaeological exploration and philologico-historical study of Babylonia and ancient Mesopotamia in general. Nevertheless, for several years in Germany it focused public attention on the ancient Near East and its recent re-discovery, something that had never happened and would never recur again.


Italian and Iraqi excavations

In September 1974, Iraq’s Department of Antiquities commissioned the Italian-Iraqi Institute of Archaeological Sciences in Baghdad to make a preliminary study of a plan to restore and enhance the site of Babylon. Its main goal was to retard degradation, due to erosion and the rise of the water table, and also to give greater architectural legibility to the remains of the ancient city. This study lasted until 1977.

Excavations and prospective digs were carried out from 1987 to 1989 on questions related to the urban layout, but this campaign was unfortunately halted due to the outbreak of war.

Most of the Babylon now visible on the site corresponds to the great Biblical city of the monarchs of the Chaldean dynasty (626–539 BC). The older levels of Babylon remain almost completely unknown from an archaeological standpoint. Cuneiform texts tell us little about the structure of the city and the actual appearance of Babylon’s monumental buildings. For that reason, a vast research project devoted to Babylon’s urban sector was launched; it calls for a team of experts who will notably study the successive phases of occupation and urban development. The interdisciplinary programs of archaeological analysis are slated to include a new semiological reading of the cityscape. Analysis of past and present signs and traces visible on the ground, based on available documentation, will rest on the tried-and-true method of interpretative analysis, on satellite imagery, and on aerial photos taken at different times. The proposed goal entails identifying the ancient urban strata and their interrelationships, in order to reveal not only the historical phases of development of the city in the Neo-Babylonian period but also older—and more recent—archaeological layers in Babylon. Since direct on-the-spot study is not currently possible, the archaeological basis of this semiological interpretation will rest on the publications of German and Iraqi excavations.