Babylon

Babylon

The welcome Babylon produced for the young conqueror was like something out of a fantastic tale. For ten stadia along the road leading to the city thousands of youngsters – girls and boys – had lined up and were throwing flowers before Alexander’s horse. The majestic Ishtar gate, one hundred feet high and finished in enamelled tiles carrying figures of dragons and winged bulls, seemed to loom more and more as the King advanced with his companions and followed by his army in formation, his soldiers and his officers all dressed in their finest armor.

The inhabitants of the city had taken up position on the ramparts of the towers flanking the gate and along the gigantic walls – wide enough to allow the passage of two four-horse chariots side by side. They were anxious to see the new King who had defeated the Persians three times in less than two years and had forced many heavily fortified cities to surrender.

The priests and the dignitaries greeted Alexander and accompanied him to offer a sacrifice to the god Marduk whose shrine was at the top of the Esagila, the great stepped temple that stood towering over the wide sacred area. Before the immense crowd gathered in the great courtyard, Alexander, together with his companions and his generals, climbed the steps which led from me terrace to another right up to the sanctuary on the summit which housed the god’s bed of gold in this his earthly dwelling.

Bablyon destroyed. Photo by Elena

From up there the King was able to look upon and absorb the amazing spectacle of the majestic metropolis. Babylon extended before him at his feet with all its marvels, with its endless walls, the triple bulwark that protected the royal palace and the ‘summer palace’ located in the northern part of the city. He could see the smoke from the burning incense as it rose from the more than one thousand sanctuaries in the huge urban area – the wide, straight roads that met one another at right angles and all the main arteries, paved in terracotta tiles all bound together with asphalt. Each of the roads began and terminated with one of the twenty-five gates that provided access through the walls, with their colossal doors dressed in bronze, silver, and gold.

The city was split in two by the River Euphrates, shining like a ribbon of gold extending from one side of the walls to the other, flanked by gardens and exotic trees of all kinds in which flocks of multicolored birds were roosting.

Beyond the river, connected to the western part of the city by massive stonework bridges, the royal palaces stood out because of their finish in polychrome enamel tiles, resplendent in the sun with images of fantastical creatures, storybook landscapes, scenes from the ancient mythology of the Land of the Two Rivers.

Not far from the royal palace stood the greatest structure in the entire city, considered to be one of the most impressive wonders in the known world – the Hanging Gardens.

The typically Persian concept of the pairidaeza had taken shape here in a completely flat location whose climate was unsuitable for a large tree-filled park. Everything here was artificial, created with notable effort and ingenuity by the hand of man. The priests explained to Alexander that according to the story of the gardens’ origin, a young Elamite queen, having arrived in Babylon as bride to King Nebuchadnezzar, suffered so much from homesickness for the wooded mountains of her homeland that the King gave orders for an artificial mountain to be created and covered with a shady wood and with the most beautiful flowers. That was why the architects had created a series of platforms, one above the other, reducing in size as they increased in height. Each was supported by hundreds of stonework pillars carefully covered in asphalt and linked by curved vaults, and the huge platforms which carried all the soil necessary to allow the bushes and the high trees to root and flourish were also asphalted. Many birds, even the high species, started nesting in the trees and bushes while exotic species, such as peacocks and pheasants, were brought from the Caucasus and far off India. Fountains of all types were created with ingenious machines bringing the water from the Euphrates, which flowed past at the bottom of the wonder.

From the outside it looked like a hill covered with a flourishing wood, but here and there were signs of man’s intervention -terraces and parapets hidden away among the climbing and trailing plants, all of them rich in flowers and fruits.

It moved Alexander to think that such a wonder had been ordered by a great king to ease the melancholy of his queen, a young woman born in the high, woody lands of Elam, and he thought of Barsine who slept now for ever on her ‘tower of silence’ in the arid desert of Gaugamela.

‘Gods above!’ he murmured as he looked around him. ‘How many wonders there are here!’ and his friends too, Ptolemy and Perdiccas, Leonnatus and Philotas, Lysimachus and Eumenes, Seleucus and Craterus, all looked in amazement at the city which for millennia had been considered the heart of the world and God’s Gate’, as its very name in the local language – Bab-El -actually meant. Vast green spaces opened up between the houses and the buildings, orchards and gardens with all sorts of fruit, and out on the river there were many boats moving agilely through the water. Some of these, made of bundles of reeds and driven by .irge square sails, came from the estuary areas where the oldest ernes of Mesopotamian myth were located: Ur, Kish, Lagash. Oners, round in shape, like large baskets and covered with tanned sens, came from the north and brought with them the fruits of those far off lands – produce from the green fields of Armenia, rich in wildfowl, animal skins, wood and precious stones.

The sky, the water and the earth all contributed towards the creation of a universe of harmonious perfection within the great city walls with their imposing crown of towers. Yet Alexander continued to look around in search of another marvel he had heard tale of since his childhood. Indeed, his teacher, Leonidas, had been the first to mention the ‘Tower of Babel’, a mountain of stone and asphalt some three hundred feet high and as wide as that at its base. All the peoples of the world were said to have worked on its construction.

The priest pointed to a huge area that was completely abandoned and covered in weeds, “That’s is where the sacred Etermenanki stood, the tower that touched the sky, destroyed by the Persians in their fury when the city rebelled, at the time of King Xerxes.

Ancient Walls. Photo by Elena.