The capital of Babylonia, the first "world kingdom" that existed for one and a half thousand years, was so famous in the ancient world that Alexander the Great, when he took ancient Babylon in 331 BC. e., made it the capital of his empire. The great commander even made sacrifices to the god Marduk and ordered the restoration of ancient temples. Eight years later, Babylon became the last refuge for the Macedonian. After his death, the star of Babylon also set in - by the beginning of the Christian era, only ruins and biblical legends remained from him.
Even signs of the royal dignity of the Byzantine emperors and Russian tsars come from ancient Babylon. In the "Legend of Babylon City" (according to the list of the 17th century) it is written: "When Prince Vladimir of Kiev heard that Tsar Vasily received such great royal things from Babylon, he sent his ambassador to him to give him something. For the sake of his honor, Tsar Vasily sent Prince Vladimir to Kiev in a gift a cornelian crab and a monomakh's hat. And from that time, he heard the Grand Duke Vladimir of Kiev-Monomakh. And now that little hat in the Moscow State in the cathedral church. And as is the power of the appointment, then for the sake of the rank they put it on the head."
According to the Bible, the first builder of the city and the Tower of Babel is Noah's great-grandson Nimrod. For many centuries, ancient Babylon was for Europeans only a legend, a myth, in the reality of which few believed. Even the description of its beauty and grandeur in the chronicles of famous ancient scientists such as Herodotus or Strabo was not taken seriously until the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey was able to confirm the authenticity of these documents. The fragments of a brick bas-relief, which he discovered in 1899 on the Euphrates River, became sufficient reason for Kaiser Wilhelm II to begin generously funding the excavations. They made it possible to restore the true history of Babylon.
The first news about the city of Kadingir, which means "Gate of the Gods" in Sumerian, came from the XXII century BC. BC when King Sharkalisharri built a temple here. 1894 BC e. - the Amorite tribe Yahrurum invaded Mesopotamia. They made the Sumerian city the capital of their state and translated its name into their own language - Bab-ilu. A little later, during the reign of King Hammurabi, Babylon became the largest political and cultural center of the whole of Western Asia. This sixth king of the first Babylonian dynasty, who ruled from 1792 to 1750 BC. e., remained in the memory of descendants thanks to its laws, which have come down to us on cuneiform clay tablets (tuppums) and carved on a stone stele. Many of his military victories were known to his contemporaries, including the defeat of the Sumerians, major victories over Assyria and the unification of all of Lower and part of Upper Mesopotamia.
In the 9th century BC. e. from the south to Babylon began to advance the nomadic tribes of the Chaldeans - Semitic tribes from the northwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. They embraced ancient Babylonian culture and began to worship Marduk. In 626 BC. e. the Chaldean leader Nabopalasar raised a revolt against the Assyrians. The bloody war lasted for 12 years, but as a result, the Chaldeans captured all of Mesopotamia, as well as most of Syria and Palestine. The most significant period in the history of Babylon begins.
When in the 5th century BC. e. Herodotus visited Babylon, he was shocked by its size and grandeur. Residential areas stretched on both sides of the Euphrates along the river in a narrow strip of 22 kilometers. The city was surrounded by a deep moat filled with water and three belts of high brick walls with massive crenellated towers and eight wrought copper gates. The fortress walls were up to 20 meters high and 15 meters thick.
The streets were built up with 3- to 4-storey houses, which were located according to a clear plan: some ran parallel to the river, others crossed them at right angles. The main streets were paved, and in some places pink asphalt was used. The main entrance of Babylon was the Gate of the goddess Ishtar, faced with blue glazed tiles with alternating bas-relief images of animals - 575 figures of bulls, lions and fantastic sirrush dragons.
Babylon became famous for the Chaldean sages, who enjoyed great fame even in the late Roman era. They were unsurpassed astronomers and mathematicians, the best versed in astrology and alchemy. Ancient engineers managed to curb the turbulent and capricious Euphrates by creating an ideal irrigation system. The products of the craftsmen of ancient Babylon enjoyed a well-deserved fame and great demand in the East and in Egypt. The first schools appeared under the Babylonian temples. Children there studied theology, law, medicine and music.
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Trade and business outside the walls of Babylon reached unprecedented heights. Already in those days, the local bankers used non-cash payments, wrote checks and paid for them, gave money on credit and credited them at interest. The leasing of land plots also developed. And an enterprising Babylonian woman Babunu in 567 BC. e. (2,500 years before Gogol's genius novel) she built her "business" on the purchase of dead and fugitive slaves.
In Babylon, even robbery was considered a profession. Anyone could get a diploma of "master of criminal cases". One of the clay tablets depicted a contract that was rather common for Babylon. A certain citizen took upon himself the obligation to teach another person the profession of a bandit and a pimp in 2 years and 5 months. For this he received income from "work". In case of failure, the student could collect a penalty from the teacher through the court.
Babylon reached its greatest prosperity during the reign of the famous king Nebuchadnezzar II. It was under him that Assyria - the main enemy of the country - was finally thrown back to its native lands and fell into complete decline. Nebuchadnezzar conquered Phenicia, Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Judah and successfully resisted Egypt. He launched large-scale construction work that was supposed to turn Babylon into a luxurious world capital.
In the northern part of the city, on the left bank of the river, there was a large royal palace with hanging gardens, and on the other side - the main temple of the capital, reaching the height of a modern 8-storey building. At the base, the temple was a rectangle with sides 650 and 450 m. There was a sanctuary with a statue of Marduk made of pure gold weighing about 20 tons, as well as a bed and a golden table. This could only include the special chosen one of the celestial. Herodotus was told, "as if God himself visits this temple and rests on the bed." Not far from the temple stood the famous stepped 7-storey tower of Babel - Etemenanki, which means "the house where heaven meets earth."
It is not known exactly when the construction of this temple began, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi. Perhaps the project of this gigantic structure was borrowed from Sumerian sources, where it is said about the existence of seven-tiered temples, called in Sumerian "e-pa" and considered to be the repositories of the sacred "me" - the mysterious and powerful divine forces that control the course of the development of the world. The tower was destroyed several times by the Assyrian invaders, and each time the next ruler of Babylon again resurrected it from the ruins. During 75 years of his reign, Nabopolasar did not manage to complete the restoration work. His work was continued by his son. Another 40 years later, the tower appeared before the Babylonians in all its beauty.
On one of the relatively recently found tuppums there is an image of a seven-tiered temple, near which is written: "Etemenanki, ziggurat of Babylon." On the right is the image of the king and the inscription in Akkadian: “I am Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, I gathered all the countries to complete the Etemenanka and Urmeiminanka, each and every ruler, raised to a prominent place in front of all the peoples of the world. I filled the foundation for the high terrace, I created its buildings of bitumen and baked bricks, erected its top to Heaven, made the temple shine like the Sun. In order to build the tower, it took about 85 million bricks. After this last and largest reconstruction, its foundations have reached a width of 90 m at the same height of the structure.
The death of Babylon and the famous tower is one of the most famous historical mysteries. The biblical tradition, set forth in the 2nd chapter of "Noach" of the Book of Genesis, says that after the Flood, humanity was represented by one people speaking the same language. From the east, people came to the land of Shinar (in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates), where they wanted to build a city (Babylon) and a tower up to the sky in order to "make a name for themselves." But the construction of the tower was interrupted by God, who mixed the languages of people, because of which they ceased to understand each other, could not continue construction and were scattered throughout the earth.
The melted remains of Etemenanka have survived to this day and can serve as a clear confirmation of the veracity of the biblical texts about the terrible fury of fire that destroyed the tower. From the heat of the incredible temperature, the upper part of the tower literally evaporated, and the remaining, smaller part melted into a homogeneous glassy mass both from the inside and from the outside.
Scientists have been trying for a long time to unravel the mystery of this phenomenon. Various reasons were named - a huge lightning strike, an explosion of a large meteorite and even a nuclear explosion. However, the "earthly" version of the death of a huge structure looks more plausible. It's all about the extreme flammability of Babylonian buildings. The main building material was clay - which is weathered and washed away by rains. Chopped reeds and straw were used to reinforce it. The resulting adobe bricks are best fired in ovens, but there was little fuel in Mesopotamia.
Fired bricks were very expensive. Each brick was stamped with a tsarist mark. Therefore, the thick walls of the buildings were made of adobe bricks, shifted with reed ropes and filled with earthen resin. Then they were faced with fired bricks on both sides. Well, for the outbreak of a fire, in addition to the "avenging right hand", there could be many reasons, including another storming of the city. Etemenanki was very richly decorated, and not only with gold - with precious fabrics, wooden products. However, even without them, the fire could well have raged for those 7 days that experts assign to it: the burning of reeds and bitumen created a gigantic temperature sufficient to melt clay.
The tragic end of the Babylonian kingdom is described in the Bible as retribution for sins and arrogance before the Lord. The destruction of the city was so terrible that the compilers of the biblical texts had difficulty in choosing epithets. Babylon, which was “a golden cup in the hand of the Lord,” suddenly, in one Day of Judgment, “became a terror among the nations”, “the kingdom of Antichrist”, “a desolate desert”, “a heap of ruins”, “a house of desolation” and “a dwelling of jackals”
After the death of Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BC. e. in Babylonia came the "time of troubles." Within five years, three kings were replaced on the throne, the last of whom, Nabonidus, betrayed the ancient cult of Marduk and highlighted the god of the moon. The Bible says that his eldest son and co-ruler Belshazzar sacrilegiously used sacred vessels for food and drink, which were taken out of the Jerusalem temple. In the midst of the fun, the words inscribed by a mysterious hand appeared on the wall: “mene, mene, tekel, uparsin”. The Jewish prophet Daniel interpreted the inscription, in translation from the Aramaic it meant: “numbered, numbered, weighed, divided,” and predicted Belshazzar would soon doom for him and his kingdom. That same night, Belshazzar was killed, and Babylon came under the rule of the Persians. Probably,the biblical story is based on real events on the night of October 12, 539 BC. e., when Babylon was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus the Great.
331 BC e. - Babylon was conquered by Alexander the Great, and 19 years later it was captured by one of his generals, Diadochus Seleucus, who resettled most of the Babylonians to the city of Seleucia he founded nearby. By the beginning of the new era, only ruins remained on the site of Babylon.
Still relatively not so long ago, in the second half of the XX century, Babylon was the most important monument of state importance and attempts to harm it were punished up to the death penalty. Now vandalism has become the norm in Iraq. This is the conclusion reached by UNESCO experts who visited the "Babylonian pandemonium" of our days during the hostilities in Iraq. American troops and their allies traveled around Babylon in bulldozers, tanks and heavy trucks, conniving at the "black diggers" who plundered most of the wealth of the ancient city. Even more damage was done by ordinary vandals from the local population. They diligently destroyed the legacy of Babylonian culture, often explaining this as a religious impulse. For example, nine wall inscriptions on the Gate of the goddess Ishtar were completely knocked down …
Y. Podolsky