From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Incredible as it may seem, as much ignorance long prevailed among the learned of Europe respecting the site of the city of Babylon as about that of the tower which was generally supposed to be located either within its walls or in its immediate neighborhood. Writing about the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar at the beginning of the last century, a learned English scholar declared, “Well indeed may the glory of this renowned place be said to have departed when even its site cannot with precision be ascertained and when the antiquary and the traveler are alike bewildered amid the perplexity of their researches.”[504] The same author expresses the same opinion in different words when he writes of Babylon, called Babel by the Arabs, that “its vast remains lay for ages in the depths of time as much forgotten by the learned of Europe as if it had been a city of the antediluvians.”[505] Even the Turkish geographer, Djihannuma, was so in the dark about the location of the ruins of Babylon that he placed them at Teluja, nearly eighty miles northwest of their actual site.

How great was the ignorance of Europeans during the Middle Ages regarding the capital of the ancient world may be gathered from a statement of Sir John Mandeville, who tells his readers that “Babylone is in the grete desertes of Arabye, upon the waye as men gon toward the kyndome of Caldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man durste neyhe to the toure, for it is alle deserte and full of dragons and grete serpentes and fulle deverse veneymouse bestes alle abouten.”

Even in the second part of the last century the distinguished Orientalist, Oppert, head of the French expedition to Mesopotamia in the years 1851 to 1854,[506] was entirely in error as to the site of Babylon. Influenced, no doubt, by the accounts of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and other classical writers regarding the vast extent of Babylon, he made it to embrace both Babil and Birs-Nimrud, which are full fifteen miles apart from each other, and to include an area that the researches of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have demonstrated to be preposterously large.[507]

But, in order fully to realize how greatly the size of Babylon was exaggerated by the ancient writers and to understand how this capital of thousands of years was able, throughout the ages, to cast so great a spell upon the peoples of the earth, one must briefly consider some of their statements respecting its vastness and magnificence. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the glamour that has so long attached to it and to discover the reasons for the countless legends and romances to which it has given rise since the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Semiramis.

Of the ancient writers who have given us the most minute descriptions of Babylon, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus are the most deserving of notice. As Herodotus spent some time in the city and was an eye-witness of what he describes he is, notwithstanding the charges of credulity and exaggeration which have frequently been made against him in certain of his statements, more trustworthy than are those authors who wrote only from hearsay.

What most impressed the writers of antiquity who have given us the most graphic descriptions of the Babylonian capital was its stupendous walls and the vast area which the city embraced. According to Herodotus, who is followed by Pliny, who evidently accepted the measurements of the Greek historian, the wall which girdled this wonderful metropolis was seventy-five feet in thickness and three hundred feet in height.

On the top, along the edges of this wall were constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to drive round. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts.[508]

Such a prodigious wall seems impossible, but when we remember the Great Wall of China, which has nearly thirty times the length of that which Herodotus says surrounded Babylon, we cannot insist that the historian’s account is inherently improbable. But when we know that the Babylonian wall was composed almost exclusively of sun-dried bricks we feel compelled to doubt the writer’s measurements for the simple reason that it was quite impossible for the material used to support a structure of so great a height. It is true that Nebuchadnezzar, in a notable inscription, describes his wall as “mountains high,” but this is a bit of hyperbole in which the self-glorifying monarch was wont frequently to indulge. His statement is quite as much of an exaggeration as that of Diodorus Siculus,[509] who declares that Semiramis, to whom he attributes this colossal work, employed two million men in building the wall of Babylon and that she built it at the rate of a furlong a day and had it completed in the space of a single year.

The circumference of the immense wall of Babylon, according to Herodotus, measured no less than four hundred and eighty statia—somewhat more than fifty-three miles. Ctesias, however, makes the circuit of the city but a trifle more than forty miles. In either case the area enclosed by the wall was enormous and far greater than that included within the extended walls of Paris or within those of Nanking, which is the largest city site in China.

The city of Babylon [writes Herodotus] is an exact square, but certain recent investigators maintain that it was in the form of a rectangle twelve miles wide and fifteen miles long. But whatever the form of the city, the estimates given of its area by ancient authors have appeared to many modern scholars so staggering that they have contended that it was an inclosed district rather than a regular city, the streets which are said to have led from gate to gate across the area being no more than roads through cultivated land over which buildings were distributed in groups and patches.[510]