From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

And, by their aspects, signifying works

Of dim futurity to man revealed.

No, it was not those shepherds “in boundless solitude” who “made report of stars,” but the Babylonian priests who, from the summits of their zikurrats, or temple-towers, laid the foundations, broad and deep, of the sublime science of astronomy centuries before Hipparchus and Ptolemy began those admirable investigations which have rendered them immortal.

All the ruins of Babylon which we had hitherto inspected had greatly impressed us, but we did not yet have a concrete idea of the greatness and splendor of the capital of the Babylonian Kings until we visited that part which the Arabs still call the Kasr, or castle. It was the great palace which was begun by Nabopolassar and completed by his illustrious son, Nebuchadnezzar. By the Roman historians it was called the Arx, by the Greeks the Acropolis. It served not only as a citadel but also as the favored residence of the king and as the approach to the great temple of Merodach, already referred to, which was the most famous sanctuary in Babylonia.

Not until we saw the wonderful ruins of the Kasr, which have in great measure been excavated, were we able to appreciate the enormous amount of work which Dr. Koldewey and his associates have here accomplished and the splendid contributions which they have made to the science of Assyriology and to our knowledge respecting the greatest capital of the ancient world.

The massiveness of the walls of the citadel—some of them more than fifty feet in thickness—and the vastness of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with its countless chambers were amazing. But even more noteworthy were the remnants of the Sacred Way, which were once adorned with scores of life-size figures of lions made of brilliantly enameled bricks, and the great Ishtar Gate which spanned Babylon’s Via Sacra, where it entered the older city. The hundreds of bulls and dragons, in brick relief, which cover the walls, and the delicate modeling of the figures prove conclusively that the glyptic art of the Neo-Babylonian period must have attained a very high degree of perfection.

Before the discovery of these wonderful works of art, Koldewey was disposed to be quite skeptical about the traditional splendor of Babylon, but, when he unearthed the marvels of the Sacred Way and the Ishtar Gate, which is “the largest and most striking ruin of Babylon,” he was compelled to admit that the fabled splendor of the city was not without foundation.

Adjoining Ishtar Gate are what are supposed to be the remains of the famous Hanging Gardens which antiquity classed among the Seven Wonders of the World. But a view of the semicircular arches which are said to have supported these gardens makes it difficult to understand why they were called hanging—pensiles hortus—as described by Quintus Curtius[526] and other ancient writers. So far as one can judge by an inspection of the ruins now visible, this wonder of antiquity was nothing more than an elevated garden court and far less of a miraculum, as the Roman historian calls it, than is an ordinary roof garden on one of our modern “sky-scrapers.”

In the same palace, of which the Hanging Gardens formed so conspicuous an ornament, is shown the large throne room of the Babylonian Kings. Speaking of this Dr. Koldewey does not hesitate to say that “it is so clearly marked out for this purpose that no reasonable doubt can be felt as to its having been used as their—the Kings’—principal audience chamber.” And he furthermore adds: “If anyone should desire to localize the scene of Belshazzar’s eventful banquet, he can surely place it with complete accuracy in this immense room.”[527]

Among the other objects of interest among the marvelous complexus of ruins are a huge lion of basalt, the remains of Persian and Parthian buildings and the débris of a Greek theater which, one may believe, was founded by Alexander the Great for the benefit of his countrymen who, in this remote capital of the East, would have been quite loath to forego those intellectual amusements to which they had been so devoted in the land of their birth.