by F S Naiden
Coming to a cedar and copper gate, they passed an embankment and then not one wall, as they expected, but two walls twelve feet apart. For an overly long time they marched alongside a stretch of uncultivated ground. Every walled settlement had room for gardens, pastures, and muster grounds, but this space was bigger than small Greek cities. For the first time, they were walking on asphalt. Then they passed block after square block of unpainted mud-brick buildings, unrelieved by the sight of an alley, a courtyard, or even a window. Every house shared walls with its neighbors. And every house—every wall—was crumbling. The mud bricks eventually fell apart because of impurities in the sand used to make them. Or did the sun burn everything to bits? It bore down on the marchers, block after block.
Once the army reached downtown, crowds of people appeared on the rooftops and threw bunches of green twigs. Then the army wheeled onto a broad street of white limestone bordered by red and white crushed breccia—a sacred way. High along the buildings on either side, a band of enameled blue brick flowed past the mounted Macedonians at the head of the column. Sixty bas-relief white lions with yellow manes leapt from the blue brick. So did sixty yellow lions with red hair.52
After some more blocks, all crowded with admirers, a pair of towers built of more blue enameled bricks dwarfed the parading soldiers. They noticed a few slits for archers, for these towers dated to a time when the outer walls did not exist and the city extended no farther than this spot. Near the top of the towers, 150 bulls and snakes glared down from the blue enamel. Another gate, and the troops glimpsed the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, a towering building with a rooftop garden watered by water screws. Mazdai’s men were still on duty at the doors. In another direction, a citadel loomed beyond a pavement of limestone and black basalt. Guarding the citadel gate were basalt lions, one shown treading on a prostrate man.53
They have come to their destination: Esangil, the temple of Marduk. Copper dragons protect the gates, and the high wall around the temple keeps them from seeing most of this four-story building. Yet even here, the edges are crumbling. Soon they stop in a street that has widened to eighty yards, far broader than any in Egypt or Tyre. Alexander dismounts, and the priests, all depilated and in white robes, usher him inside. The troops disperse, fleeing the lethal sunlight.
Entering Esangil, Alexander cannot tell whether it is a temple or not. First comes an outer court or hall, as in Egypt or Greece, but which the Babylonians call the “gateway.” Tradesmen bringing food and drink for the gods crowd the place, a vulgarity the Egyptians would never allow. There is no altar, as there would be in Greece, and so there is nowhere for the tradesmen to deposit their goods. Then the new king comes to the next court, which the translators call the “house.” Where, though, is the temple? To the right, the translators answer. With its forest of pillars and lofty steps, this building looks like a temple, and so Alexander, remembering Egypt and Greece, expects to go inside. There the priests will crown him, or, if he can find some way to improvise, he will crown himself. He did that in Tyre.
No, the translators inform him. Like everyone but the depilated priests, called “insiders,” he will not be allowed to enter. He would desecrate the place, except, of course, on New Year’s Day, when his presence in the temple is obligatory. Asking when New Year’s Day is, Alexander and a few companions learn that it is twice a year, but not at the present time.54
The same day, or soon afterward, the priests crown Alexander according to a ritual script that is no longer preserved but may have resembled the script used for the last native ruler. That would be the man for Alexander to imitate.
First the priests explain that Alexander must once again avoid the sacred precincts. A throne and a footstool of solid gold, 800 talents’ worth, are there, but they are for Marduk. Alexander must follow the shatammu to another place, where the chief priest seats him on a less impressive throne. The assemblymen raise their fists in approbation, and the shatammu crowns him with headgear that looked like a battle standard. A priest of Nabû, Marduk’s scribe, bestows a scepter on him. The gods now proclaim Aleksandari king of the four corners, king of Babylon, and king of the world.55
In words he does not understand, Alexander swears to do something he certainly does understand—guarantee temple privileges. With that, the priests squire him to an altar where he makes his first offerings, a bloodless affair, since a priest has already done the work of killing the animal. Alexander need only prostrate himself while a priest presents meat, bread, and beer to Marduk, courtesy of the god’s servant, the new king. Babylonian sacrifice, Alexander now sees, is less a way of making a gift to a god, or of paying courtesies, than of feeding him. As a grace note, Alexander has to sprinkle cypress dust on the offerings. Mainly he will offer beer. (The priests commonly drink the leftovers, but this time the king will.)56
Out they march into the courtyard of the temple. Beyond them rises the seven-story ziggurat that looms over the city. The summit of the ziggurat is the artificial Olympus of the Babylonians, where gods mingle with astronomers. The king of the world can never go there.57
After the ceremony, Alexander repaired to the water-cooled palace of Nebuchadnezzar to quaff his beer and consider his fate. In Macedon, Greece, and Egypt, he had not received leftovers and priests had not taken him by the hand. They guessed the future through omens, but they did not predict it through observations. In Babylon, even the calendar belonged to the priests, who had just altered it in order to change his accession date. They would not let Alexander himself alter the calendar, as he had done several times. Eventually they would explain why: by making the lunar and solar years correspond, the Babylonians made the calendar perfect.58
This innovation threatened Alexander, other kings, and Greek magistrates. These rulers all governed men partly by controlling time. Now the proto-scientists would control time. Worse, they would control it mathematically. No bribes, no offerings, no pleas. No religion as Alexander knew it. He sent copies of the calendar to Aristotle, and news of it spread throughout the Greek world. Some cities reformed their calendars the next year.59
after the parade halted and the companions dispersed, some toured the city. If they were lucky, they had guides who knew schoolboy texts listing waterways, streets, and as many as forty-three shrines identified by neighborhood. Shrine names ran to the grandiose—the House That Gathers All Decrees, Ishtar’s House of Lapis Lazuli, the Foremost Mound of Cream, the Foremost House in the Universe (not an especially famous place), the House That Bestows the Scepter. Along with these Babylonian shrines, the companions saw unlisted Persian ones. Marduk presided over one shrine, the Persian Ahura Mazda over the next. Ishtar presided over one, and her Persian counterpart Anahita over another. Hebrews worshipped Yahweh. The companions found no Greek shrines, and they did not know which gods to compare to which.
They did not even find the famous hanging gardens. Greek reports of these gardens were wrong, said the guides. The gardens were one more achievement of Sennacherib, who had built the pillar at Anchialus in Syria. The Assyrian king had built the gardens at Nineveh, a city long since destroyed.60
Sun god tablet of Nabu-aplu-iddina, ninth century BC.
Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum, BM 910000+.
To make offerings—and get the beef that went with it—the companions worshipped outdoors in their own way. One of the astronomers recorded a Macedonian offering in a marginal note for the fourteenth of Tishrutu, the month following the battle: “These Ionians [slew] a bull [—] / [some number of] short [ribs?] and [some number of] fatty tissues.” Although some words are missing, since the tablet, too, has crumbled, some Macedonian officer slew a bull and removed some of the “tissues,” in other words, the innards. To the surprise of the Babylonian observer, he did so on the spot. He was going to feed his men, not the god. That oddity struck the writer as noteworthy.61
Rather than offer a religious or cultural welcome to the Macedonians, Babylon treated them as tourists. The city that had taken the meas
ure of Alexander took the measure of his men and furnished them beer and temple prostitutes.
Alexander’s work would differ from the pharaoh’s in Egypt. There he built new shrines and repaired old ones. Here he would need to concentrate on maintenance, especially for Esangil. Recent Persian rulers had not maintained the temple as well as Cyrus had. The ziggurat was in some disrepair, and the astronomers wanted it restored. The shatammu and Mazdai did not succeed in simplifying the finances of this perpetual project. Alexander wanted to know whether he should pay or whether the priests should, but the Babylonians did not answer unanimously.62
If the priests refused to cooperate, Alexander could replace them, but he could not dismiss them in a body. Priests could challenge any act of his by declaring it ominous and asking the astronomers for the last word on the subject. If the astronomers had no word to give, a struggle would ensue between priests who challenged the king and those who supported him. The king could win these battles, but at a cost in time and trouble.63
When Alexander tired of these planning sessions, he took boat trips. He soon discovered that in spite of the canals the Euphrates and the Tigris were not navigable all the way to the Persian Gulf. One day Alexander discovered what he took to be a royal tomb, and summoned translators. Another day he started a food fight between boats, throwing apples. No one fell into the water and died afterward, as Hector had in Egypt.64
In Egypt, Alexander had supposedly owned all the land, and in Macedon he could make gifts of all the land he owned or conquered, but in Babylon he was neither a monopolist nor a benefactor. Instead he was a leading landowner competing with Babylon’s temples and merchant banks. Beyond Babylon, the king must maintain the canals on which agriculture and prosperity depended. He also must collect taxes from the nomads who owned some of Mesopotamia’s livestock. He would not need to swear an oath to respect their rights, but he would need camel-riding police to catch them should they flee his tax collectors.
Mesopotamia had resources all its own, like naphtha, yet was short of currency. Like the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians used silver as a money of account, and they also used silver bullion and Persian coins, but they lacked a coinage of their own. That made it harder for Alexander to collect taxes, pay troops, refurbish temples, and rebuild waterways. The currency shortage also impeded small transactions. To buy beer or hire prostitutes, Macedonian soldiers had to pay with silver bits snapped off ingots like pieces of a chocolate bar. When Babylonians were paid in foreign coins, they treated them like raw silver and assayed them. Alexander and Mazdai had to erect a mint, then compel Babylon’s merchants and bankers to switch from silver to coins.65
These challenges would consume months or years of Alexander’s time, and he preferred to chase Darius. His men expected as much, and so did observers throughout the Persian Empire. Darius aside, Alexander wished to capture Susa, the next important Mesopotamian city. He must bequeath crumbling, opulent Babylon to legates.
As in Egypt and Phoenicia, he divided power. Although he appointed Mazdai governor, he gave him no troops. He assigned several thousand infantry to two companions who would remain in Mesopotamia, and tapped a third man to command a Macedonian garrison that would occupy a big fort on the other side of the river. He assigned the treasury to a fourth man. Mazdai observed, “There was one Darius, but Alexander has made many Alexanders.”66
This compliment did not please the companions who overheard or later got word of it. Mazdai, who was not a companion, had received the best post in the empire outside of Macedon. Would this Persian be another Antipater, brown on the outside and purple on the inside?
To mollify the companions, Alexander distributed massive donatives during offerings in the palace and elsewhere. He kept relatively little for himself. The officers lived like generals, and the generals like kings. The only person to complain was Olympias, who learned of these donatives and reproached the king for living like a general.67
Alexander also offered the companions a new kind of power—central administration. Babylon, he decided, would be capital of the empire, and it would need a cadre that understood the empire as a whole, not men like Mazdai who knew only some part of it. A top financier would need to work in Babylon, which would engross Alexander’s massive revenues. To this post Alexander appointed Harpalus, who had been the army paymaster. Others, including Eumenes, his secretary, and Chares, his chamberlain, would work in Babylon eventually, but for the time being they would accompany Alexander on the march to the east. Alexander needed to see these men daily and could not afford to leave them behind.68
The companions could not object to these arrangements. No place in Macedon could be the capital of an expanding Asian empire, and the companions disliked Egypt. Because Babylon surrendered without a fight, it was better than Tyre or Damascus. Someone had to police Babylon’s traffic in men, whores, and money, and since Harpalus had a limp he could not serve in combat.
Alexander and the army spent thirty-four days in Babylon. They would not experience so long a break from fighting, marching, or cold weather for another seven years.69
the army now moved south along the eastern bank of the Tigris, with Alexander accompanying them by boat. The tribesmen of lower Mesopotamia must have gawked at this column of 50,000 men in tunics and skirts. Where were the long pants and kepis of the Persians, their chariots, covered wagons, and bottled water? And what was the rush? Like Philip, Alexander marched his men double time.
To avoid the marshes on the lowest part of the Tigris, the army turned east and followed freshwater tributaries. Much of the year, this flat country was flooded, but now, in late fall, it was passable, and the wheat and barley grew luxuriant. They entered the province of Elam, Cyrus’s homeland, and passed a large abandoned city capped by a four-story ziggurat. Then they approached Susa.70
Like Babylon, Susa announced itself from afar. The army was now marching on a paved road, and mountains framed the city on its shelf of land. The blue glaze of the temple and palace walls shone like jewelry atop a colossal table. Memnon had built all this—the original Memnon, buried near Troy—and also the drainage and irrigation system that brought water to sacred groves around the city. Cyrus, Alexander knew, had marched down out of the mountains and conquered Susa, and his successors had made it a Persian capital. Although smaller than Babylon, Susa had distinct quarters: the Apadana palace and grounds, a citadel, a residential neighborhood, and date groves in the open ground within the walls. Temples were everywhere, identified by cattle horns attached to the walls.71
The Persian satrap, Attalitta, came out of the Apadana and surrendered. A few of his soldiers may have resisted, angering the Macedonians. What is certain is that when Alexander and his party entered the palace and found the statue of Darius I the Persians brought back from Egypt, they vandalized it. Someone who knew Egyptian zeroed in on the cartouche containing Darius’s Egyptian titles and defaced it.72
They also found some Greek statuary taken from Athens in 480. The most famous of the Greek pieces was a pair of statues to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Athenian youths who attempted to kill the last of Athens’s tyrants. Alexander, with his penchant for political gestures, made sure these statues would be returned to their spot in the Athenian marketplace. The Athenians worshipped these youths as heroes.73
The famous chandelier in the main reception room of the Apadana went undisturbed. Alexander might someday use this room, and until then his satrap might. Alexander also spared the life-size bas-relief images of Darius’s guard throughout the palace. There was much for these guardian spirits to protect—the chandelier and the cotton curtains and hangings tied with linen cords, the silver rings and marble pillars, and the gold and silver couches placed on a mosaic of porphyry, marble, and mother of pearl. Here the resources of the Persian kings merged with the finery of the Mesopotamians.74
The king and his men left the Apadana and passed through the House of Lapis Lazuli, dedicated to Ishtar. Straight ahead they saw the shrine of the “Lord o
f Susa,” Inshushinak, surrounded by a deep moat lined with stone. The water was luminous, the shrine as small and tidy as a Greek temple. Alexander crossed the bridge, opened the temple door, and beheld Inshushinak, who was not much more than life-size. Several nearby statues had been dedicated to Inshushinak, but the king and his party learned to their surprise that these were statues of Babylonian kings. One was a life-size diorite image of King Manishtushu; another was a statue of the most famous Babylonian king, Hammurabi, seated atop a copy of his laws. The statue of Manishtushu had stood in Babylon for about 1,000 years before being removed to Elam around 1158 BC. Hammurabi’s statue had stood in Sippar for 600 years before being removed at the same time. The Elamites had captured the statues and brought them to Susa. They had also defaced them. After scratching out part of the Akkadian inscriptions on these statues, they had written Elamite inscriptions dedicating them to Inshushinak.75
By questioning translators, Alexander and his entourage learned some of the history of these artworks. Long before Cyrus led his Elamites to power, Elam had conquered Babylon. Babylon had also conquered Elam. Each time, the statues of kings were captured and carried away, like slaves. So were statues of gods, even the Babylonian god Marduk and Inshushinak himself. Then they were defaced. Alexander knew that many peoples carried the statues of their own gods from place to place—even the Greeks did. Now he learned that the Elamites and Babylonians pilfered the statues of their enemies’ gods and kings. Inshushinak captured Marduk, and Marduk captured Inshushinak.
This perpetual rivalry compromised Alexander. He was the son of Amon, the ward of Marduk, and the intimate of Inshushinak, roles that should be complementary. Apparently, they were not. Rather than form some international consortium, the chief gods warred upon one another. They acted the way Alexander and his men had acted toward the statue of Darius.76