Another Time, Another Place

by Jodi Taylor

  Yes, this was definitely Babylon. Deafening. Mind-blowing. Eye-watering. Nostril-searing. And, never forget, we were in the year 565BC and the city had been here over two thousand years already, exuding strength and prosperity. And yet, its decline was only a few years away.

  Sands tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. I turned. Over everything, dominating the city, loomed the great mass of Etemenanki. The Tower of Babel. It was colossal. A huge, solid ziggurat, seven terraces high, with crenellated battlements. There were no curves. It was all angles and vertical lines and zigzags, soaring upwards to the heavens. I tilted my head back to see all the way to the top. This structure must be over three hundred feet high, and towered over everything. Nothing in the city came even close to it for size and mass.

  I’d always wanted to see the Tower of Babel. Sadly, no trace of it remains in modern times, thanks to Alexander the Great. And no, he didn’t raze it to the ground in a drunken orgy of destruction like Persepolis – he came across the remains of it on his travels. Rather impressed at the size of the pile of mud bricks, he issued instructions it was to be rebuilt in all its former glory. His men cleared the site, sweeping away all traces of the old tower, but that didn’t matter because it was going to be rebuilt, wasn’t it? And then the silly bugger died and it never was. Rebuilt, I mean. Which reminded me to put ‘locate Alexander’s tomb’ on my bucket list for Dr Bairstow. I mean, Treadwell.

  The tragedy was that in trying to rebuild, Alexander had destroyed the original building. Today there is absolutely nothing left, not even the foundations. What a bugger. Without his intervention, there was a chance part of it might actually remain today.

  And it truly was a stairway to heaven – cleverly sited so that to anyone standing in front of it and looking up, all the staircases seemed to be standing one above the other. From a distance it looked like one long ladder all the way to the top. I had to struggle very hard not to hum the tune under my breath.

  I couldn’t wait to get to it. The tower dominated everything in the same way the pyramids dominate their own surroundings. Except the pyramids had been built for a king and this had been built for a god. A man-made mountain with a monument to the great god Marduk at the summit.

  I was not so mind-blown, however, as to forget my two newbies. I watched their faces carefully. They weren’t open-mouthed but it would be fair to say they were impressed by their surroundings.

  ‘Everything is so green,’ said Glass, looking around, and he was right. The broader streets were lined with avenues of palm trees, planted for dates and shade, I assumed. Ornate pots and planters were stuffed with lilies and other flowering plants I didn’t recognise. Even among the poorer houses, many external stairways and flat roofs also held giant pots from which brilliantly coloured flowers cascaded down.

  ‘The Hanging Gardens,’ said Glass, suddenly.

  ‘A good thought, but no,’ I said, quite sorry to stamp on his enthusiasm. ‘We discovered them at Nineveh a few years ago. Shall we go and find the others?’

  The Ishtar Gate was easy to locate. We simply followed the widest street – the Processional Way – and walked north against the flood of traffic entering the city.

  There were ten gates altogether in the walls of Babylon and the Ishtar Gate was the eighth. Built in 578BC by ­Nebuchadnezzar – as his commemorative plaque proudly proclaimed – it was the grand entrance to the city. And if that didn’t knock your socks off, the southern and northern fortresses were nearby and the king’s palace just over there, as well.

  Before I joined St Mary’s – in the days when I just wandered around from one archaeological dig to the next and European travel was a lot easier than it is today – I’d visited the replica of the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I was quite keen to compare the original with my memories. I wanted to see what sort of a job the museum had made of the reconstruction.

  The city walls reared above us, built of those beautiful blue glazed tiles, decorated with reliefs of dragons, lions and aurochs – don’t get me started on aurochses again – representing the gods Marduk and Adad and the goddess Ishtar. The gates were opened wide, lying flat against the wall, fortunately shaded by the walls themselves, which enabled us to record them more easily because even in the shade, they dazzled the eye.

  The massive gates had been constructed of cedarwood – that most rare and valuable of woods. This was Nebuchadnezzar making yet another very public declaration of his wealth and power. There really wasn’t much to choose between him and Ramses II for modest understatement, was there? Although Ramses only called himself the Great. Nebuchadnezzar called himself King of the Universe. And Darius of Persia styled himself King of Kings. You have to hand it to rulers in this part of the world – they never knowingly undersold themselves.

  ‘Look,’ said Clerk in great excitement, his nose about three inches from a low relief of the god Marduk in his incarnation as a dragon. ‘Look how carefully they’ve laid the bricks. Can you see how none of the joins run through the eyes? Every eye is complete. That is so amazing. Imagine trying to work that out without a computer.’

  We pulled him away before the guards closed in.

  For the first few days, everything went well and we soon dropped into our usual routines. Evans reported the survey of the city was proceeding without problems and that the new Security people were functioning. ‘They’re not bad lads, Max, and Glass in particular tries really hard. I’m keeping an eye on them, but everything’s fine. You historians can carry on wafting pointlessly about the place like you usually do.’

  We’d been quite surprised by the extent of the settlements outside the city. Not only were there whole towns out there, but each gate had at least one garrison. Evans asked permission to spend some time studying the fortifications, cleverly choosing a moment when Hyssop and I were standing together so he was able to speak to us both at the same time, blurring the lines of whom he should be requesting permission from. It dawned on me that he was managing me the same way I was trying to manage Treadwell, which was quite amusing. Hyssop and I both nodded our permission at the same time. Evans was obviously considerably more adept at conciliation than me. Perhaps I should get him to deal with Treadwell.

  Clerk and Prentiss had finished with the Ishtar Gate and were working their way around the major temples in the city – Nabu, Ishtar, Enlil, Adad – before fetching up at the big one, Esagila. Sands and I were continuing our love affair with the Tower of Babel.

  Yes, everything was absolutely fine.

  There had been a buzz of excitement running through the city for the last two days. We were aware something was in the offing. Additional flags and pennants had been erected and snapped over our heads in the desert breeze. Wreaths of flowers were being offered for sale everywhere. Small ones for personal use, larger ones for attaching to house doors, and spectacular, truly sumptuous arrangements for offering to the gods, I assumed. We woke up one morning and the traditional street racket was absent. The day of the festival had arrived.

  We at St Mary’s are no strangers to festivals. Empty bladders and full water bottles are the standing instructions. Sands and Evans knocked us up a rudimentary sunshade, knotting together three or four shawls and tying them to a couple of old wooden poles we’d found. All right – stolen. We’d put them back behind the goat shed when we’d finished with them. Evans snapped the poles in half over his knee and tied a knot in each corner of the shawls. Voilà. Sunshade for three or four people.

  We now had an important choice to make. Did we stand in the dusty street with its better view or did we look for a position near the canal with its cooler breezes wafting our way? Sadly, wafting breezes tend to waft mosquitoes as well. Great clouds of them. Every morning we would leave the pod encased in a gloopy mixture of sun cream, insect repellent and our own sweat, and despite all our best efforts, the determined little buggers feasted on our flesh like tiny Nazgûl. We were all of us
red and lumpy.

  I remembered, some time ago, we’d had to make an emergency jump to Egypt to retrieve a weapon someone had lost there and poor old Markham had been nearly eaten alive by the local insects. He’d been in such a bad way at the end that Peterson and I had had to throw him into the Nile. For his own good, of course. I wished Markham would come back to St Mary’s.

  Anyway, after that small digression into the eating habits of mosquitoes, you won’t be surprised to hear we chose the street.

  This was not the big New Year’s festival, held in March to celebrate the beginning of the agricultural year. This was something smaller and more intimate. Or as small and intimate as Babylon could get, anyway, and it certainly didn’t stop the streets being lined with people who had come from all over to see the ceremony and have a bit of a knees-up and some free nosh.

  Above us, the white sky was slowly turning a dirty browny-yellow again as the wind brought in even more sand from the desert.

  Apart from the temples, nothing was open today. Everything had been folded up and put away. There were none of the familiar smells of street cooking. Not that we needed them. There would be sacrifices and food for all later in the day.

  Groups of musicians were appearing everywhere. People danced along behind them and the streets echoed to the accompaniment of drums, cymbals, twanging harp-like instruments and horns. Those lining the streets laughed, clapped and threw flowers or small cakes. Each group was playing a different tune, of course, and it wasn’t as if the music of Babylon was particularly harmonious to begin with. I suspected most of it was banging on about gods defeating their enemies and the things the king would do to subjugated peoples he considered not quite subjugated enough. The tune was probably secondary to the message.

  Clouds of smoke arose from the temple courtyards, especially that of Esagila where a long line of priests were offering up sacrifices. I wondered if we looked poor enough for a nice fat haunch of goat. Don’t scoff. Done properly, goat is very tasty.

  The street procession was long. Spectacular, but definitely long. There were ranks of soldiers, interspersed with priests and musicians. Then more soldiers. Then more priests and musicians. Then more soldiers. This was a procession that concentrated on length rather than excitement. St Mary’s had our recorders going and we grew hotter, dustier and thirstier with every minute. My ankles ached. My throat ached. My eyes ached. But finally it was over and the last soldier disappeared around the corner. Let the festivities begin.

  Along with everyone else in the city, we began to make our way towards the entrance to Esagila, which had been built by the great god Marduk himself. According to legend he had fought and killed the monster Tiamat, thus bringing order to the cosmos. I had a brief vision of our own modern politicians, wearing nothing but loincloths and clutching spears, sallying forth to defeat chaos and bring order to the cosmos. Or the other way around, of course. Anyway, in celebration, they built Esagila, the Temple of Marduk, just next door to Etemenanki. This cluster of buildings was the most important temple complex in town. The axis of the world. The straight line that connected earth and heaven. So definitely a place where histor­ians should tread lightly, then.

  Behind me, Clerk and Prentiss, who understood the words free time about as well as any other historian, were discussing the possibility of there actually being a statue of Marduk and his wife in the inner sanctum. And if so, would they be brought out for the world to have a sight of them? It could be the most accurate representation of Marduk that we would ever see. And then the food turned up and we had other things to think about.

  They’d slaughtered innumerable goats and sheep in a sacred area behind the temple, probably while everyone’s attention was on the parade. Half a dozen priests, stripped to the waist and smeared with blood and worse, butchered carcasses at lightning speed. One minute the priest was dressing a whole goat carcass – the next minute he was tossing four hooves into a bucket and moving on to the next.

  Plumes of smoke rose into the air, carrying the aroma of roasting meat with them. I felt my stomach rumble and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

  I don’t know where the bakers’ ovens were but pile after pile of flatbreads were being laid out. To be used as plates, I assumed, watching the lines of people shuffle patiently to the makeshift tables. The priests’ managing-large-numbers-of-people skills were first-rate. There were no bottlenecks, no impatient people, no trouble at all. Everyone was good-humoured and enjoying their holy day.

  Gorgeously dressed priests handed everyone a flatbread, more priests slapped slices of still steaming meat on top, another priest blessed both portion and recipient impartially and then we were gently eased aside by those behind us to find somewhere shady to sit. I ate with one hand, recorded with the other and was generally content with the way things were going.

  Night fell eventually. I was shattered – I think we all were – but the best bit was yet to come. We watched the procession of flickering torches inch their way up the sides of Etemenanki as the priests climbed slowly to the summit. The people of Babylon stood silently, watching. We could hear the priests’ solemn chanting rolling out over the city, punctuated by the occasional drum roll and clash of cymbals. It was all here. The black sky. The blaze of stars above us was mirrored by the torchlight below. My arms throbbed with trying to record it all. We had tons of material already but, as Sands said, Treadwell would reckon this was the money shot. Only when the horizon lightened in the east, and one by one the torches were being extinguished, did we pack up and make our weary way back to the pods.

  The festival marked a natural halfway point in the jump and we all took a rest day afterwards. We’d been here about eleven days now and it was time to review our material and identify any gaps or areas where we felt more information was required while we were still on site and could do something about it. We had masses of raw data – figures, statistics, images, holos, notes, sketches – all safely tucked away in boxes in the pods for us to pull together on our return to make a coherent narrative of life in ancient Babylon.

  Evans and his team, starting from Esagila and working outwards, had managed to map nearly half the city, and substantial areas outside the gates as well. They uploaded daily and we sat in the evenings, watching digital Babylon unfold before our eyes. To this, we could then add specific details from various sites we’d visited. Theoretically, at the end of the assignment, we’d have most of Babylon at our fingertips. However, we still had to move to the second part of the assignment – the poorer quarter. I was particularly keen to do some work here because the flashy bits of Babylon were all very well but the less affluent areas often have a lot to offer. Sands and I were to put in some time investigating the artisans’ quarters – potters, metalworkers, masons and so forth – how they lived and worked, what they ate, how they worshipped, the role of women, family groups and so on – before finally moving on to the markets and waterways.

  Clerk and Prentiss wanted to spend one last day at Esagila observing the aftermath of the procession and ceremony, before moving off to investigate the giant brickmaking compounds. The final part of their assignment would be to observe the famous blue-glazed brick tiles being made.

  Everything was going well. Everyone was being meticulously polite to everyone else and concentrating on the job in hand.

  The newbies were performing adequately. Evans had been right about Glass. Yes, he was a little slow, but he was conscientious and gave every indication of enjoying himself, frequently staring around in an open-mouthed disbelief that was rather endearing. Even Harper wasn’t doing too badly.

  Scarfe, on the other hand, complained incessantly about the heat, the flies, the smells and, incredibly, boredom. Clerk reported he and Prentiss pretty much ignored him most of the time. His contributions were negligible.

  Both Hyssop and I had been unable to find anything to fight over, although being quarter of a mile apart and in separate
pods might have had something to do with that. There was no doubt though, there wasn’t the same atmosphere on this jump as I was used to. There was less joking. The two crews stayed apart and within the crews themselves, people stayed in separate groups as well. We were an assignment of two halves. Historians on one side and the new Security people on the other. Evans and Keller sat uneasily between the two.

  We weren’t doing badly, though. The city was robust in its behaviour, especially at night, but none of us had been involved in incidents of any kind. No one had taken a blind bit of notice of us as we pottered about, recording, documenting and working our way through our allotted tasks. None of us had gone down with anything horrible. Apart from too enthusiastically scratching our mozzie bites and making a bit of a mess of them, we were all absolutely fine. Everything was absolutely fine.

  Until it wasn’t and nothing was ever the same again.

  It happened the very next day. Clerk and Prentiss were finally finished at Esagila. They’d covered the public areas of the temple, identified the chief priests and their functions and now just had a few loose ends to tidy up. We were all preparing for the second half of our assignment. In just over a week we’d be back at St Mary’s with, I have to say, some pretty spectacular stuff. Dr Bairstow – sorry, I was going to say Dr Bairstow would be pleased. Treadwell, I suspected, would be mildly content and then complain about the cost. But it had been an incident-free assignment. Babylon was peaceful – probably due in no small part to the frequent patrols of well-armed soldiers on the streets.

  Initially I knew nothing of it. Because that idiot Hyssop thought she could fix it herself. The first I was aware something had happened was when Hyssop herself turned up in front of me as I was packing up my gear in preparation for returning to the pod for a quick splash of cold water on my face and a drink before setting out again.