by Bruce Feiler
O you who dwell in the shelter of the Most High
And abide in the protection of Shaddai—
I say of the Lord, my refuge and stronghold,
My God in whom I trust,
that he will save you from the fowler’s trap,
from the destructive plague.
He will cover you with his pinions;
you will find refuge under his wings;
His fidelity is an encircling shield.
You need not fear the terror by night,
or the arrow that flies by day,
the plague that stalks in the darkness,
or the scourge that ravages at noon.
A thousand may fall at your left side,
ten thousand at your right,
but it shall not reach you.
The psalm ends with the following passage:
Because he is devoted to me I will deliver him;
I will keep him safe, for he knows my name.
When he calls on me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in distress;
I will rescue him and make him honored;
I will let him live to a ripe old age,
and show him my salvation.
“There are at least three dozen books of the Bible,” I said, “and 150 psalms. Why did you choose this one?”
“I believe God leads through his word,” he said. “When you are in stressful situations, he will lead you to specific parts of his word that will have meaning and will give you encouragement to make it through. In this instance, I couldn’t have asked for anything better. When we heard that first night lightning, lightning, lightning, and Scud missiles were flying at us from all directions, we had the comfort of knowing that, as it says here, the plague will not overcome us, God will cover us in wings, the terror of the night will not destroy us.
“And I’m not sure if this will make any sense to you, but as we were praying together that night, we received a promise that we would have no loss of life in our battalion. I believe the Lord gave us that promise on March 9, 2003.” He paused and looked out over the landscape. His eyes were dark, impenetrable. The only sound was the crinkly paper of our Bibles flapping in the wind.
Then he looked back at me. “Tomorrow we will leave the country after nearly a year, the only battalion in our brigade with no loss of life.”
. 3 .
BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON
Are you scared?” Linda asked.
I was standing in front of the Al-Janoub hotel in Nasiriyah, a drab concrete building with balconies that look like airport security barriers glued to the side of a jail. Every evening, forced to confine ourselves to Soviet-style hotels as Hikmat and Bijar gathered roasted chicken, white beans in tomato sauce, and flat bread for dinner, I tried to use my Thuraya satellite telephone to reach home. Priced at an exorbitant rate, minutes were precious; but service was even rarer: satellite telephones, chunky devices like early cell phones, work only when the thick antenna is pointed, unobstructed, toward the heavens. That meant the only way I could assure my family I was safe was to do the most dangerous thing imaginable: stand alone in the middle of the street.
“I’m wearing my body armor,” I said. “It’s unbelievably heavy. I pulled my back out. And it’s impossible to take a nap in the car, the armor is so boxy. But no, I wouldn’t say scared is the feeling. The feeling is one of concentration: Do I go down that street? Do I walk through that crowd? Do I trust that man?”
“You sound better.”
“It’s odd, but in some ways it was much more stressful worrying about coming here than actually being here, once you get over the sound of gunfire all the time.”
“I wish you didn’t tell me that. And your e-mail about the guy from the water department getting shot. Oooh. I didn’t like that very much.”
“Yeah, maybe that was too much information. I was just trying to be honest.”
“What about all the suicide bombings?”
“Twenty people were killed this morning at a police station. But the strangest thing about life here is how differently you process the information. Unless the attack is immediately in front of us, or where we might be in a few days, it’s amazing how quickly the mind tunes it out. The survival instinct is a powerful thing.”
“Where are you going next?”
“Babylon.”
“ ‘By the rivers of Babylon . . .’ Wow. I can’t believe you’ll actually be there.”
“I miss you, baby. See you soon.”
“I’m proud of you. I can’t wait.”
By far the most dangerous thing we did on any given day was drive. One doesn’t quite realize how fragile law and order is until one tries to get from one place to another in a vigilante nation. We got up early for the 150-mile drive north to Babylon so we could beat the traffic, which clogs all arteries through the country by early afternoon. Also, highway pirates sleep late, we were told, which meant morning commutes were supposed to be less stressful.
Setting out along the banks of the Euphrates, we encountered the familiar mix of jalopy tractors, random military caravans, and brightly colored semi trucks with matinee-style portraits of Shia saints taped to their windshields and silhouettes of women painted on their mud flaps. About an hour north of town, the traffic slowed, and we were directed to the side of the road by an American soldier on the roof of a Humvee wielding a machine gun. As we waited, a five-mile-long convoy of oil trucks inched by. The civilian drivers were some of the fiercest-looking men we’d seen, with bodies like wrestlers’ and faces like prison guards’. Some wore ski masks, others goggles. Most slung Kalashnikov rifles over their shoulders. “They look scared,” Hikmat said.
Half an hour later we were allowed to resume, but our progress continued to be stalled because we were trapped behind the convoy on a single-lane road. On several occasions, Bijar attempted to maneuver onto the shoulder to pass, but the soldiers protecting the convoy’s rear aimed their guns at us. We eased back into formation. Finally we arrived at a double-lane highway and were allowed to drive along the right of the convoy. At one point Bijar, attempting to pass a civilian car, dipped briefly in between two trucks. Without warning, the truck from behind accelerated rapidly and smashed into our rear bumper, swerving us out of control and threatening to pin us between the tankers. The trunk began to crinkle. The tanker backed off, then reared forward like an angry elephant about to hit us again. At the last second Bijar jerked back into the adjacent lane. We would be late to Babylon.
Around 11:00 A.M. we arrived on the outskirts of what looked like a Disney-style theme park. Picnic tables lined the shores of manicured canals with hyper-blue water, like the artificial waterways in It’s a Small World. A giant concrete statue of Hammurabi, his arms crossed like those of a stern elementary-school teacher, lorded over the park. Nearby was a stone billboard with the face of Saddam Hussein. It was pockmarked with bullet fire, a bad case of revenge acne.
Saddam rebuilt parts of Babylon and erected a palace on its highest hill in order to claim that he was the inheritor of the ancient empire. He then opened the park to the public as a sort of Six Flags over Hammurabi. The park had been turned into a coalition base at the start of the war and was now guarded by Polish troops. We approached the two-lane road leading up to the entrance. A sign read, in English and Arabic: “Military vehicles to the right; civilian vehicles to the left.” We started down the wrong lane but caught ourselves. Seconds later, as we approached the actual entrance, a taxi made the same mistake and drove down the wrong lane. The guards shouted at the car, but it didn’t stop, and the soldiers opened fire, blowing out the taxi’s tires and splintering the windshield. Smoke spiraled from the engine. An Iraqi driver leapt from the car with his arms in the air. I had never been so close to bullets fired in anger.
We were met by Major Dezso Kiss of Hungary, a rotund figure with spectacles and a trim beard. He drove us through a buzz of satellite trucks, mess tents, and troops from twenty countries. Noting that the
Tower of Babel was erected nearby, Major Kiss said soldiers here communicate in one language, English. “The Tower has finally been built,” he said.
We neared a blocky, deep blue gate, like the Arc de Triomphe painted the color of blueberry pie. This was Saddam’s version of the famed Ishtar Gate. Huddled at the bottom was a gaggle of military personnel, a few private security guards with bulging body armor and M16s, and one man who was running his nose along the stones, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him. He was dressed in rumpled khakis, a starched white shirt, a blue blazer, and Reebok tennis shoes. He wore thick calico glasses and was carrying a briefcase and a Burberry trench coat. He looked like a character from an Agatha Christie novel who’d pitched up suddenly on the wrong movie set.
I leapt from the car and ran to greet him. “Dr. Russell,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you.”
Sumer may have been the first grand civilization of Mesopotamia, but Babylon was the first great empire—the younger sibling that pushed aside its elder, like Jacob purloining the birthright from Esau. While Sumer was at its peak in the late second millennium B.C.E., wandering tribes from Arabia began to move north into the heart of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Initially they maintained their pastoral ways and settled on the outskirts of Sumerian cities, but over time they began to infiltrate urban areas and set up a rival political force. In 1781 the German scholar August Ludwig Scholzer coined the term Semitic to describe the languages spoken by these tribes. Later, Semite came to refer to the people. Both terms derive from the name of Noah’s son Shem, who was said to be the ancestor of the Assyrians, Aramaeans, Israelites, and Arabs. Semites, in other words, are the ancestors of today’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
The first triumph of the Semites was to set up the kingdom of Babylon, just south of modern-day Baghdad, about halfway between the mountains of the north and the lowlands of the south. The name comes from the Akkadian word Bab-ilu, meaning “the gate of the god”; it appears in the Bible as Babel and was later Hellenized into Babylon. Babylon was by far the most famous city of the Ancient Near East, more influential than Ur, Damascus, or Jerusalem, the last of which was a mere hilltop afterthought when Babylon first seized the world stage around 1800 B.C.E.
The initial golden age of Babylon arose with Hammurabi, a fearsome leader who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C.E. Some cuneiform tablets link Hammurabi with King Amraphel of Shinar, who appears in Genesis 14, a contemporary of Abraham. Sumer had been mostly a haphazard conglomeration of city-states, many with their own calendars, which never coalesced into a force strong enough to assert control over their neighbors. Hammurabi, by contrast, was one of the great administrators of ancient history, who centralized economic control and used the resulting bevy of resources to expand his authority across the region.
Hammurabi’s greatest legacy was the promulgating of an intricate set of 281 laws governing everything from what happens to someone who steals another’s slave (put to death) to what happens when someone takes over another’s farm but is too lazy to till the fields (return the farm to the owner). Some penalties seem particularly expressive of Mesopotamia: If one man brings an accusation against another, the accused must jump into the river. If he sinks, the accuser gets possession of his house; if he floats, the accuser gets put to death and the accused gets the house.
The Code of Hammurabi was reproduced many times, but the only surviving example was inscribed on an eight-foot-tall slab of black diorite, whose permanently recorded laws gave birth to the expression written in stone. The number 13 was left off the enumerated list, considered unlucky even then. Contrary to reputation, the Code was not the first legal code in history; other examples predate it. Its legacy comes from its sometimes surprising humanity and advanced sense of social justice. Women had fewer rights than men, for example, but the protections afforded them were still revolutionary. A woman could lend money, buy or lease property, and initiate legal proceedings. And unless unfaithfulness could be proved against her, she could not be summarily divorced.
Hammurabi’s preamble contains one of the earliest and most forward-looking declarations of human rights. Marduk, the ruling god of Babylon, calls Hammurabi “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.” The roots of Western humanity show their earliest glimmers in the writings of Mesopotamia.
Viewed from these riverbanks, two of the most lasting innovations of the Bible—the 613 laws of Moses and the moral paeans of the prophets—appear less as unprecedented creations and more as evolutions of ideas emerging in the region over thousands of years. That these notions reach their fullest expression in biblical writings that date from the Exile, when the Israelites return to Mesopotamia, makes the influence of the earlier ideas even harder to ignore. The Bible, too, is a child of Iraq. Its true innovation was to take beliefs first carved in stone and, as Jeremiah says, inscribe them on human hearts.
John Malcolm Russell is an unlikely activist. With his big nose and bookish nervousness, he bears a striking resemblance to Woody Allen. He stammers. But the fifty-year-old Assyriologist from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston moved to Iraq after the war to serve as chief archaeologist. At great personal peril, he helicoptered into looting zones, wrangled with complacent security forces, hunted down organized thieves, and attempted to wrest control over the most aggressive threat to ancient history in a generation. “I’ve never been just an archaeologist,” said the Missouri native. “I’ve always been a bit of an activist. There are a lot of archaeologists who want to make a difference. The difference is: I get to do it.”
Saddam’s Ishtar Gate is actually two-thirds the size of the original. The replica has two forty-five-foot towers with an arched entrance and is covered with hundreds of glazed reliefs of dragons and bulls, which march in alternating rows like beasts on their way to slaughter. Built in honor of the goddess of love, the original gate was one of eight entrances to the city erected by Nebuchadnezzar II. After Hammurabi, Babylon underwent several centuries of decline; it returned to prominence around 1100 B.C.E. under Nebuchadnezzar I but was quickly eclipsed by the Assyrians, who established a vast regional empire in the mountains north of Baghdad. After sacking the kingdom of Israel, the Assyrians turned to Babylon, razing the city in 689 B.C.E. and tossing the remains of its temples, walls, and palaces into the water. The Babylonians fought back sixty years later, under King Nabopolassar, but it was his son, Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled for forty-three years beginning in 605 B.C.E., executed the destruction of Jerusalem, and elevated Babylon to the most prominent city in the world.
“Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt the Ishtar Gate three times,” Dr. Russell explained, “probably within a fairly short period. Each time, instead of tearing it down, he just covered the old one with earth, then built another on top. Would you like to see the real gate?”
We walked through the archway onto the broad central avenue of the city known to the Babylonians as “May the enemy not cross it.” This mile-long processional, once lined with shops, was the Champs-Elysées of Mesopotamia. To our left was the rebuilt royal palace, with tan brick walls soaring forty feet high, topped with crenellations. To the right stood a temple to the goddess of the dead, one of an estimated twelve hundred religious sites within the city walls. Behind us, outside the city walls, were the remains of a ziggurat.
As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia, I was taught that my hometown was the first planned city in North America, with a meticulous grid of streets and parks stretching away from the river. Savannah, historians believe, modeled itself after the planned city of Peking (now Beijing), dating from the fifteenth century C.E. Babylon was a planned city twenty centuries before that. One of the biggest cities in the ancient world, Babylon was roughly square, bisected by the Euphrates and surrounded by an eleven-mile wall wide enough on top for two four-horse
carriages to pass each other without touching. Its mix of straight streets stretching from the river bears striking similarities to Peking and Savannah. Even Herodotus, who visited in the fifth century B.C.E., was struck by the order: “The houses are mostly three and four stories high; the streets all run in straight lines, not only those parallel to the river, but also the cross streets which lead down to the waterside.”
“Why is it that civilization began south of here, in Sumer,” I asked Dr. Russell, “but Babylon became much more powerful?”
“Agriculture actually began in northern Mesopotamia,” he said. “The north was an extraordinarily lush and wealthy area. Because of all the snow and rain, you could farm anywhere. So it was a good place to develop settled societies. But you can’t irrigate the rivers in the north. The riverbeds were too low, and it was impossible for ancient societies to raise the water high enough to reach the fields.
“In the south, the riverbanks are not as high,” he continued, “the rivers flood naturally, and it’s much easier to build irrigation canals because the landscape is flatter. The reason civilization began in the south is that it takes a significant population to maintain those canals, carry the water long distances, and allocate the water to different farms. That process stimulated the people to get organized.”
“So societies in the south were more complex.”
“Exactly. But as the irrigation systems became more sophisticated, they could carry water longer distances. Once you can do that, it makes more sense to tap the rivers farther upstream, so you can maintain the canals at a higher level and reach more fields. But you also have to be able to control lots of territory and have the cooperation of a lot of people. Babylon represents the next evolution in the development of intricate urban societies.”
“So what was the practical difference between Sumer and Babylon?”
“Sumer I think of as city-states,” he said. “Babylon as a nation-state. Sumer was where civilization began, but Babylon was how it spread into the world.”