Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  But how smart were the Babylonians? Did they rewrite the laws of gravity? On the northern limits of the city is a mound where Nebuchadnezzar erected his summer palace. Few remains are visible today. After years of excavations beginning in 1899, the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey uncovered here a citadel, built on stone arches. Stone was rare in Babylon, which relied mostly on mud bricks. Koldewey plowed through ancient sources until he found a mention of an unusual construction. “Ta da!” he declared. He had discovered the Hanging Gardens.

  The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are like the Lost City of Atlantis: Everything we know about them comes from people who never saw them. Accounts suggest the gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar II to comfort his homesick wife Amyitis, who came from Medes, in modern-day Iran. Medes was mountainous and green, as compared with the baked flatland of Babylon. This story is certainly romantic, but no evidence exists to support it. In fact, no contemporaneous descriptions of the gardens have been found. Herodotus, who arrived a century and a half later, didn’t mention them, which suggests they were gone by the time he got there.

  The first discussion of hanging gardens comes from the Greek geographer Strabo, who in the first century B.C.E. (five hundred years after Nebuchadnezzar II) described gardens consisting of “vaulted terraces raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars. These pillars are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted.” One reached the highest story by stairs, Strabo said, along which ran something akin to water elevators, “which are continually employed in raising water from the Euphrates to the garden.” The entire construction was said to be four hundred feet square and eighty feet high, more than twice the footprint of the ziggurat but around the same height. But even the gardens described do not hang in the sense of being suspended from anything; the name comes from an inexact translation of the Greek kremastos, which means not “hanging” but “overhanging,” as in dripping over a balcony or terrace, like ivy cascading from a window box.

  Despite the lack of evidence, the gardens were famous enough to be included in the original list of seven wonders (literally “must-sees”) of the ancient world, compiled by the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon around 140 B.C.E. The list included, in chronological order: (1) the pyramids of Giza; (2) the walls of Babylon; (3) the hanging gardens of Babylon; (4) the statue of Zeus at Olympus; (5) the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey; (6) the mausoleum of Governor Mausolus in Bodrum, Turkey; and (7) the colossus of Rhodes. By most accounts, one of the more famous items considered to be one of the original seven wonders, the lighthouse at Alexandria, seems to have been added centuries later in lieu of the walls of Babylon.

  So why has something mythical endured as the most famous legacy of Babylon?

  “I think the Hanging Gardens are like a mirror,” Dr. Russell said. We were strolling up the central processional on our way to Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace. The sun was beating on the sidewalk. Babylon was empty, except for us. “Look at the Hanging Gardens and you see yourself. It’s pretty clear that nobody who wrote about them had ever seen them, and the descriptions that survive would have been technically impossible at the time.”

  “If that’s so, then why was it so mythologized, and why were people so eager to believe the myth?”

  “Gardens were not mere playgrounds in the Ancient Near East,” he said. “They were important political statements. We have Assyrian accounts that describe how after the kings campaigned across the region, they came back home and built a garden that was evocative of the land they had just conquered. You built a model in your capital of the place you’d annexed. Gardens were not designed to please your wife; they were to remind the people of the extent of your realm and to bring examples of the flora and fauna from all over the realm into one place. They’re a kind of zoological and botanical microcosm of the empire.”

  “Does the Garden of Eden evoke the same idea?”

  “Absolutely. It’s a kind of center of the world, isn’t it? With one giant river, which divides into four rivers, which then flow around the world. Plus all sorts of different animals and trees. It’s very much like a Mesopotamian royal garden. Only in its case, the ruler is God.”

  “What’s interesting about Babylon,” I said, “is that while the sun and the moon gods have long since disappeared, the gardens are the one idea that has endured.”

  “People love gardens,” Dr. Russell said. “They can suggest power, they can suggest beauty. But above all they’re a way for humans to mold something into the image they choose. They’re not like the stars, which we can’t control. Gardens are humans exercising control over nature. They are our Creation. They are a way for us to play God.”

  We entered Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace. Reconstructed walls of caramel-colored bricks climbed forty feet high, topped with hundreds of small pyramidal merlons. The walls were interrupted with elongated arches, more than two stories tall, that allowed vistas from room to room in the multichambered complex. The concrete floor was empty in each room, and there was no roof. Altogether the feeling was like standing in a half-completed mock-up of Buckingham Palace—only there was no grandeur, just quiet strength.

  But this palace was no longer alone. Standing at the entrance to Nebuchadnezzar II’s headquarters, one looks over a lawn of ruins, stumps of foundations and hints of walls that have not been reconstructed. Above this yard, on the highest hill in Babylon, is a totally new palace, two stories tall, built of red and white marble in receding tiers in a direct echo of a ziggurat. This palace had belonged to Saddam Hussein.

  Saddam’s interest in Babylon had largely to do with bolstering Iraqi pride during the country’s decade-long quagmire with Iran, and burnishing his claim to be leader of a pan-Arab resurgence. He touted Nebuchadnezzar II’s destruction of Jerusalem as a herald of the Arabs’ impending defeat of Israel. “Nebuchadnezzar was the one who brought the bound Jewish slaves from Palestine,” he said. “That is why, whenever I remember Nebuchadnezzar, I like to remind the Arabs—Iraqis in particular—of their historical responsibilities. It is a burden that should not stop them from action but rather spur them into action because of their history.”

  Saddam’s efforts had curious effects. On the one hand, by turning the ruins into his backyard, he guaranteed that Babylon was one of Iraq’s few ancient sites to receive money for preservation and was not open to widespread looting during his tenure. On the other hand, his lording over the complex sent a number of apocalyptic Christians into a frenzy of doomsday prognostication.

  Some Christians believe the reconstruction of Babylon is a crucial step that will precede the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. This idea is hinted at in Revelation, the sometimes cryptic final book of the New Testament, which forecasts the end of time. In Revelation, Babylon is described as the “mother of whores and of earth’s abominations,” the Antichrist, whom God will soon destroy.

  Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!

  It has become a dwelling place of demons.

  For all the nations have drunk

  of the wine of the wrath of her fornication

  and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,

  and the merchants of the earth have grown rich

  from the power of her luxury.

  These references to Babylon in the New Testament, not the citations in the Hebrew Prophets, are the source of the contemporary usage of Babylon as a place of sin and debauchery.

  As long as Babylon lay in ruins, however, which was most of the last two thousand years, the apocalypse could not happen. When word of Saddam’s rebuilding spread, a wave of pamphlets and books flooded the evangelical community in the United States, suggesting that the end of time was one step closer. “Here was another thrilling proof that Bible prophecies are infallible,” writes Charles Dyer in The Rise of Babylon: Is Iraq at the Center of the Final Drama? And what do those prophecies show? “Babylon is destined for devastation,” Dyer explains, “but Jerusalem is destined for de
liverance.” Babylon is the great prostitute; Jerusalem is the bride, the wife of the Lamb. “When God’s final curtain falls on the world stage, only one of these cities will remain, and she will remain forever.”

  Once again, the Middle East had produced a rich religious snare: Saddam rebuilt Babylon as a way to prophesy the fall of Israel, while his rebuilding was seen by some lovers of Israel as a way to prophesy the fall of Babylon. Babylon had become like the Temple Mount, another battleground in the struggle over God.

  So may I ask you a question?” I said to Dr. Russell. “Why did you come here?”

  We were standing before a reconstructed cement proscenium stage in a long, narrow room of Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace. On the wall was an arch with three perimeter pipings of brick that gave the niche a quiet regality. The king would sit here to receive visitors, Dr. Russell said, and the wall behind him would have been decorated with lions marching toward him from either side. Dr. Russell asked me to snap his picture on the platform, a reminder of how privileged we both felt to be here.

  “Because I was willing to come,” he said.

  “What has been the best part of your job?”

  “Repairing the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Undoing twenty-four years of deferred maintenance and neglect under Saddam, plus some rather nasty looting at the end of the war. Putting a roof over Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh. Arranging for Iraqi scholars to travel to the United States. What I hope I’ll be leaving is a community that got back on its feet, when Iraqi scholarship, the Iraqi museum, and Iraqi archaeology rejoined the world.”

  “And what’s the worst thing you discovered, archaeologically?”

  “The real disaster has been the looting,” he said. “I flew in a helicopter recently over a few of the country’s ten thousand sites. Major sites that would have taken centuries to excavate, every one of which would have rewritten our history books countless times over, are just gone. Ruined. The damage in only a few months is incalculable. We’ve gotten a few of the sites under protection, but most are still being stripped as we speak. It’s the single worst disaster to our Mesopotamian heritage that’s ever happened. Substantial parts of our past in Sumer and Babylon have been destroyed, and we’ll never know what we lost.”

  “Is it possible that some remains exist because the looters don’t have the sophistication to dig deep enough?”

  “Oh, they’re really sophisticated. They’re organized into gangs, and they go very deep. They’re digging through houses, temples, palaces, city walls, neighborhoods, cemeteries.”

  “So even if those objects show up in private collections in Tokyo, London, or Chicago, they will still be worthless?”

  “There are only two values to an artifact,” Dr. Russell said. “One is its commodity value, which appeals to certain selfish collectors. The other is as part of our human past, which collectors don’t care about but most people do. Objects mean nothing unless you find them in context. They’re just pretty pieces of stone. The only thing that gives an object value is if you find it in the grave of the person it was buried with, or in the palace where it was used. It doesn’t matter how many pieces are out, the only ones that count are the ones that are still in the ground.”

  “So give me an example of a question we’re not going to know the answer to, because this stuff is gone,” I said.

  “The great thing about archaeology,” he said, “is that every excavation raises questions you didn’t even think to ask. Every excavation that I’ve ever been involved with causes fundamental changes in what we think. Now, we’ll never know what we’re missing.”

  “So how do you feel about this?”

  He raised his voice. “It’s awful! I mean, what kind of people are we that we can neglect our past and that part of ourselves that is so fundamental for us as civilized beings? I worry because we call this the Cradle of Civilization. If we destroy this, what does that make us?”

  “One of the most famous lines in the Bible,” I said, “is ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept—’ ”

  He cut me off. “You can’t fly over completely ruined sites, hundreds of square miles of our past that’s been destroyed, and not weep.”

  A shadow crossed his face. I looked up at the sun. We had reached the end of our day. And somehow it seemed fitting that we would end on this note. Most of the writing about exile in the Bible ends with hope. God will redeem the Israelites. He will send them back to the land. He will restore them to Eden.

  Yet the most famous passage about Babylon ends on a darker note. Psalm 137, the one that begins “By the rivers of Babylon,” goes on to describe how the Babylonians mock the Israelites. “Sing us one of those songs of Zion,” they cry. The Israelites lash out at their tormentors. The psalm ends with these bloodcurdling words:

  Fair Babylon, you predator,

  a blessing on him who repays you in kind

  what you have inflicted on us;

  a blessing on him who seizes your babies

  and dashes them against the rocks!

  The Israelites, so exasperated by the cruelty they perceive in the Babylonians, want to repay their captors with cruelty of their own.

  Why did a psalm with such an ignominious final outburst become so popular in Judaism and Christianity? Perhaps because it represents a fundamental truth. In moments of testing, humans will act like humans, complete with pettiness, vengeance, and bile. The Bible does not whitewash this struggle. And in presenting this blunt portrait, the text poses a challenge for each of us: When faced with unimaginable trials, will we weep for what we have lost or rise up and build something new? When faced with evil in others, will we treat our tormentors with violence or compassion?

  One surprising theme of the prophets is that humans don’t get off easy. The prophets don’t preach that God is omnipotent and humans mere pawns. Everything on earth does not reflect divine will. God may be able to control foreign leaders, as he does upon summoning Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem, but he can’t control his own people. For that he has given humans a will of their own. The relationship between heaven and earth is one in which humans constantly disappoint God and God prods them to accept his wisdom. “Now are you ready to accept me?”

  In that way, John Russell was right. At the bottom of Babylon I did find a question, and it was not one I expected. It was a voice, deep in the past, wondering: Will you remember Babylon? Will you remember that you once were hopeless here? Will you recall that in that moment of helplessness you finally reached the point where you came face-to-face with your own inhumanity and realized that the only way to ensure your survival was to call out to God?

  What’s startling about Psalm 137 is God’s response. When the Israelites beg for permission to destroy their enemy, God does not reply. With his silence, he answers. They must decide for themselves.

  The surprising lesson of the Exile is that God does not abandon us in moments of despair, nor does he save us. He gives us the freedom to choose for ourselves. As history suggests, in moments of chaos, some people will flee God, some will try to smash babies against rocks, some will loot the treasuries of our past. But others will find new ways to reach out to the divine, will cradle the youths of their enemies; will hold out their arms to stop the destruction. Some will find hope among the ruins.

  Psalm 137 endures precisely because it captures this essential truth of Western faith. In the relationship between humans and God, humans actually have enormous power. We are the ones who control our own behavior. Only we can save ourselves from exile. By the rivers of Babylon, we should not weep for Zion. We should not seek vengeance on our enemies.

  We should redeem ourselves.

  . 4 .

  CITY OF PEACE

  I knew my heart had warmed to Iraq when we motored back into Baghdad, and without thinking, I exclaimed, “It’s nice to be home.” After the pirate-infested roads of the south, Baghdad felt almost safe, even indulgent. The hot-and-cold running water in the Flowers Land Hotel felt like a luxu
ry after so many icy showers. The generator that kept me awake at night seemed like a godsend after terrifying nights spent shivering in darkness once the daily allotment of electricity had expired. The fried rice with canned chow-mein sauce tasted like peach pie in August after only chicken and bread. I attended a party where more than one hundred foreign correspondents traded war stories and lascivious glances, and I even ran into several people I know, including a reporter for The New York Times who had written an announcement about my wedding. We embraced.

  I never would have believed it, but Baghdad in wartime felt like the center of the world, a status the storied “City of Peace” had not enjoyed for almost eight hundred years.

  As I set out to explore the Iraq National Museum, the lone synagogue, and an underground effort by a U.S. soldier to kindle interfaith relations in the capital, I wondered if Iraq would yield to the demons of religion—civil war, sectarian violence, and terror—or rise to the higher angels of faith—tolerance, compassion, and peace. Once again, what happened in Mesopotamia would define the future of the Middle East.

  Baghdad was still tense. Large portions of the city were no-go zones for foreigners. The streets were littered with roadblocks, as well as the remains of vehicles, buildings, or trees that had been singed by suicide bombs. Hikmat, our fixer, showed up at the hotel one day to announce that the previous evening a car appeared in front of his neighbor’s house, the driver asked the neighbor whether he was so-and-so, who once worked at the Interior Ministry, then the driver assassinated the man with two gunshots to the head. The neighbor’s young children were watching from the window.

  But I was equally startled to realize how much of the city continued to function. The streets neither teem like those of Cairo nor gleam like those of Kuwait City, but they do stretch in stately fashion from the banks of the Tigris, which wends it way through upscale shopping neighborhoods and a leafy embassy quarter like the Thames through London. Baghdad is hardly flush with parks; precast cement is more common. But shops were open; air conditioners and satellite dishes bloomed from every corner; and money changers sat every ten feet trading the old Saddam-faced currency for new tender honoring the country’s history, including Hammurabi.