ARCHITECT OF THE LAST GLORY

While the glory of Nineveh is inextricably tied to the name of Ashurbanipal (it must also be clear from the previous entry that the whole glorious history of ancient Mesopotamia owes him a large debt of gratitude, on account of his library), the glory of the city of Babylon proper goes hand-in-hand with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II. This last great king of Mesopotamia, before Babylon fell, first to the Persians, and then, to Alexander and the Greeks, owes his fame to two sets of circumstances. His fateful role in the history of the Jews has one curious dimension, which I am particularly eager to discuss in this entry. On the other hand, his role in the history of Babylon and Mesopotamia proper, is a gem in its own right, and, considering the fact that this is also the final entry in my Mesopotamian series, it is the latter aspect of his significance that I have focused on in its title.

Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled from 605 to 562 BC), considered the ablest Babylonian ruler since Hammurapi, inherited the neo-Babylonian Empire from his Chaldaean father Nabopalassar (meaning “son of nobody,” or, as we call them today, “a self-made man”), who had rebelled against Assyria in 626 BC, conquered and destroyed Nineveh, and founded the aforesaid Empire. An able warrior since an early age, Nebuchadnezzar, while still a young prince, defeated the army of Egypt, and secured the control of Syria for his father. Crowned as king, on his father’s death, he felt secure enough at home to continue his relentless campaigns abroad, culminating in the historical conquest of Judah, several sieges of Jerusalem (it took some twenty years to reduce the city to dust,--- not for his inability to do it sooner, but due to his initial reluctance to go beyond exacting tribute from Judah, which was not coming, as Judah defected from him again and again, tying her fortunes to a succession of losers), the destruction of the First Temple, and the deportation of the Jews into captivity. Meanwhile, the fate of Jerusalem, in the wake of his outrage, was to become for more than a century what Isaiah had promised as the land of briers and thorns.

Despite his terrible role in Jewish history, Nebuchadnezzar is viewed by the Jewish tradition in a generally favorable light. He was the protector of the Prophet Jeremiah, much kinder to him than the Jewish kings of Judah were to their own, and he also became a friend to the Prophet Daniel, seeking his advice and acting upon it. Jeremiah was quite tolerant of him, seeing him not as a bloody aggressor and tyrant, but as God’s own instrument, whom it was a sin to disobey. A similar attitude is expressed by the Prophet Ezekiel. In the Book of Daniel, and in Bel and the Dragon, Nebuchadnezzar comes out as a champion of Truth, welcoming God’s vindication. (In a way, one may draw a parallel here between the attitude of the Bible’s Jews toward Nebuchadnezzar, and a similarly favorable attitude of the Hasidic Jews, not long ago invited to a Holocaust Conference in Teheran, to their host President Ahmadinejad. Even more ironic in this “Iranian” respect, it was the Persian King Cyrus who would end the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews and would allow them to return home after his own conquest of Babylonia, just a few years after Nebuchadnezzar’s death. Incidentally, how does a certain Evangelical pastor from Texas, named John Hagee, fit into this picture?...)

This astonishingly positive attitude toward one of their worst oppressors in history, on the part of the Jews, is already enough to mark Nebuchadnezzar as one of the most interesting personalities in world history. But as I have suggested, there is another aspect of his story, which I am now eager to point to.

Inasmuch as Ashurbanipal was the great benefactor of Nineveh, Nebuchadnezzar was the great rebuilder of Babylon, giving it all the splendor of the world’s foremost capital. The rebuilding effort, lasting throughout Nebuchadnezzar’s long reign, was so extensive that it is practically impossible for modern archaeologists to find any traces of structures at its site predating his time. Herodotus’ florid descriptions of Babylon are, of course, all a testimony to Nebuchadnezzar’s architectural genius.

His Babylon was by far the largest city in the world, surrounded by a 60-mile-long wall, which was often counted as an “alternate member” among the seven wonders of the ancient world. The wall itself was 300 feet high, 80 feet thick, going down 35 feet below the ground, so that the enemy could not tunnel his way under it. The city had fifty-three temples and 180 altars to Ishtar. The Great Temple of Marduk (Bel) was known as one of the world’s greatest sanctuaries ever. Its golden image of Bel plus a massive golden table weighed a good 50,000 pounds. In the prophetic words of Isaiah, Babylon was truly a city of gold.

Associated with the Temple was a ziggurat, popularly known as the Tower of Babel, with seven stages, the base one hundred yards on each side, all reaching a height of 300 feet. Although Nebuchadnezzar’s famed hanging gardens (allegedly built to please his Median Queen Amuhia, but commonly associated with the name of the mythical Assyrian Queen Semiramis) did not survive the fuga temporum, they are universally counted as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, second after the Egyptian Pyramids.

Nebuchadnezzar’s Palace in Babylon was yet another magnificent structure, whose vast ruins were dug up by the archaeologists a hundred years ago. Unlike the beautiful Nineveh, completely destroyed in 612 BC, the city of Babylon was spared by the Persian King Cyrus, and long remained one of the greatest cities of the world as the capital of Persia’s richest satrapy. Alexander the Great had ambitious plans for Babylon’s major restoration, but, cut short by his death, they remained unfulfilled, and the city eventually declined in the next few centuries. As the new capital Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate was ordered to be built, since 762 AD, the builders, with complete disregard for the Babylonian history, used Babylon’s hallowed bricks to build Baghdad and repair the canals, reducing Nebuchadnezzar’s last glory to a desolate heap of mounds, as if in fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy of Isaiah 13:17-22 and Jeremiah 51:37-43.

So much for modern Iraqis and their Arab ancestors, claiming ownership of the Babylonian glory. The fact that the memory of Babylon survives in the history of human civilization owes no thanks to those who used its ancient structures for bricks, and back in 762 AD discarded Babylon’s antiquity in favor of a brand-new construction called Baghdad. As for the historical legacy of Nebuchadnezzar himself, aside from his unique place in the Bible, his monument as the architect of the fairytale city of Babylon is aere perennius, built not so much out of brick and gold, as out of the hylos of the historical memory of the human race.