Sunday 02 August 2015

Babylon at the British Museum - review

Clay tablets and cuneiform prove surprisingly fascinating at the BM's 'Babylon', finds Richard Dorment.

A good exhibition title strikes a balance between descriptive accuracy and audience appeal, but draws the line at outright deception. A few years ago the British Museum announced the opening of a show called The Queen of Sheba, a sure-fire come-on for what turned out to be a display of pot shards. Though that show could hardly have been drearier, I've always had a sneaking admiration for the curator who came up with the title. "Recent Archaeological Discoveries in the Yemen" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

You will learn a lot from the British Museum's Babylon: Myth and Reality, but don't go expecting to encounter anything like the splendours of The First Emperor or Hadrian - unless, that is, you happen to be a huge fan of clay tablets and cylinder seals covered in cuneiform writing. But stick around. Curators at the BM seem to have a knack for explaining why objects that to you and me have zero visual interest are in reality so compelling they've devoted their entire lives to studying them.

The focus is on the long reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562BC) and his successors, ending in 539BC when the Persian king Cyrus invaded the city and brought the Babylonian empire to an end. In those 66 or so years, a lot happened. Not only did Nebuchadnezzar (probably) create the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and (definitely) build the Tower of Babel but he also invaded the rebellious state of Judea twice, the second time changing the course of history by destroying the temple and enslaving the Jewish people.

The show opens promisingly with three massive reliefs of glazed brick that ornamented the walls of the processional route leading to the Gate of Ishtar. At the New Year festival the king, courtiers and priests passed through this gate to the sanctuary of the chief Babylonian god, Marduk. Made of baked clay glazed in brilliant turquoise blue and vivid green, the stylised dragon, bull and lion on view at the BM give us some idea of the wealth of Babylonian civilisation.

And also, let's face it, a touch of barbarity. Sorry to bring this up, but these monumental reliefs owe a great deal to those from Nimrud showing the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal hunting lions carved 300 years earlier, in 865-860BC. In terms of draughtsmanship, linear refinement and compositional subtlety, the earlier stone carvings are infinitely more sophisticated than the Babylonian brick reliefs. I know this is unfair - it's a little like comparing Roman art to Greek - but the question of what the Babylonians achieved (in art, architecture and science) that was original recurs later in the show.

From here on, the exhibition requires a certain amount of concentration and a lot of imagination. A fragment of a clay tablet; a cylinder seal in lapis lazuli; a translation of a cuneiform text into Greek: through mere scraps of evidence like these, scholars are able to reconstruct a vanished civilisation.

There is no archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of the famous hanging gardens Nebuchadnezzar made for a favourite wife who was supposedly homesick for the mountains of her native Persia. But an Assyrian stone carving dated 645-635BC proves that a century earlier aqueducts and canals were in use that made the construction of such a garden possible. A clay tablet from the 7th century lists plants in the garden of one of Nebuchadnezzar's predecessors and even suggests what might have been planted in it (garlic, onions, and leak).

Unlike the Hanging Gardens, though, the Tower of Babel certainly did exist, though it was called the Etemenanki ziggurat, and it was destroyed not by God as punishment for the hubris of the builders but by local people in search of free bricks to use as building materials. Dedicated to Marduk, the real tower was formed by stacking seven square structures of diminishing size one above the other with a small temple on top.

Thanks to a mathematical exercise in which a Babylonian teacher set his pupil the task of calculating the dimensions of each of the seven stages of the ziggurat, scholars can now accurately reconstruct a model of the tower. Of course, the Dutch and Flemish artists who were fascinated by the Tower of Babel in the 16th century couldn't know this, and so invariably showed it as circular.

From the PR point of view, Nebuchadnezzar made one of the biggest mistakes in history when in 587BC he captured Jerusalem, destroyed its temple and deported King Jehoiachin and a large number of his subjects to Babylon. For this act he was vilified by the Old Testament prophets, who painted a picture of Babylon as a seat of decadence, tyranny and cruelty. The prophets were writing invective, not history, falsely claiming, for example, that God struck down Nebuchadnezzar by driving him mad.

Still, what is truly remarkable is not that some of the Old Testament is fiction but that so much of it is true. In fact, it wasn't Nebuchadnezzar but his successor Nabonidas who became unhinged, or at least was considered so by his own people. In neglecting to sacrifice to the gods and in deserting his own country to live in what is today Saudi Arabia, Nabonidas weakened the empire, so that his son Belshazzar was unable to resist the depredations of the Persian king Cyrus. When Cyrus allowed the Jews to go home, many of them chose to stay, which accounts for the large Jewish population that existed in Iraq until relatively recently.

Towards the end of the show we learn that the Babylonians developed the pseudo-sciences of astrology and the horoscope, and that their one lasting gift to mankind was the division of time into units of 60 seconds, hours and minutes. But, unlike the Jews or the Greeks, they left no literature and are remembered for no one idea, such as democracy. From what I could see, their art and architecture was derivative, but had the curators not padded the last galleries with irrelevant trivia and instead used them to show more works of art, perhaps they'd have proved me wrong. We all know the word "Babylon" has become synonymous with decadence. Wouldn't it be enough to reproduce the cover for the notorious book Hollywood Babylon or the clip from DW Griffiths's Intolerance in the catalogue? Do we gain anything by seeing them on the gallery walls?

Apart from that, the curators IL Finkel and MJ Seymour tell a complex story with clarity and enthusiasm.

Until March 15

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