Babylon

I drove down from Baghdad on a morning when the Mesopotamian plain was doing what it does best: being vast and flat and ancient in a way that makes you feel like a very recent footnote. The road south runs through date palm groves and agricultural land that has been irrigated for five thousand years, and every so often you pass a mound — a tell — rising gently from the flatness, which could contain anything, literally anything, from six millennia of accumulated human activity compressed into earth. Iraq is full of these mounds. Most have never been properly excavated. Most never will be.

The ruins of Babylon sit about ninety kilometers south of Baghdad, and approaching them is a disorienting experience because of what Saddam Hussein did here in the 1980s. Wanting to associate himself with Nebuchadnezzar II — the king who built the original city to its greatest glory — he ordered large sections of the ancient site reconstructed. New bricks, stamped with his own name alongside the ancient king’s, were laid over or near original foundations. The result is one of the most complicated archaeological encounters I have ever had: you are walking through layers of history that include a genuine ancient wonder, a twentieth-century dictator’s ego, and everything that has happened since.

The Lion of Babylon is the thing that gets you. This black basalt statue — a lion standing over a prostrate human figure — has been here for twenty-six centuries, through the Persian conquest, the Greek conquest, the Arab conquest, the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, the Ba’ath Party, the American invasion, and everything since. It has survived all of it through the sheer dumb luck of being stone and having been buried for long enough. You put your hand on its flank and the basalt is warm from the sun and smooth from all the other hands that have done exactly this, and you feel the weight of everything that connects you to the person who carved it, somewhere around 600 BCE, who was also just a person trying to make something that would last.

The processional way — the Aibur-shabu, the road along which Babylonian kings would march during the New Year festival — still runs through the site, and even in its reconstructed form there is something genuinely moving about walking it. The glazed brick panels with their blue and gold reliefs of dragons and bulls are reproductions of the originals now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and there is a particular irony in standing in Babylon looking at copies of what was taken, while in Berlin people look at the originals without quite understanding what was left behind.

What I did not expect was the quiet. There were almost no other visitors the day I went — a school group from Hilla, the nearby city, and two journalists with cameras, and otherwise just me and the site guard who walked with me at a distance of about twenty meters, curious but not intrusive. The silence out there on the Mesopotamian plain, with the wind moving through the sparse vegetation growing between the reconstructed walls, had a quality of accumulation — as though the centuries of noise had compressed into something you could almost hear if you stood very still.

When to go: November through March is ideal for visiting Babylon. The winter sun is warm enough to be pleasant but not punishing, and the flat plain does not trap heat the way it does in summer. Morning visits are best — the light is extraordinary and the crowds, such as they are, tend to arrive after noon.