To Understand Iraq, Take a Visit to the British Museum
Neil MacGregor, in the Guardian (June 14, 2004):
The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed. The result was bleak incomprehension. Ambitious technology defying the natural order was punished as the tower that tried to reach the skies collapsed. Irreligion and promiscuity inevitably conjured the apocalypse.
Unlike Egypt, which in popular imagining continued serene through the centuries, Babylon is seen to have flourished and fallen again and again, the reading of each episode informed and deformed by those that went before. Mythical or historical, they go on and on: the Tower of Babel; the conquests of Nebuchednezzar and the invasion of Babylon by Cyrus and then Alexander; the glorious court of Haroun-Al-Rashid; the devastation of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, where the Tigris ran black with the ink of the manuscripts from the ransacked libraries. Is there any other culture for which the distant past, real or imagined, still wields such power?
If you want to understand day by day the turmoil of Iraq now, you can of course gorge on newspapers and television bulletins. But if you have any energy left, you should go to the British Museum and see a different kind of reportage.
The antiquities of Mesopotamia reveal the constants of Middle Eastern politics. Endlessly fluctuating frontiers and proliferating religions mean endless wars. Here, in the sculptured reliefs, are the cities bombarded, the hostages taken, the aggressive displays of military power, the puppet rulers installed, the brutality of militaristic regimes.
Baghdad fell last year, but Babylon falls every day in the National Gallery. In Rembrandt's Balshazzar's Feast, painted in Amsterdam in the 1630s, a corrupt and doomed ruler is about to be deposed by foreign armies, all apparently in the name of a God that he has disparaged. The writing on the wall announces (for those with eyes to see) that Balshazzar has been found wanting and that his kingdom will be divided among foreign occupiers. In a few hours divine retribution will strike. It is the biblical story as shaped by the Dutch 17th century....