Cement floors trapped water while a cement roof on one of the ancient temples pushed down the entire structure. The restoration installed heavier modern bricks atop the ancient original ones. He also ordered parts of Babylon reconstructed, leading to most of the current conservation problems. Saddam Hussein, who saw himself as the successor to King Nebuchadnezzar, in the 1980s built a large palace overlooking the excavated remains. In the 1920s, the British ran train tracks through the archaeological site as part of a Baghdad to Basra railway. All that caused significant damage, a British Museum report found.īut they were hardly the first encroachment. military contractors built a base on the site, digging trenches, driving armored vehicles on the fragile streets and filling sandbags with dirt mixed with pottery and bone shards. Now, he said, it’s difficult to stop even clearly illegal building.Īfter the invasion of Iraq in 2003, U.S. “It’s a sense of pride to have Babylon a World Heritage Site, and during that process the state board for heritage was able to get people to behave better,” Mr. While Iraqi officials went to great lengths to protect the site while vying for the coveted World Heritage Site designation, those efforts appear to have since eased. So did advances in astronomy and other sciences.
CIVILIZATION 5 BABYLON CODE
The Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest recorded laws and punishment, came from Babylon. The 4,000-year-old city, mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible, became the capitol of the ancient Babylonian empire and was considered the largest city in the world. Like many Iraqis, he feels Babylon’s past is not just ancient history but his history.Ī visitor now to the site about 50 miles south of Baghdad sees a mostly reconstructed outline of a small part of the city including the walls that once supported the Ishtar Gate.įor hundreds of years until the mid-1900s, Babylon suffered the ignominy of surrounding townspeople dismantling its walls to cart away the ancient bricks for their own building projects. “The antiquities are beautiful,” said Mr. On a recent weekend, Ahmed Juwad and his college friends stopped to take selfies as they strolled down the processional way, where Babylonian kings paraded statues of their gods and goddesses. Now, that mailbox is rusting and abandoned, and police guarding the site have taken over the souvenir shop.Īfter years of conflict, although not violence-free, Iraq is safe enough for younger Iraqis who have never seen most of their own country to come to Babylon.