| HALFWAY along the wall of one of the last rooms in this vast exhibition (there are more than 450 exhibits on display currently in Paris; the associated exhibitions in Berlin and in London will be very different) is a painting from 1624 by Guercino. It depicts Queen Semiramis receiving the news of the fall of Babylon (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), and was once in the collection of King Charles II, part of the gift of the States General of Holland to mark his restoration.
The mythical figure of Semiramis became popular in the late 16th century and appears in literature, music, and the visual arts as a type of “strong woman”. One thinks of Cleopatra, Zenobia, and Clorinda in much the same way. That a few lines in Herodotus, Valerius Maximus, and Diodorus of Sicily should be sufficient to establish such a powerful myth that sustained representation into the age of Rossini and Edmund Kean attests to the narrative power of the story.
In the background landscape, Guercino has represented Babylon. Instead of a towering ziggurat crumbling to the ground — an artistic parallel to the events of 11 September 2001 which we have already encountered in violent scenes engraved by the Dutch artists Cornelis Anthonisz (1547) and Philip Galle (1569) — there is a low-lying tell (a mound formed by archaeological remains).
This is not what we expect. The low hill and the remains of a once great palace are remarkably accurately drawn, strongly suggesting that Guercino followed closely the 1614 oriental travels of his fellow countryman, Pietro della Valle, to Babylon. Although della Valle did not return to Rome till 1626, the interest of the Arabist antiquarian fired the imagination of a generation of Italians.
It is one of the extraordinary strengths of this exhibition that it is not simply a presentation of the archaeological finds of an ancient civilisation, as fascinating as they are extensive, but also the history of how one culture becomes appropriated as part of the narrative myths of another. Thus we are offered a comprehensive review of the critical fortunes of Babylon in Eastern and Western literature and art, ranging from the Hebrew Bible and the Revelation of St John through the classical age to the Middle Ages when both Crusaders and Byzantines as well as Turks and Persians appropriated the account for their own uses.
At the Reformation, Babylon gained a new notoriety as a way of condemning the perceived luxury of papal Rome. If we jib at this over-identification, we should perhaps watch scenes from David Griffith’s 1916 silent movie, Intolerance. Sets derived from the later 19th-century archaeology of Koldewey and Andrae and Griffith brought in more than 5000 extras to fill the throne room and 16,000 to attend Cyrus. The purpose of his film, the most expensive ever made at the time, however, was to promote a pacifist message as the United States debated joining late in the First World War.
The destruction of Babylon was so complete that the archaeological record has often had to be obtained from outside, in particular from Susa, and from literary sources. The exhibition fully illustrates the pioneering work of generations of archaeologists who have followed in the wake of della Valle, including those who mistakenly identified the Kassite ziggurat of Aqarquf (c.1380 BC) as the tower of Babel, and therefore held that Baghdad was on the site of the ancient city.
Visual representation was often based on wishful thinking rather than on any accurate survey, although J. M. W. Turner used an earlier (1818) design by the traveller Sir Robert Ker Porter for his inclusion in William and Edwin Finden’s Landscape Illustrations of the Bible of 1836. Even the nomadic Arabs in the foreground are more historically verifiable than the nightmarish wraith-like figures that Turner’s contemporary John Martin scattered across any number of his biblical reconstructions. The Fall of Babylon (an engraving based on a painting of 1819) and The Fall of Nineveh show signs of a mind running wild.
The exhibition opens with a survey of the city in the time of Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC), who brought together an empire among the city states of Mesopotamia after the destruction of Ur. From this period date the numerous copies of ancient epics telling of creation and flood, as well as the tablets of the law code that provide numerous parallels with the laws of the Pentateuch. On display is the diorite stele from the Louvre. On it is engraved the Hammurabi Code beneath a bas-relief that shows King Hammurabi receiving a divine mandate to compile a code from the sun-god Shamash. This, among other social laws, proscribed non-religious sorcery.
As well as cuneiform tablets and seal engravings, this early section includes striking examples of portrait sculpture, wall frescoes (with bulls and red-skinned priests much as from contemporary Egypt and Crete), and jewellery. As the Babylonian empire spread from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan, precious imports included lapis lazuli, while inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar turn up in Lebanon and across Syria.
With the best will in the world, I cannot claim that visiting this exhibition in the subterranean gallery of the Salle Napoleon is an attractive experience: the archaeological exhibits are presented too close to one another with extensive labels placed at knee-height in often impossibly small founts.
This leads to over-crowding, abetted by the group mentality of those using the audio tour; and a certain degree of uncharacteristic Parisian behaviour is discernible. But the extensive scope and scholarly range of the exhibition makes it advisable to see it before its London showing.
“Babylon” is at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, until 2 June. Phone 00 33 (0)1 40 20 53 17. The exhibition will be presented in a different form at the Pergamon Museum, Am Kupfergraben 5, Berlin, from 26 June to 5 October, and different again at the British Museum in London from 13 November until 15 March 2009.
www.louvre.fr
www.smb.museum
www.britishmuseum.org
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