CHAPTER 8
Discussions of Babylon traditionally lead to meditations upon its fall. There is one sense in which the city is indeed falling, along with every other component of the historical grand narrative within which that fall fits. Babylon had a definite place, albeit an unenviable one, in the biblical and classical sources carefully reconciled in the Middle Ages and developed through many permutations to underpin modern narratives of human progress. Today the tide of scholarly thought has begun to turn away from such unilinear narratives and towards understandings of history that, though dominated by interconnections as never before, nonetheless place great value on the particular and the local for their own sake, and resist regarding one particular grouping or locale as more significant in terms of the human condition than any other.
The various manifestations and offshoots of postcolonial studies, fields dealing constantly with the mechanics of the interconnected and the particular, represent a revival of that beauty seen by medievalists in the encyclopaedic nature of their scholarly work: the great but finite complexity of a world of particulars, all of which must be understood in relation to one another. This new particularism differs from the old in two crucial respects, however. First, though all is explicable within its terms, it allows dissonance and discord in all things because these are reflective of the multiplicity of perspectives and perceptions that make up human experience.1 The purpose of the growing search for subaltern voices in colonial literature, for example, is not to erase and replace the colonial literature but to complement it, expand its scope and balance its inherent biases.2 Second, it is a particularism without an obvious linear focus. Previously there have been two such foci: the divine will, as in medieval and Renaissance conceptions, and the fate of humanity (as in Enlightenment, romantic and modern models). Although the concept of humanity’s fate as defined by the will of the gods is of great antiquity, that of the divine as structuring linear history is medieval, a product specifically of Jewish apocalypticism but adopted by both Christianity and Islam. It is a conception according to which the history of the world is not cyclical and will end, and whose entry into historiography is usually attributed by philosophers of history to St Augustine and The City of God.3 This history ‘sees humanity as in process toward a not yet attained but ultimate condition of mankind’4 at the end of time. Importantly, this type of history made a project of the unification and harmonization of source material, working towards a single figuration, to use Erich Auerbach’s term, of humanity and history.5
Such approaches, with their ultimately religious structures and understandings, were gradually supplanted by models of humanity’s progress in which human agency increasingly made history until, in modern thought, progress became the goal and responsibility of humanity, something that it was possible to strive for and obtain. The idea of control over history is utterly alien to The City of God, but the linear structure is shared.6 Where St Augustine’s historical model was firmly grounded in providential history, however, modern linear perspectives have pursued philosophical models as potential keys to future utopias, driven by the very modern idea of humanity’s own perfectability.7 One product of such ambition is disillusionment, as witnessed in the modern flowering of dystopian fiction whose greatest exemplars, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were both written in the mid-twentieth century.8 The dangers attached to thinking of human history as project and destiny have also been amply demonstrated in the real history of the twentieth century. Karl Popper dedicated his argument against historical prediction as an intellectual goal, The Poverty of Historicism, to the ‘memory of countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny’.9
It makes sense that postcolonial thought should be so much less utopian in character, generally eschewing overarching structures and pointing toward more complex and pluralistic histories whose patterns need not be progressive or degenerative, and which lead neither to a utopia nor to the Last Judgement. One implication of this is a radically reduced significance for previously critical historical loci, such as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, classical Athens or imperial Rome, because their stories are no longer considered to structure the whole of human history in the way that they once were. This, at least, is the theory. Cultural canons have not historically changed quickly, however, and as icons in representation alone one would expect the constituent parts of the grand narrative to prove tenacious in practice.10 In the case of Babylon there is already a long history of temporal and geographical displacement beginning with Revelation, and the continuation of this phenomenon seems certain. In one sense this makes the city important in a distinctly pre-modern, moral and quasi-religious way. If we return to the rough distinction between classical sources on Babylon as more descriptive and biblical sources as more moralizing, we will see its reestablishment here very clearly, remarkably intact after so many integrations and reconciliations of the two groups. For a Babylon whose meaning is abstract, ahistorical and largely moral biblical sources are far more relevant, and therefore are drawn upon more extensively. This is true on the one hand for twentieth-century images of the Tower of Babel, rarely located in a historical Iraq and no longer related to ziggurats but only to an allegorical or even atheistic and metaphorical reading of Genesis, and on the other for the many cities that have been called Babylon – Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles – where the prophets and particularly Revelation are the source. It is the classical sources that are directly affected by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft excavations; their descriptions did become less authoritative, and have been supplanted by the writings of Koldewey, his colleagues and their successors in archaeology and Assyriology as the most authoritative sources on the geography of Babylon.
Knowledge and hybrids
The representation of Babylon offers practical examples of almost every conceivable transformation in epistemology and knowledge that a historical subject might undergo. Particularly interesting are the abiding presence and influence of a mythic component and the near-ubiquity of hybrid understandings that incorporate several different kinds of knowledge with quite different bases. Mythic elements are present where we might instinctively expect knowledge that was neatly and absolutely theocratic; in the case of Revelation the allegorical aspect of Babylon’s use is mythic, as is the archetype of the worldly city in St Augustine. On the other hand, we find both allegorical and theocratic knowledge permeating humanist empiricism with regard to Babylon. When explorers, antiquaries and archaeologists sought the Tower of Babel, that search could be defined either as theocratic or, where Genesis is seen as a reliable (as opposed to infallible) reference to an actual building regardless of whether that building really was the site of divine punishment and the confusion of tongues, as humanist. The tension between different epistemological bases is particularly pronounced in Athansius Kircher’s Turris Babel, a product of the author’s attempt to reconcile biblical and classical sources with far more recent visitors’ accounts. Voltaire’s use of Babylon championed the use of the past as an effectively timeless, placeless setting for storytelling, i.e. as a site for myth and fantasy, but in a way that absolutely depended upon an empiricist approach against which to kick. Medieval travellers, whose visits to Babylon we are inclined to privilege on the grounds that they involve empirical observation, frequently turn out to be primarily theocratic, displaying a tendency for the observed world to be tested against that of the text rather than vice versa. The medieval encyclopaedic compilation and resolution of written sources is certainly theocratic in a broad sense, but also contains an Aristotelian forerunner to the Cartesian privileging of rational thought in the high value placed on logic, particularly important in medieval European education and in evaluating, resolving and sometimes rejecting incompatible claims. The conceivably equally encyclopaedic (though far less orderly) outcome of a postmodern and postcolonial scholarship that rejects grand narratives and is sceptical of claims to objectivity would be thoroughly humanist in the importance it places on the human subject and subjective knowledge, but also prone to the development of unchallengeable, unempirical claims on the basis of individual subjectivity and the equal validity of subjects’ perceptions.
Despite taking place in a very different world, the German excavations and German reception of Babylon in the early twentieth century shared with Kircher’s work a noticeable strain in the effort to resolve different kinds of knowledge into an absolute. The attempt at resolution proved antagonistic, hence the crisis of Babel–Bibel. The perceived value of excavations in terms of producing knowledge is obviously empirical, but the nationalist or imperialist desire to lay claim to the discovery of biblical sites where the production of extra knowledge about them was arguably irrelevant is a different matter. To the extent that this is about knowledge at all it is theocratic. Sardanapal: Historische Pantomime can be seen as an acknowledgement of and an attempt to redress the failure of academic research to satisfy the mythic component of people’s understanding of Babylon. The development of a division that put this component outside the scope of archaeologists’ work should not be taken for granted – the values attached to particular forms of knowledge are changeable and historically situated, and perhaps even now it is possible to discern some movement back towards a broader remit for archaeological interpretation, including serious academic consideration of communicating archaeology through fiction.11 Similarly, the nature and implications of literary fiction’s interventions in historical discourse have been analysed by Price,12 and the interplay between literature and history has been the subject of a volume edited by Caldicott and Fuchs.13 This is a new exploration of an old idea: in some ways it echoes the Aristotelian view of poetry’s value over history.14 Meanwhile, Michael Shanks’ work as been particularly influential in introducing consideration of the human and creative elements in archaeological expression and practice.15 One recent volume is dedicated to the possibilities of academic archaeological engagement with and expression in the creative arts,16 a development better described as resurgent than new, while another considers archaeological writing for its own sake and as an integral part of the interpretative process.17 The significance of Stephanie Moser’s work on representation and iconography lies in her demonstration of these elements as acting on interpretation and constituting arguments about the past in their own right.18 All of these recent works can be seen as part of a resurgence that is closely related to the broader acknowledgement of academic archaeological writing and practice as situated, contingent and subjective.19
Robert Koldewey occupies a significant point on this trajectory, as part of the turn towards detached and transparent description as the proper goal of a scholar describing an ancient site, and the introduction of conventions shared with the natural sciences in recording and writing. Within the specific context of Iraq, the departure Koldewey’s publication represents from preceding English and French works on the Mesopotamian past is substantial, as discussed in Chapter 6. With Babylon, as with archaeology more generally, however, some resurgence in the role of narrative can be seen more recently. Marc Van De Mieroop has focused on the ideological messages of Babylon’s monumental architecture and its self-representation in texts,20 while Zainab Bahrani’s The Graven Image analyses the roles of representation within Babylonian and Assyrian culture more broadly.21 Their interest in capturing Babylonian modes of thought has much to do with a critical self-consciousness of subjectivity and perspective. On the other hand, more traditional approaches continue to play a central and essential role. Just as we are still dependent on the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft excavations and their publication for our understanding of the ancient city of Babylon, so too we still share for practical purposes an empirical, more-or-less positivistic outlook with the excavators of the early twentieth century, and much of the difference between their work and that of the present has to do with technical innovation and a broadening of interest in, for example, the study of residential areas, rather than a challenge to the basis of their approach. As a fundamental tool for gathering archaeological data we still value archaeological excavations for much the same reasons as Robert Koldewey.
There is value in all these forms and manifestations of knowledge, and certainly a great deal that is productive stems from their hybridity. One huge factor to consider is the serendipitous creation of knowledge in one category through the pursuit of ideas in another. Umberto Eco has written brilliantly on this topic, selecting examples such as scholarship building on the Ptolemaic universe and Columbus’ discovery of the Americas,22 but there are many other cases. The scale and diversity of such serendipity that can be demonstrated around the study of Babylon, for example, threatens to dwarf that progress which has been directed and intentional. Returning to origins, the Tower of Babel in Genesis inspired much scholarship. On the one hand searches for the original language, while acting on the basis of a narrative many Christians in the twentieth century would not treat as literal, produced much valuable and useful knowledge on the relationships between languages, and thus some of the foundations of present-day comparative linguistics. On the other, searches for the physical site of Babylon’s Tower, not to mention its Hanging Gardens, walls, incalculable wealth and evidence of its decimation by God, led to the discovery and decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform script and the Akkadian and Sumerian languages; Iraq’s is the most completely preserved of ancient literatures and, as it happens, the best-positioned for establishing that the Hebrew of the Old Testament formed part of a complex and geographically wide-ranging linguistic history, and was not the divine or Adamite language various Christian and Jewish scholars, including St Augustine, had at times argued.23 As we have seen, the biblical fame of Babylon was an important factor in the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft’s decision to finance excavations there, and thus in large part to generate an ‘archaeological’ identity for the city. The idea that this archaeological identity might compete with or harm the legitimacy of others was not part of the imperial agenda; rather the assumption was that it would confirm and complement what was already known and believed. Meanwhile, the study of languages, initially developed (like archaeology) in the belief that it might take humanity closer to a divine Truth, would lead eventually to a great destabilizing of textual authorities: to post-structuralists such as Derrida, Barthes and later Baudrillard; and of course coming full circle in Borges’ The Library of Babel. All of these developments can be seen, in whole or in part, as serendipitous. Nonetheless they form a part of Babylon’s intellectual history, which is one of unintended consequences as well as grand visions.
It can be difficult to connect this interplay of epistemological bases and understandings in fact, however, to a formulation of their value in principle. An instructive example is the case of William Blake and his (probable)24 pairing and juxtaposition of Newton and Nebuchadnezzar. Blake’s interest was of a moral and theological kind, taking the history of Daniel and from it producing a visual meditation on reason, unreason, punishment and redemption. It is inappropriate to weigh this kind of production of knowledge against the historical misrepresentation of Nebuchadnezzar (or even Nabonidus – see Chapter 3) as a crazed and piteous man/animal on some absolute scale of merit, because allegorical art and humanistic Assyriology produce meaning according to different criteria of value and truth. Not that this implies a splendid isolation of science from art; Blake’s emotive image, though but a further mythologization of Daniel’s Nebuchadnezzar, directly affects conceptions of the historical king, and not only for those who believe in the literal truth of his years living as a wild beast. It is neither easy nor very natural to disentangle the different sources on a historical character: our instinct is instead to pull together and reconcile what we ‘know.’ In many cases, but particularly those of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft production of Sardanapal and Edwin Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market painting, the intention is to blur such distinctions, and to naturalize or efface the application of a mythic framework to new empirical research. In such blurring, and in the uncritical reproduction of stereotypes without empirical foundation in books that do claim such authority, such hybrids can indeed pose serious problems. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think of the purpose of studying representation in archaeology as the identification and refutation of empirical inaccuracy (‘errors’ would imply that these are always accidental and made in ignorance) and stereotyping. This is useful work, with the prospect of incrementally improving popular representations of the past in the sense of bringing them into closer harmony with the archaeological research they represent, but it does not begin to reflect the full relevance and importance of representation for students of the human past.
Differentiation between different forms of knowledge is surely useful in interpretative terms. How one acts on this understanding, however, depends in large part on what one considers archaeology should be. The current interest in the roles of oral history and narrative in archaeology, for example, show that this is an open debate. Attempts by archaeologists to engage with other approaches to the past are laudable and potentially very constructive. The archaeologist has every right, even a professional duty, to assert his or her views on truth and falsehood within such a dialogue, and no doubt generally adds new insights to others’ knowledge of the past through doing so. It does not follow that the archaeologist should be automatically hostile to other uses of the past. Scholarly, humanistic archaeology and history have already won popular respect, a democratic sanction for academic expertise in which we should perhaps have more confidence.25 The archaeologist’s duty, based on a belief that theirs is indeed a particularly rigorous and epistemologically valid way in which to investigate the past, is to the differentiation of understandings and the dissemination of their expert knowledge, not to destruction or censorship.26
The central theme of this book has been the interaction of different ideas, understandings and forms of knowledge. We have seen many combinations of hybrids, rarely keeping to the boundaries of epistemological consistency in themselves or in their influence upon one another. In representation, we have seen the capacity for myth and legend to act on interpretations produced by empirical research and humanist criticism without subjection to their tests of truth. Understanding this entanglement is all-important if we aim to produce meaningful knowledge of the past.