The Lost Palaces of Iraq

Page 6 of 8

• 1. Heritage under threat
• 2. Birth of civilisation
• 3. World's first city
• 4. Nineveh
• 5. A desecrated cemetery
• 6. Samara and Babylon
• 7. Adam's tree
• 8. Find out more
• Print entire article

Samara and Babylon

The Great Mosque at Samara is the most memorable architectural image in Iraq. The minaret was built in about 850 AD and is a 52m-tall spiral, which looks rather like a medieval image of the Tower of Babel. And that is the point - in its infancy, Islam embraced the forms of the sacred buildings of earlier religions, and this minaret is in effect an Islamic ziggurat. It is also an astonishingly powerful, elemental and mystic structure. If anything happened to this minaret it would be an act of barbarism of the highest order. The prelude to a new dark age.

'And then came Babylon - the mythic Biblical city.'

And then came Babylon - the mythic Biblical city. It was rebuilt in about 600 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar, who sacked Jerusalem and drove the Jews into exile, and it is described in great and lurid detail in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. Here I explored the remains of the Hanging Gardens and the site of the massive ziggurat of Babylon - the latter is sometimes said to be the legendary Tower of Babel - but all is horribly transformed.

'Saddam has had his name stamped upon the bricks...'

Since the 1980s Saddam has worked on the rebuilding of Babylon, in an attempt to build himself into the fabric - the history - of the nation. To imply that he and his regime are a continuation of the great empires of the past, Saddam has had his name stamped upon the bricks of 'the third reconstruction of Babylon' just as Nebuchadnezzar stamped his name on the bricks used at Babylon 2,600 years ago. The result is dreary and destructive in the extreme. To achieve a short-term political end the authentic ruins of Babylon have been obscured or destroyed by new building in poor quality pastiche - inauthentic in scale, detail and construction techniques.

NextPrevious

Published: 2003-02-16