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THE
ROVING EYE
The lions of Babylon
By Pepe Escobar
BABYLON -
Hussein Sahab, a frail, gentle man in his late 50s,
married, two sons and two daughters, has had the same
job for the past 27 years. His salary: 24,000 Iraqi
dinars a month (less than US$8). Sahab is one of the
caretakers of Babylon, the mythical Bab Ilou (God's
gate), founded in the 24th century BC by the Amorite
king Sumu-Abum.
Nothing could be more
enlightening than to roam around Babylon guided by this
quintessential Mesopotamian. He talks about how Babylon
started to make history after the fall of Ur in 2003 BC.
He talks about the great king Hammurabi, a skilled
diplomat who turned Babylon into the center of an empire
settled in a territory comparable to contemporary Iraq.
He shows the visitor around the Babylon of king
Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BC - as reconstructed
by Saddam Hussein. At the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the
prophet Jeremiah described Babylon as "a cup of gold in
the hands of the Lord which inebriates the whole of the
earth".
Hussein Sahab takes the visitor to some
of the visible ruins of Hammurabi's Babylon (most are 40
meters underground). He shows the exact corner where
Alexander the Great died of malaria in June 323 BC. He
talks about sexy Semiramis - the legendary founding
queen of Babylon - who chose her lovers among her most
handsome soldiers and executed them once she was
satiated.
According to legend, Babylon was built
in 365 days by 2 million workers. At the outset of the
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Saddam set out to rebuild
Babylon. The summer palace, the temples of Ishtar, Nabu
and Ninmah, the ramparts, the Greek amphitheater, were
all restored. If one uses one's imagination, one can
hear the chanting of pilgrims echoing around the "House
of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth" - the
ziggurat (temple tower) the whole world knows
under the biblical name of the Tower of Babel. "It's
over there," says Hussein Sahab, pointing to the top of
a hill less than 800 meters away from Nebuchadnezzar's
palace walls.
In a commemorative plaque placed
at the square of the throne, Saddam Hussein says that he
rebuilt Babylon "to restore to the Iraqi people the
pride of its glorious past". Saddam is now gone: Hussein
Sahab figured it out when he noticed the surrealist
Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf did not
show up on Iraqi TV on April 9. Hussein Sahab says, "We
are not satisfied with the Americans, but we are
satisfied because they destroyed Saddam's family." What
Hussein Sahab did not expect was the destruction that
take place afterwards - and from which Babylon was not
spared.
Babylon's museum was pillaged and
torched. Although most of what has been discovered on
site since the end of the 19th century is in European
museums, it held some priceless objects recently
excavated by Iraqi archeologists. Hussein Sahab says
that most were saved by the site's staff of 60. The
vandals, he says, were "not people living in the area".
The tribune in the Greek amphitheater where Saddam's
family used to watch concerts was also vandalized. The
restored, sprawling Nebuchadnezzar's palace at least was
not bulldozed: originally it had more than 200 rooms and
courtyards linked by corridors, with royal apartments,
administrative buildings, courtesan quarters and shops
whose ruins were long mistaken for vestiges of the
famous Hanging Gardens.
What happened in Babylon
is only a fraction of what happened in Baghdad. The
transformation of the siege of Baghdad into the pillage
of Baghdad is considered by many Iraqis and concerned
foreigners as a crime against humanity, a crime against
civilization and a crime against Islam. In Mesopotamia,
the "Land between the Rivers", the home of the Garden
of Eden (which is located 74 kilometers north of Basra
in the direction of Baghdad, where the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers meet), the human race invented
agriculture, alphabets, codes of law, mathematics,
astronomy, poetry, epic literature and organized
religion. Without Mesopotamia, the human race might have
lived a lot longer in darkness and ignorance.
The Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, housing more than
170,000 priceless sculptures, bass reliefs, ceramics and
ancient texts, chronicling Stone Age settlements of half
a million years ago, the rise and fall of the great
civilizations of Uruk, Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria and
Persia, and the spread of Islam, has been thoroughly
looted. Among the irreparable losses are the tablets
containing Hammurabi's Code - the first code of law in
history - and the 4,600-year-old Ram in the Thicket
statue from Ur. The 4,300-year-old bust of an Akkadian
king was smashed.
Asia Times Online went to the
Iraqi Museum one day after the looting, which took place
on April 10. Dr Doni George, director of general
research and studies at the State Board of Antiquities,
said at the time, "The whole administrative compound was
completely destroyed and looted. The first point is that
there were people who knew what they wanted. They've
taken the precious vase of Uruk, an Akkadian bronze
statue from 3,200 BC, Abbassid wooden doors. Before they
started looting, there were American armored cars
outside, and people inside. They asked for the American
troops to intervene, but they did not. On Sunday, the
chairman of the State Board of Antiquities went to the
American HQ and explained the situation. But they sent
no help. This shows they wanted the Iraqi Museum to be
destroyed."
At the time, the curators were too
traumatized to discuss what was lost, and how. In the
following days, they started collecting extremely
disturbing evidence that this was a very well organized
operation. Archaeological files and computer disks
simply disappeared. Glass-cutting tools were found on
the museum's floor. Replicas that the curators had
switched with the genuine article were still there, but
the genuine artworks were stolen. The museum's vaults
had been opened with special keys: an armed guard at the
museum told Asia Times Online that American soldiers had
not taken anything, but that they had opened the doors
for "people from other nationalities" to loot. "The way
they opened the locks, no Iraqi could do it."
Specialists at the UN Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization in their headquarters in Paris
are convinced that this was a concerted operation
organized outside of Iraq. Not all the oil in world -
which as a matter of fact will not benefit Iraqis
anyway, but will serve to pay foreigners for the Iraqi
war - would be enough to compensate the Iraqi
population, the whole Arab nation, and the whole
civilized world for what has been lost in the looting.
Meanwhile, in a deserted Babylon tormented by
sandy winds, Hussein Sahab wants to keep his job. He
shows the visitor that the Lion of Babylon is still
standing: it has not been stolen or vandalized. The Lion
of Babylon - supposedly a trophy from Hitite times,
middle of the 2nd millennium BC - is an enigmatic basalt
statue representing a man who is about to be killed by a
lion. But in fact the man is resisting: with one hand he
tries to shove the lion's mouth away, and with the other
he fights one of the lion's menacing paws. Legend rules
that as long as the statue is there, Babylon will never
be conquered. As to Hussein Sahab, he could have stolen
anything from Babylon, and sold the loot for millions.
He did not. Long live the lions of Babylon.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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