Walls of Babylon

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The two walls of Babylon were the fortress belt of the city of Babylon . They belonged to the seven wonders of the ancient world . When they fell into disrepair, they were removed from the list and replaced by the Alexandria Lighthouse . Viewed as a whole, one speaks only of a wall.

Model of the Ishtar Gate with the procession street, part of the walls of Babylon

history

The Babylonian walls Imgur-Enlil and Nemed-Enlil were the second oldest of the seven wonders of the world after the pyramids of Giza . In ancient Greek and Latin they were called: ( ancient Greek : τὰ τείχη Βαβυλῶνιος (ta teichē Babylónios) - the Babylonian walls, τὸ τείχος (τοῦ) Βαβυλῶνος (to teichos tou Babylónos) - Latin : the wall of Babylon; Babylonian walls ; Babylonian walls , Muri Babylonis - the walls of Babylon). Nebuchadnezzar II added around 600 BC With the east wall ( Osthaken ) the city walls. At that time, Babylon was the capital of the New Babylonian Empire . Nebuchadnezzar's goal was to make Babylon bigger and more beautiful than any city before. He surpassed his father Nabopolassar with his construction activity .

According to Nebuchadnezzar, the city needed an additional wall that would freeze enemies in awe and astonish the city's residents. An ancient text in cuneiform from Nebuchadnezzar has been preserved, in which it says: “What no king has done before me, I did, 4000 cubits of land (about two kilometers) to the side of the city, far away, inaccessible, I left a huge wall, to the east, encircling Babylon. I completed Babylon. "

"Lion with a lowered tail", detail of the processional route to the Ishtar Gate, in the Pergamon Museum , on a GDR postage stamp, 1966

The wall was erected for pragmatic reasons. The cities of antiquity were fortresses. A wall ring had to encircle the residents' living space like a protective belt. After Nebuchadnezzar's death, the city was conquered under Cyrus II and Alexander the Great . Here, both rulers besieged the city until their task - to avoid having to berennen the walls. As Babylon fell apart over time and sank from a cosmopolitan city to a small town, in the end even shrunk to a small village, the beauty and grandeur of Babylon's former wonder walls faded.

It is possible that the walls, made of mostly unfired adobe bricks, were already well advanced due to destruction and environmental influences at the beginning of the third century BC. That would be an explanation that in the second oldest enumeration of the seven wonders of the world the Babylonian walls were painted and the newly built Pharos of Alexandria was used instead. Permanently removed from the list they were first by the Frankish kingdom living Gregory of Tours in the 6th century.

Little of the original wonder of the world has remained visible on the surface of the earth. Remnants of the wall and widely scattered bricks between the desert, drilling rigs and oil pipes bear witness to the former splendid building. Researchers assume that much is still hidden under the desert sand. Due to the uncertain political situation, no further archaeological excavations have been carried out since 2003 .

In the era of Saddam Hussein , new walls were built around the ruins of the old city of Babylon to protect them from unauthorized access (e.g. robbery graves ). At the same time, parts of the huge area were reconstructed from 1979 to 2003, such as the 600-room palace of Nebuchadnezzar, as it was built around 600 BC. Could have looked like BC. The reconstruction was based on the plans of the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey , who had extensive excavations carried out in ancient Babylon between 1899 and 1917 and brought the fragments of the famous Ishtar Gate to Germany. The lavishly restored Ishtar Gate and parts of the processional street are now on display in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin . A copy of the Berlin reconstruction has also been in Babylon since Hussein.

During the Iraq war in 2003 , after the invasion by the USA, there were large, previously unexcavated areas within the historic site of the city. B. been leveled to helipads, which now - provided with picnic tables - serve tourists. In ignorance, these areas were probably perceived by the military as "mud hills in the landscape". In addition to destruction by soldier souvenir hunters , heavy military vehicles wreaked havoc on the structure of the processional route to the Ishtar Gate. Thousands of sandbags were filled with excavation material. Originally the base was supposed to protect the ancient city from looting.

architecture

Position and shape

The Plan of Babylon, an idea by Thomas Stackhouse (1677–1752)

Ancient Babylon, on the east bank of the Euphrates, was fortified to the north, east and south by walls and a 80 m wide moat. To the west the Euphrates and the ramparts protected. Nebuchadnezzar had the two existing moat walls of his father extended by a third. This was built alongside the others and joined with the embankment wall. The trench reached down to the groundwater. The bank edge was bricked with asphalt mortar and fire bricks and joined with the original land wall. The sea wall surrounded the ramparts of Babylon. The eastern bank wall of the Arachtu Canal was also completed by Nebuchadnezzar II, which his fatherly producer had built from the Ishtar Gate to the Urash Gate . A new district was built on the west side of the Euphrates, which was also surrounded by walls. This created a fortress square through which the Euphrates flowed. In addition, an outer wall was built further outside, which enclosed the eastern suburbs and perhaps also built-up open land, probably in order to be able to serve as a huge refuge in times of war.

Wall thickness and height

Excavations have shown that the bank walls on the Euphrates were eight to ten meters thick. The ramparts around the city center 17.5 m. The outer walls were even 27 to 30 meters thick. The fortifications around the historic city center towered 25 meters, the outer wall 30 meters high. The walls were built high inside and outside and the space in between was filled with rubble and clay from excavated trenches. In this way a broad crest was created. On the 30 meter thick wall behind the protective towers, battlements and protective parapets, a driveway more than twelve meters wide was laid out, which the besiegers could not see. There was enough space so that teams could race past each other without getting in the way. Wherever an attacker managed to climb the wall by surprise, the defender could bring four-horse chariots from the staging rooms . The city walls were so thick that chariot squares could drive and turn on the top of the wall.

length

For a long time there was only speculation about the exact dimensions of the walls. The text of Nebuchadnezzar contains no measurements. The building was considered insurmountable and built to last. What should not be forgotten was only the glorious name of the builder. Herodotus himself, who is considered a very reliable observer, gives the length of the city walls as the equivalent of 86 km. But this length has been questioned again and again over the centuries, as it would correspond to a square with a side length of over 20 km. German archaeologist Robert Koldewey , who excavated Babylon in the early 20th century, found that Herodotus exaggerated more than four times that the wall was actually only 18 km long. How mighty and large the fortress walls of Babylon were, can be read in the ancient writer Pausanias . Pausanias, who only saw the walls in a state of complete decay, still calls them an enormous structure; one is tempted to imagine that demons with superhuman powers have destroyed them.

material

The wall was not put together from stone blocks weighing tons, but was mostly made of burnt clay bricks and filled with tamped earth. Gaps were filled with rubble and clay. For the Greeks , who put up stone walls, the ramparts of Babylon were just for that reason astonishing and worthy of communication. The Roman satirist Juvenal alluded to the fact that the walls of the cosmopolitan city of Babylon had been fortified "by potters". Despite the simple material, the ramparts have proven to be extremely sturdy due to their enormous dimensions.

Decay

Several factors caused the walls to deteriorate. When the ravages of time began to gnaw on the structure, the building material proved to be very fragile and more and more prone to damage. Floods also contributed to the collapse of the wall. In places the fortress wall was a dam for the floods of the Euphrates. Over time, the water dissolved the loosened material, washed away the earth and hollowed out the walls. The firmly attached bricks were widely scattered. There were also hills and bumps that collapsed more and more. The entire structure slowly crumbled and became useless.

literature

• Ernst von Khuon : The seven wonders of the ancient world. In: Bodo Harenberg (Hrsg.): Monuments of the world. (213 monuments from history, technology and nature). Chronik-Verlag, Dortmund 1985, ISBN 3-88379-035-4 .
• Robert Koldewey : Babylon Rising Again. The previous results of the German excavations (= broadcast of the German Orient Society. Vol. 6, ZDB -ID 516555-6 ). Hinrichs, Leipzig 1913 (5th, revised and expanded edition. Edited by Barthel Hrouda . CH Beck, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-406-31674-3 ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Destroyed cultural treasures . www.sueddeutsche.de, May 17, 2010. Accessed May 2, 2014.
2. ↑ The Second Destruction of the Great Babylon www.welt.de, June 19, 2008. Retrieved May 2, 2014.