This 4,300-year-old town -- now mainly an archaeological ruin with two important museums -- knows political and military upheaval well. Dynasties have risen and have fallen here since the earliest days of settled human civilization.
King Hammurabi wrote his famous code of laws here.
PHOTO: AP
Nebuchadnezzar sent his vast army from here to Jerusalem to put down an uprising and bring the Jews back as slaves.
Some say Alexander the Great, who lead his great army out of Macedonia to conquer most of the known world, died here in 332 BC.
The American military is just the latest to pass through the Euphrates River city. And now US soldiers and civilian occupation officials struggle with mixed success to put the city -- with its deep resonance in so many important cultures -- back together yet again.
The newest of the conquerors who have washed through the fertile crescent for millennia have held the site of the Hanging Gardens -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- for a mere 3 1/2 months.
The Americans are cleaning up after mobs of looters ransacked the city's two museums, but fortunately got away mainly with small display copies of ancient artifacts. Museum managers, fearing looting as the US-led coalition threatened war, bricked up the museum windows.
The looters, however, yanked air conditioners out walls and climbed in and out of the holes carting off the display copies of humankind's earliest handiwork. Most of the real artifacts were stored in vaults at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which also was looted. It is not known what portion of the stored Babylonian museum treasures have been lost.
Fortunately the makeshift holes were too small for looters to escape with the large pieces in the city's two museums, named after Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.
Nearly two weeks after Saddam Hussein fell on April 9, US Marines entered Babylon to find dozens of vendors had flooded into the streets as looters robbed the museums, souvenir shops, a restaurant and the police station. US troops said they moved swiftly to stop the lawlessness.
``On my first day here, I caught many people. ... We had to arrest few looters at that time,'' said US Navy Chaplain Commander Emilio Marrero, project official of the site. ``[We] pushed everybody outside the gate so that we could preserve the city.''
Since then Babylon has been closed to the public, but Marines hope to reopen the site within two months, Marrero said. The Marines have created a major base at the city, calling it Camp Babylon.
``We took over the compound because of the need that we saw here in the ruins and in the museums and the surrounding area,'' he said.
Decoys
Mariam Omran, director of Babylon's two museums, said they were both looted but ``most of the pieces in the museums were certified copies not real relics. All the display cases were damaged as was a miniature model of the old city.''
Marrero said only three actual relics were displayed in the Nebuchadnezzar museum. They disappeared with all the display copies. He said the Americans were trying to recover the pieces and had found some.
``Most of the relics that belong to this place are up at the museum of Baghdad and they've been up there since 1989,'' he said.
The first people to settle and build in Babylon were the Akkadians, who called the city Akkad. King Sargon I was the founder of the dynasty that lasted just two centuries.
``So many things were looted. The whole antiquities department, the library -- full of historical books, and the city's ancient archive -- were stolen then burned. Why did they burn it?'' asked Omran while standing in one of Nebuchadnezzar Museum's four large rooms where workers were busy painting the walls and fixing the miniature model of Babylon.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer, is spending thousands of dollars to renovate and repair the damage.
So far, the coalition has invested US$60,000 and plans to spend about that much more, Marrero said.
``The first phase of reconstruction was to insure that the museum was protected so we installed an alarm system in the museum. We repainted it, repaired it, fixed the roof ... cleaned it up after the looters,'' he said.
The souvenir shop, a small ticket office and the police station were repaired as well.
More than two decades of war, UN sanctions and international ostracism of the Saddam regime nearly killed tourism to Iraq's unparalleled archaeological sites.
Yet the nonpaying tourists -- more than 10,600 US Marines, sailors, soldiers, aid workers and journalists -- have passed through ancient Babylon since April 26, Marrero said.
Those who visit the ruin in the years to come will be reading the name of Saddam, stamped into the bricks used in reconstructing Nebuchadnezzer's Southern Palace, the seat of the king's ancient empire.
When reconstruction began, the palace walls had crumbled to a fourth of their original height. On Saddam's orders the walls were reconstructed between 1982 and 1987.
Bricks that brag
Some of the mud bricks in the original wall carried the seal of Nebuchadnezzar. The bricks used in the Saddam reconstruction, not to be outdone by the likes of the ancient king, read:
``The City of Babylon was reconstructed during the era of the victorious Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic, protector of the great Iraq, the modernizer of its renaissance and builder of its civilization.''
The Marines are getting ready to leave the area soon and will hand security over to Polish troops, Marrero said. But until then US troops are enjoying the site.
``I think its pretty cool. I mean, I used to watch the discovery channel but never thought I'll actually be where they are. It's kind of cool. I enjoy it,'' Marine Lance Corporal Rod Brooks of Chicago, said as he looked at the 2,600 year-old Lion of Babylon, symbol of Babylon's strength against invaders.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS