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Hellenism and its Enemies

Pergamon versus the Great Babylon Show

[A shorter version of this article appeared on the website of The American in March 2009.]

Two museum exhibits

The two exhibits stood side by side in adjacent halls. One room, lofty and spacious, displayed Pergamon’s Great Altar and various associated sculptures — the other was mainly given over to Babylon’s Ishtar Gate.

Athena

Athena

The ruins of both the Altar and the Gate took years to excavate, and in the early decades of the 20th century they had taken Berlin’s most famous archaeologists even longer to reconstruct. Though to me it was a comparison of cheese and chalk, or caviar and brickwork perhaps. Because while the Pergamon display with its statue of Athena represented Hellenism and the light of Greece, the Ishtar Gate symbolised Mesopotamia’s long dark age before the light — an age that some might say has yet to end.

But the zeitgeist is of course hostile to such a view. It says demandingly that Babylon’s time has come and that today the east should receive its proper due. For too long has Hellenism been uncritically exalted in the west — that’s the political story. Now is the time for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to stand aside so that we can gaze upon the je ne sais quoi that was Mesopotamia. For that reason the combined resources of the British Museum, the Louvre, and Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, had prepared a travelling exhibition called Babylon: Myth and Reality. Though as for Babylon itself, what exactly was it? Imperial majesty? Architectural folly? A voluptuary paradise? Or just oriental despotism of the usual kind?

Mesopotamia

The Ishtar Gate

The Ishtar Gate

That remained to be seen. As I discovered while visiting Berlin in 2008, entry to the Mesopotamian exhibit was through the Ishtar Gate, a permanent display first opened to the public about 1930. If you find the fortresses of kings impressive — the Tower of London for example — then you’ll certainly be impressed. A towering affair in glazed bricks nearly 15 meters high and 16 meters wide, its walls ornamented with tiers of bulls and dragons and surmounted by crenellated ramparts, it had been the entrance to a palace where supplicants prostrated themselves at the Great King’s feet.

But once past that intimidating entrance-way the exhibition was rather less impressive. The museum hall requisitioned for the Babylon show had been divided into narrow winding ways, and in the heat of July, with indifferent air conditioning, Berlin felt like Baghdad. In packed discomfort hundreds of us moved slowly past scores of glass cases containing horoscopes, cylinder scrolls with royal braggadocio, magical arcana, topographical maps, and cuneiform tablets of baked clay — terra cotta evidently being Mesopotamia’s main industrial product.

Creation of the World

Creation of the World

One tablet told of Babylon’s creation epic. Another contained a magical spell. The most significant declaimed the illimitable power of kings, and to accompany the tablets were rigid lifeless busts thought to show this royal or that. There was an oracular object the shape of a dogfish, and stamp seals from the 7th and 6th centuries BC. There was a crude 6th century clay statue, 15.5cm tall, of a god with a horned headdress. Students of ancient middle-eastern languages were not neglected: those who felt up to the challenge were invited to read a “remarkable tablet from 500 BC” showing “interaction between the age-old syllabic cuneiform writing used for the Akkadian language and the new alphabetic Aramaic that ultimately displaced it.”

Dragon, Babylon

Now and then something stood out. The dragons of the Processional Way outside the gate were striking, and a seven-foot-high black basalt stone on which Hammurabi’s Code was written around 1750 BC was a useful reminder that law and civilization are inseparable. Good for Hammurabi: it’s something people forget. But another stone raised more questions than it answered — especially at an exhibition designed to demonstrate that Mesopotamia’s achievement should be taken as seriously as that of Greece. About 60cm by 50cm and dating from Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (605-562 BC), its four columns of early cuneiform script were described as “a masterpiece of archaising Babylonian epigraphy” — and no doubt they are.

East India House Inscription

East India House Inscription

But what is inscribed? What royal ruminations are here set down that might claim our attention, diverting it from things Greek? We were told it “memorialises Nebuchadnezzar’s building operations in stone. After quoting his royal titles and describing his personal piety, it describes the decorating of the chapels of Marduk, Zarpinitu and Nabu; the reconstruction of the processional boat of Marduk, the rebuilding of the Akitu house, the restoration of the Babylon temples…” and so on. Peggy Lee’s disenchanted question has no doubt been overworked, yet it was difficult to emerge from those claustrophobic museum corridors without gasping “Is that all there is?” What literary evidence is there from antiquity of a polity and a culture meriting as much attention as ancient Greece?

The route through the exhibits wound on; the scrolls and tablets and sticky heat continued; and it was a huge relief to at last escape out through the Ishtar Gate to the world beyond. Since the Jewish captivity, one feels that Babylon must always have been a good place to leave. As you walked back into the rival hall of the Great Altar of Pergamon with its flanking statues of Athena and Poseidon a sense of oppression lifted. It was like taking off from a barren desert airstrip and landing in Paris. Once more there were faces of human scale with human emotions — gods like men and men like gods. In the Telephos Frieze, young and elegant figures were clothed in drapery arranged with all the delicacy of civilized feeling and all the art that gifted sculptors can bestow. Exploring in the nearby Greco-Roman collection I found, instead of the cold faces of despots, the statue of a young girl playing knucklebones.

Girl playing knucklebones

Discovering Pergamon

A German engineer named Carl Humann discovered the Great Altar back in the 19th century. A cultivated man, he was working in Anatolia at the time, and had heard there were remarkable ruins high on a hilltop above the Caicos River — an entire Acropolis in fact. So he decided to take a look. Perhaps he’d also read the single literary reference to the site that we have from antiquity. This appears in a 3rd century AD work by the Roman Lucius Ampelius where he writes: “At Pergamon is a great marble altar, 40 feet high with remarkable statues, and the entire is surrounded by a Battle of the Giants.”

Great Altar, Pergamon

Great Altar, Pergamon

What Humann found among the weeds and grasses on top of the hill were the Pergamon Altar’s massive foundations. What he also found was an ominously smoking limestone oven where local peasants were pulverising the remains of the spectacular 2nd century BC altar frieze to make fertilizer for their fields. Though to be fair to men and women whose priorities understandably differed from his own, destruction of one kind or another had been going on for centuries. Under Byzantium much of the altar was torn down and its masonry used to build a retaining wall. Anyway, like Lord Elgin before him, Carl Humann arrived at the 11th hour.

Back in Germany he got the support of Alexander Conze, director of the sculpture collection of the Royal Berlin Museums; Conze got Bismarck’s backing; and around 1878-1879 the Turks, who at the time didn’t much care what happened, formally authorised the rescue of surviving relics and their transport to Germany. Humann had been planning this for years, and once excavation started the work went quickly. By April 1880, according to a museum catalogue by Max Kunze, “97 relief panels of the Gigantomachy and 2000 fragments, with 35 panels from the Telephus Frieze and 100 fragments, as well as numerous free-standing statues, busts, inscriptions and architectural elements had been excavated.”

What Pergamon stood for

The Giant Alkyoneus

The Giant Alkyoneus

These were the surviving relics of a major Hellenizing endeavour. In the 3rd century BC, writes Kunze, “not only had Pergamon set about becoming the new cultural and scientific center of the Greek world, but also the successor and legitimate heir of fifth and fourth century Greek culture which at that time was considered the Classical age.” In brief, Pergamon stood for everything that Babylon did not. This capital of the Attalid empire, opposite the island of Lesbos, with its 200,000-scroll library and its sculptures and theater and Greek temples, defiantly asserted 5th-century Athenian cultural ideals on the shores of Asia. That’s why the Hellenizing Attalids (281-133 BC) built Pergamon. That was their empire’s rationale. Extending at its height across much of Anatolia, it was a Greek gauntlet flung in the teeth of the enemy, as if to spite the Mesopotamians to the east.

Aphrodite from Myrina

Aphrodite from Myrina

The spirit of 5th century Athens also flourished elsewhere in the region. Nearby lay Myrina (Smyrna), and around the time the Great Altar was built, in the middle of the 2nd century BC, an unknown sculptor produced a figure of Aphrodite described as “one of the finest works made in workshops in Asia Minor at the height of the Hellenistic period”. The sculpture is worth both study and introspection, bringing to mind the deep traditions of art and thought that lie behind it, the uniqueness of the Greek achievement overall, and the virtuosity of the anonymous sculptor. Much smaller than the better-known Venus de Milo, and standing only 37.6 cm tall, it is made of terra cotta. Humble stuff. The same as all those baked clay tablets. But nothing remotely like this figure came out of Mesopotamia in three thousand years.

Academic fashions

The war in Iraq and events at the Baghdad Museum provided one motive for the Babylon exhibition — a concluding chapter in the British Museum’s English-language catalogue says as much. But the underlying academic reasons go deeper than that. For much of the past thirty years admirers of classical Greece have been on the defensive, while easternizing admirers of Mesopotamia — a region including the Assyrians of the 9th to 7th centuries BC, the 6th century BC Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persians who took over under Cyrus in 539 BC — have been on the attack. Darius and Co have been talked up; Pericles and Herodotus and Co have been talked down.

That distinguished and venerable classicist Peter Green apologised for having been too keen for freedom in his 1970 book Xerxes at Salamis. Revising it in 1996 under the new title The Greco-Persian Wars he regretted embracing so enthusiastically “the fundamental Herodotean concept of freedom-under-law (eleutheria, isonomia) making its great and impassioned stand against Oriental Despotism.” What he called “the insistent lessons of multiculturalism” had forced all classical scholars “to take a long hard look at Greek ‘anti-barbarian’ propaganda, beginning with Aeschylus’s Persians and the whole thrust of Herodotus’s Histories.”

George Cawkwell, the Oxford author of the 2003 The Greek Wars, told us in a short preface that he was proud to be part of a scholarly movement that aims “to rid ourselves of a Hellenocentric view of the Persian world.” Much of the first three pages of his introduction then proceeded to ridicule and discredit Herodotus, who, he wrote, showed “an astounding misapprehension” concerning the Persians, whose stories were sometimes delightful but were certainly absurd, and who “had no real understanding of the Persian Empire.”

But if Herodotus didn’t get it right, who exactly did? Obviously some nameless Persian equivalent to Herodotus might have had “a real understanding of the Persian Empire”, but who was he and where is his narrative? What book by which contemporary Persian historian provides an alternative account of Achaemenid manners and customs, institutions and political thought, imperial policy and administration and ideals? The courts of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, not to mention Xerxes, King of Kings, employed numerous chroniclers recording royal achievements and military victories. Is it conceivable that whole decades of the new research referred to recently by both Peter Green and Tom Holland (author of the 2005 book Persian Fire) reveal no Persian literary endeavours to compare with the achievements of the Greeks?

Alas, that seems to be the case. Even the Oxford don so jeeringly hostile to Herodotus admits that though the evidence of past Persian glories “is ample and various, one thing is lacking. Apart from the Behistun Inscription which gives an account of the opening of the reign of Darius 1, there are no literary accounts of Achaemenid history other than those written by Greeks.” Moreover, he admits, such literacy as existed in the Persian Empire was largely Greek; and such writing as took place was mainly done by Greeks.

NOTE A further article provisionally titled The Assyrian Puzzle will continue this discussion. It looks at a curious anomaly — the London decision to make no use of the British Museum’s famous reliefs from Nineveh in the Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition, despite their being described by the BM itself as “among the most magnificent artistic creations from ancient Iraq.” Was the decision organizational? Diplomatic? Or perhaps PC? Watch this space.

Posted in Civilization, Open Societies & the Culture Cult.