Babylon 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠

Atlas’ Notebook: Edition XXXVI (repost)

Welcome to Cosmographia. The following is a repost from our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.

Few place names ignite the imagination as much as Babylon.

By the time Alexander set foot within its walls in 331 BC, it was already ancient. The once-magnificent Mesopotamian metropolis — for centuries the largest in the world — has lain in ruins for the last thousand years.

Despite this, Babylon’s outsized influence over disparate cultures, religions, and histories, means the city of Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi, and Marduk himself, lives on in the world’s collective imagination.

I. In Art

The Tower of Babel — Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

Bruegel depicts the legend of the Tower of Babel from Genesis. According to the story, a united human race who spoke only one language came to the land of Shinar (Southern Mesopotamia). Full of hubris and pride, they built within their city a tower so tall as to rival the heights of heaven. Yahweh, seeing this, confounded their language so they could no longer speak to one another, and scattered them around the world.¹

In a clever piece of composition, Bruegel chooses to paint the tower still under construction, so we can get a sense of the sheer size of the monolith, whilst also allowing a close-up view to fill the composition. The architecture is deliberately evocative of the Colosseum. The claims of the Caesars and their Eternal City, reduced to ruins, was, to the late Middle Age Christians, a perfect illustration of the vanity and transience of humanity’s earthly efforts in the face of an almighty God.

Emphasising the busy, tireless efforts of the masons and carpenters in constructing the tower we know to be doomed, the message is clear: man’s works are futile.

II. In Verse