Sky & Telescope July 2000 [antikvár]

spectrumBabylon RevisitedBabylon was a great city.Her ntercliantiise was of gold and silver,Of precious stones, of pearls, of fine linen.so begins William Walton's characterization in Belshazzar's Feast, an epochal work in British choral music. It ends withMake a joyfttl noise to the God of Jacob, For Babylon the Great is fallen. Allelnia!\n 539 B.C. a date known well this metropolis of the ancient world died without a whimper under Persian forces. A thousand years earlier, Babylon had died under the Hittites, but it quickly bounced back and went on to even greater glory.For scholars, dating that first collapse has itself proved to be a battleground. Getting the year right is crucial,, .because it affects all chronologies of theBy Leif J. Robinson. v, c . xi'ancient Near East. Now you can get itright by reading Vahe Gurzadyan's story beginning on page 40.One of the joys of being based near Harvard is the wealth of talent at our doorstep. One of Vahe's research colleagues was James A. Armstrong, an archaeologist and assistant curator of the university's Semitic Museum. James was invaluable in helping us put the finishing touches on this article, which provides another example of how astronomy can plumb humanity's roots. One recent afternoon we chatted in his workshop.Leif: What was life like in Babylon four millenniums ago, especially in midsummer, when one of the lunar eclipses crucial for dating the first fall of Babylon occurred? James: The adobe buildings in summer became furnaces, and no one lived inside it was impossible. I worked at a site called Nippur, about 100 kilometers southeast of Babylon, and lived in a mud-brick house. Even in September we couldn't sleep in our rooms; it was just too hot. Ancient Babylonians adjourned to their roofs at night, where they drank beer and swatted flies. It was a tough place; it wasn't San Francisco!Leif: You've coached us in developing a depiction of the ancient Mesopotamian city of [Jr. How accurate is our rendering? What are the big unknowns? James: We can feel pretty confident of the overall city plan. But the locations of the individual buildings are largely speculativeoutside the religious center. Archaeologists tend to focus on the ziggurat and its subsidiary buildings because these are the elements that make a city unique.We know the streets were winding and narrow, much like old Middle Eastern cities today. Rivers were the most important element of the landscape because they were the source of water. We know all cities had harbors boat traffic was the major means of transportation. Yet we don't always know where the city walls were. Our view is like a soft-focus picture, one taken with a little Vaseline on the lens. That's how we see all of this; we have to be careful about drawing lines too sharply.Nothing the size of Mesopotamian cities can be fully excavated. It's economically impossible. What we have to do is sample a site and hope that our evidence is representative. Leif: Would a lunar eclipse, like that on June 27, 1954 B.C., have had special significance in Babylon, politically or otherwise? James: That is really hard to answer. We get astrology our newspaper or Internet astrology from the Babylonians. Their view of the heavens was scholarly. They collected data on celestial events and waited to see what would happen. And then, to their minds, they would make a logical connection between the celestial event and the terrestrial event. They would write it down. So, by the end of Babylonian civilization, records had been kept for nearly 2,000 years. That's really an astonishing thing itself.The Babylonians probably got a little shiver when an eclipse occurrcd something bad was going to happen. But they wouldn't have just said, "Uh-oh, the king is going to die." They'd have compared the details of the eclipse with records of earlier eclipses and, like scholars everywhere, they'd have spent a lot of time arguing about what it all meant.8 July 2000 1 Sky & Telescope