Babylon

Babylon is the name before all the others: the city of Hammurabi's law and Nebuchadnezzar's walls, of the Hanging Gardens that no one has found and the tower that the Bible made a story of, where Alexander died — and it lies eighty-five kilometres south of Baghdad on a branch of the Euphrates, beside the town of Hillah, a UNESCO site since 2019 and a place that has been dug, rebuilt, garrisoned and left in turn. The Ishtar Gate that stands there is a replica, the original of glazed bulls and dragons having gone to Berlin in the 1900s; the Processional Way runs south from it between walls of brick lions; the Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt on its foundations in the 1980s with bricks stamped with Saddam Hussein's name, and his own palace looks down from the hill he raised beside it; the Lion of Babylon, a basalt beast over a fallen man, stands where it was found; the temple of Ninmakh, the Greek theatre and the marshy square where Etemenanki — the tower — once rose complete the walk. Kerbala and Najaf, the shrine cities, are an hour west and south; Kish, older still, is a few kilometres east.

The traveller who has cause to be there comes down from Baghdad in the morning with a driver and a guide — the ruins are read, not seen — and walks the site in three hours: the gate and the Way, the palace's throne room and courtyards, the lion, the temple, the theatre, the hill of Saddam's palace for the view over the whole plain and the river; a tea at the site's café and lunch of masgouf, the split river carp grilled by the fire, in Hillah; and, with the afternoon, on to Kerbala for the shrines at dusk, or back to the capital by evening. The museum's best pieces are in Baghdad, and the traveller sees them the day before or after, which is the right order.

The Guide's honesty, gently: Iraq has opened — the visa is issued on arrival for many, the roads south of Baghdad run through checkpoints that are courteous and slow, and Babylon receives a trickle of visitors who are welcomed as a rarity —, and the prudent traveller checks conditions with their chancellery the week they go, travels with a licensed operator or a driver who knows the day's road, and keeps the itinerary modest; the summer is a furnace; the site's damage — from the rebuilding, from the base of 2003, from time — is part of what one sees; and to stand at the Ishtar Gate on the Processional Way where the New Year's procession walked two and a half thousand years ago is one of the oldest feelings a traveller can have, which is why the Guide holds this page with a steady hand and a soft voice.