The Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel was believed to be based on a real Babylonian temple tower soaring 300 feet - so high it could be seen in neighboring cities. King Nebuchadnezzar II is credited with having created the terraced Hanging Gardens of Babylon some 2,500 years ago, said to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. "So that mankind may gaze on them in wonder"Īt its height, Babylon was the largest city in the world - the capital of the Babylonian empire, with an estimated 200,000 inhabitants. "I would have thought that was an ideal location to create a memory of an event that was here," he says. So stop thinking that's your obstacle to understanding the site and say that's part of its history," he says.Īllen says he would have kept the Polish military watchtower, which was demolished a few years ago, as a reminder of Babylon's more recent military history. "These things that were done to the site, they're irreversible.
But all of the site's more recent scars deserve to be considered part of its cultural heritage, Allen argues. The damage and neglect are part of the reason Babylon has never qualified as a World Heritage Site. The Iraqi oil ministry even ran a pipeline through the site and was only forced to remove it last month, after the antiquities department took the ministry to court. The Polish military, part of the U.S.-led coalition, operated an army base in Babylon, building guard towers and erecting fences. invasion of Iraq in 2003, military helicopters landed right on the site. In the early 20th century, when Iraq was ruled by British mandate, a railway ran through the remains of the ancient city. "The salt gets into the brickwork and it dissolves the brickwork matrix and the bricks just fall apart," explains Allen, crumbling the corner of a brick with his hand. In the 1950s and 1990s, for example, damage was done when mis-sized modern bricks were installed and poured concrete trapped saline groundwater underneath the site.Īmerican conservationist Jeff Allen (center) directs Iraqi technicians laying mortar between ancient bricks at the site of Babylon. The hope is that they will come away with useful skills in a region with high unemployment - along with the desire to help protect Babylon.įor decades, the site has come under repeated threat, even from attempts at restoration. Now, an important part of the program is training local technicians, most of them farmers and laborers from nearby villages. Initially, the goal was to stabilize ancient walls and roofs in danger of collapsing. His current project, funded by the State Department and others, is part of the World Monument Fund's Future of Babylon program, which aims to preserve the site. "You have to look at masonry work a bit differently when you're holding a thousand-year-old brick, and I think they're getting more sensitivity for the materials and respect for the monuments," says Jeff Allen, an American conservationist with the World Monuments Fund, a New York City-based heritage preservation group.Īllen, who oversees the Iraqi trainees, has been working at the Babylon site over the past nine years. We want to work here because we love this city," says Haider Bassim, 29, an Iraqi technician who grew up within the perimeter of the ancient city. The goal is to improve Babylon's prospects of being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation that would help ensure better protection and preservation of the site and encourage future tourism. But below it, the bricks and mortar of one of the ancient world's grandest cities are disintegrating.Īhmed is part of a team of about 10 Iraqi technicians trained by a U.S.-funded project to shore up the brick walls of the ancient site of Babylon, some 50 miles south of Baghdad. The image is so well defined it looks as if it might have been made yesterday instead of more than 2,000 years ago. Mohaned Ahmed is standing on scaffolding at the ancient site of Babylon, dipping water into a bucket and sponging the bricks around a stone relief showing a dragon with a serpent's head. Conservationists now are trying to undo some of that damage. The site was partly reconstructed in the 1950s and 1990s, but in a way that caused damage. Part of what remains of the ceremonial entrance through the walls of the ancient city of Babylon.