Day 4.

After a final breakfast at the Baghdad Hotel I packed my bags and met up with everyone in the lobby, ready to leave Baghdad.


Todays plan was to make our way south to the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon. We would then head west to Al-Ukhaidir Fortress before returning east to the city of Karbala.


Heading out of Baghdad.


After an uneventiful drive south, we arrived outside the entrance to Babylon with a replica of the Ishtar Gate. The original gate was excavated in the early 20th century and was removed and reconstructed at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and where it now still resides.


The Ishtar Gate (both the replica and the real one in Berlin) were constructed from glazed blue bricks, meant to represent lapis lazuli, a deep-blue semi-precious stone that was revered in antiquity, and alternating rows of bas-relief mušḫuššu (dragons), aurochs (a now extinct wild bull), and lions, symbolizing the gods Marduk, Adad, and Ishtar.


And inside where we met up with our local guide, Mohammed. He had studied archaeology both at the local University of Babylon and in the USA.


Mohammed then gave an overview of the Babylon archaeological area. Babylon was a key kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia from the 18th to 6th centuries BC. Unfortunately what remains of the original Babylon is little more than rubble, with the prize pieces long since been carted off to European museums.


In 1983 Saddam Hussein ordered the rebuilding of Babylon. As most Iraqi men were fighting in the bloody Iran-Iraq war, Saddam brought in thousands of Sudanese workers to lay brand new yellow bricks over where the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II (king of Babylon from 605 BC to 562 BC) had stood.


Luckily some of the original brickwork remains, and which was under restoration and maintenance when we visited.


Looking up at an original bas-relief of a mušḫuššu. The fierce looking and mythological hybrid consisted of a scaly dragon with hind legs resembling the talons of an eagle, feline forelegs, a long neck and tail, a horned head and a snake-like tongue.


Looking through a reconstructed archway with Saddam's Summer Palace in the distance. Little was known of the plans of the original Nebuchadnezzar palace so for the reconstruction considerable liberty was taken. The arches in earlier royal palaces in the region were roughly a boxy rectangle, with the height of the arch around twice the width of the entryway. It was decided that the Nebuchadnezzar palace would have been built on an even grander scale, so they simply tripled the height of the archways.


When Saddam toured the reconstruction and when he asked the curators how they knew when the original palace was built, they showed him one of the original bricks stamped with the name of King Nebuchadnezzar II and the construction date, 605 BC.