The Babylon Idol

  She reddened. ‘No need for sarcasm. I just meant—’

  ‘It’s okay. It has been a while since I did any of that kind of reading.’

  ‘Then let me explain. We’re concerned here with the ancient text that belongs to the Ketuvim, or writings, of the Tanakh, that is to say the Hebrew Bible. In versions of the Christian Old Testament it’s grouped with the Major Prophets and is commonly known as the Book of Daniel. Traditionally it’s attributed to Daniel himself, a noble Jew who was a captive exile in the ancient kingdom of Babylon, though most modern scholars now believe the author to be pseudonymous.’

  ‘All right,’ Ben said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘First, let me fill you in on the background. The kingdom of Babylonia, as you may or may not know, was a powerful and enduring historic empire that occupied part of ancient Mesopotamia, in what nowadays covers much of Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and extends into Iran and Turkey. Babylon’s origins date all the way back to the Bronze Age, and it was ruled over by a long succession of dynasties over the course of many centuries. Perhaps its most famous, or infamous, ruler was Nebuchadnezzar the Second, who took the throne in 605 BC. He was an aggressive and ruthless empire builder who reconstructed the ancient capital and sought to extend his kingdom’s influence far and wide. At the height of Babylon’s glory under his reign, the city was said to have covered an enormous area, bigger than modern-day London. Inside its giant walls, which according to the historian Herodotus were some sixty metres high with huge brass gates and watchtowers all around, were magnificent royal palaces and gardens, even a grand observatory where the Babylonian astrologers made their celestial observations.’

  Ben drank more wine.

  Anna went on, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s foreign policy was just as ambitious. He crushed and swallowed up many smaller kingdoms, waged war against the Egyptians, and also attacked Israel where he succeeded in taking Jerusalem, sacked the Temple of Solomon and deported much of the city’s population to Babylon. The Book of Daniel relates the story of three young Hebrew prisoners whom Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers had captured and brought back as slaves. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah.’

  ‘Better known as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,’ Ben said.

  Anna looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, those were the names given to them by their captors, to facilitate their integration into Babylonian culture. But how do you—?’

  ‘I studied theology, in another life. That’s why I said my Bible knowledge might be a little rusty. Once upon a time, I could have quoted you chapter and verse.’

  He might as well have told her he was from the planet Zog. She stared at him in amazement. ‘No.’

  ‘Told you, I’m full of surprises,’ he said. ‘In fact there was a time when that was going to be my life. The church. Reverend Ben Hope, living in an ivied vicarage with a bored wife, two kids, an estate car and a yellow dog. Can’t you see it?’

  ‘I had no idea. I would never have taken you for a religious person.’

  ‘Who said I was?’

  ‘You don’t believe?’

  ‘Probably not, any more.’

  ‘But you did, once. Nobody would seek a career in the church if they didn’t believe in God.’

  ‘That was a long time ago, Anna.’

  ‘And yet, you haven’t forgotten the Bible.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ he said. ‘As I recall, the story from Daniel, Chapters two and three, goes something like this: in the second year of King Neb’s reign, he was said to have dreamed of a massive statue made of precious metals. The dream inspired him to create a huge golden idol, which he had erected in the Plain of Dura, and commanded that everyone should bow down to it. When the three Hebrew captives Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused on the grounds that they worshipped only their one true God, in his kindly way the king ordered them to be thrown into a superheated furnace, supposed to have been seven times hotter than normal fire.’

  ‘Impressive, so far,’ Anna said.

  ‘But God sent an angel to protect His faithful, and they escaped completely unburned from the flames, which impressed King Neb so greatly that he bestowed all kinds of honours on them and decreed that anyone who spoke out against God in future would be torn limb from limb. Probably the all-time fastest conversion to Christianity recorded in the Bible, though Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t famous for his consistency.’

  ‘Bravo. You know the story very well.’

  ‘Let’s call it what it is,’ Ben said. ‘A myth. I’m no archaeologist but even I know that no real-life trace of Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol has ever been found. Surely you don’t believe any of it is true?’

  ‘That’s not the attitude I’d have expected from a theologian.’

  ‘Maybe I’m not famous for my consistency either,’ Ben said.

  Anna shrugged. ‘Legend, myth, call it what you want. Of course, these things are subject to all kinds of possible interpretation, and scholars have picked it all apart for so long that nobody knows what to believe any longer. But interpretation aside, what if there were a core of truth to the story?’

  ‘You mean, what if there really had been a golden idol, just like the golden statue of Zeus that Theo Kambasis spent his life looking for?’

  Anna said, ‘Well, yes, why shouldn’t there have been? Is it so improbable? I mean, if it’s possible to accept for a fact that Phidias’ Zeus existed, then how justifiable is it simply to dismiss the Babylon idol as pure fiction? They both date from roughly the same time period, give or take a century or so. The technology of the time may have been crude in many respects, but those ancient cultures were nonetheless capable of incredible feats of artistic and engineering ingenuity. Take another of Phidias’ lost works, for instance, the colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena that once stood in the Parthenon in Athens. There’s a reproduction of her in Centennial Park, Nashville, Tennessee. At thirteen metres in height, it’s the largest indoor sculpture in the Western world. I went there just to stand next to it and get a sense of the size of the thing. It was mind-blowing. Now imagine the sheer mass of a statue which, if the Biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar’s idol is accurate, measured—’

  ‘Sixty cubits high by six cubits wide,’ Ben finished for her. ‘Or so the legend tells.’

  ‘That’s twenty-seven metres in height, more than double the size of Phidias’ colossal Athena, as tall as a nine-storey building.’

  ‘Hard to hide something that big,’ Ben said. ‘You’d have thought they would have dug it up by now, if it existed at all.’

  ‘It’s more than just conjecture,’ she said firmly. ‘I take my research very seriously, evaluate the evidence as objectively as a scientist and jump to no conclusions without proof.’

  ‘You’re telling me you have proof?’

  ‘I’m working on it. There are a lot of challenges involved in trying to shed light on what was really a very hectic and crazy time in Babylon’s history. When Nebuchadnezzar died and his rule passed to his son Amel-Marduk in 562 BC, the new king reigned only a short time, giving way to a succession of weak rulers who paved the way for Babylon’s fall just twenty-three years later, in 539 BC, to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, leader of the Achaenimid Empire, the biggest empire in the ancient world, which then assimilated Babylon. Somewhere in the middle of all these turbulent changes, the fabled golden idol vanished – as you say, without a trace.’

  ‘There you have it,’ Ben said. ‘End of story.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Anna said.

  Chapter 27

  ‘I know you don’t believe me,’ Anna said. ‘That’s your privilege. But a good researcher never accepts defeat so easily, and we don’t like mysteries getting the better of us. So, as ever, we begin our hunt by going to the records. Thankfully, even though it was so long ago, that period of Babylonian history is very well documented. Since the nineteenth century archaeologists have uncovered thousands of business documents in Babylonia, written on clay tablets in the Akkadian language. Any trading bu
siness of any importance would have teams of scribes employed to chisel away all day long at flat sheets of stone, just like secretarial staff typing notes. These ancient records are typically found in large collections relating to the business transactions of a single extended family, often covering several generations’ worth of accounts. Loans, mortgages, contracts, receipts, everything, together with dates of when those transactions were made or agreements struck.’

  ‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘Nothing changes. People in history were just the same as people today.’

  ‘Which is exactly what my book was originally going to be about,’ Anna explained. ‘A new angle on those ancient times, exploring the human hearts and minds beneath the dust of history, revealing who these people really were, bringing them to life for today’s reader. At least, that was the idea I was working on to begin with. To that end I spent two months of last year in Iraq, in the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, adjacent to the site of ancient Babylon itself. The area has been something of a war zone in modern times.’

  ‘Just a little bit,’ Ben said, with a thin smile.

  ‘But since 2009 the provincial government of Babil has reopened the ancient site to tourism, and archaeologists and cultural organisations were able to resume the restoration efforts that had long been impossible thanks to political and military upheavals. I spent my time working with a team of dig volunteers from all over the world, supervised by a Turkish archaeologist and specialist in ancient languages. It was very physical and exhausting work.’

  Now it was Ben’s turn to be surprised, at the idea of the refined, elegant and ever-polished Anna Manzini getting stuck into the grinding heat and dust of a Middle East archaeological excavation, shovel in hand, knee-deep in sand and rock, sweating under the blaze of the same Iraqi sun that had scorched him and his SAS comrades so mercilessly, back in the day.

  ‘But so rewarding,’ Anna continued. ‘Especially when we uncovered a hitherto-unknown store of ancient Babylonian clay tablets that had lain buried for over two thousand years under the sand. It was when we began to catalogue them and the translation work got underway that I first realised the implications of what we had discovered. Until then, so little had been known about the Muranu family.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘The Muranus were a merchant dynasty who were active from around 600 BC right through until the fall of Babylon to the Persians. Thanks to this discovery, it’s been possible to piece together a great deal of detail about their business affairs. They made their start as rural food merchants, going out into the countryside to buy supplies such as grain, dates, onions and so on, then selling the goods in the city. From such humble beginnings they might never have flourished, but this was a golden age for Babylon, when the economy was booming, the city expanding, fortunes were being made and the spirit of the times was highly optimistic. When King Nebuchadnezzar drafted in thousands of workers to man the construction sites for ambitious new projects like the Ishtar Gate and the famous Hanging Gardens, the Muranu family saw an opening and became caterers to the armies of labourers. The profits they made from feeding the workforce they reinvested into farmland and urban real estate, allowing them to diversify still further by going into manufacturing. As they grew wealthier they also became important moneylenders, making loans of silver for interest rates of as much as twenty per cent a year. The daughters of the Muranu clan married other important businessmen and city officials, so that they gradually worked their way into the highest echelons of the state. Thanks to these connections they received tax breaks, as well as access to state-owned ships and river ports on the Euphrates, on whose banks the city of Babylon was built. The Euphrates runs all through Syria and Iraq and joins up with the Tigris near Basra, becoming the great Shatt-al-Arab River before it empties into the Persian Gulf.’

  ‘I know where the Euphrates is,’ Ben said.

  Anna replied, ‘Then you can appreciate how such a trading route allowed the Muranu family to become even richer, by distributing all kinds of goods throughout the region. Now, as I said, we know a lot about the Muranus from the cache of clay tablets that were found. But one tablet is of particular interest. It dates from 539 BC, which of course was a significant year in Babylon’s history.’

  ‘Refresh my memory.’

  ‘By then, Babylon was in terrible disarray politically, economically and militarily. It had been just twenty-three years since the death of King Nebuchadnezzar, who for all his faults was an effective ruler, made the kingdom strong and was adored by the mercantile class. Since his son Amel-Marduk took power in 562, the Muranu family had been watching anxiously as the economy began to slowly unravel under a succession of bad rulers, none of whom lasted very long.’

  ‘Sounds like present-day Europe,’ Ben said, swallowing the last of his wine.

  ‘You said it,’ Anna chuckled. ‘What changes?’

  At that point, Talia came to collect their dishes. Ben asked if he could have another bottle of wine, which she brought a moment later. Anna declined a refill of her glass. As Ben got to work on the fresh bottle, she went on:

  ‘But things reached a low point with the rise to the throne of King Nabonidus after his predecessor, the child king Labashi-Marduk, was murdered just months after his inauguration. Nabonidus was a lousy king, almost universally disliked, especially as he spent much of his seventeen-year reign absent from the kingdom, in self-imposed exile in the oasis area of Tayma in present-day Saudi Arabia, having little to do with his kingdom and leaving everything in the control of his son and coregent Belshazzar.’

  ‘Belshazzar, as in, Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall in blood,’ Ben interjected. ‘Daniel, Chapter five.’

  Anna nodded. ‘The same. Nabonidus’ neglect of Babylonian affairs was much resented by the general public, the priesthood, and of course the merchant families. They were right to be anxious, because all the while King Cyrus of Persia was growing ever stronger and his shadow hung over Babylon. Invasion and war were coming, and the elite knew it. There was talk of evacuation, as many people were convinced that the Persians would enslave or execute the entire population of the city. Belshazzar, a strong warrior but a worthless politician, began to panic. Babylon’s gold reserves were at a critical low and he desperately needed to raise money to fight off the threat of the Persians.’

  ‘War is an expensive business, right enough,’ Ben said. ‘Always was, always will be. But what’s so important about this one clay tablet you mentioned?’

  ‘It’s important because it’s one of the very last records from ancient Babylon, prior to the Persian invasion of 539,’ Anna said. ‘Not just one of the last surviving records; one of the actual very last due to its date. And also because it’s so unusual in itself. It’s a legal document, an official contract agreement between Belshazzar and the Muranu family. Unfortunately, it was too damaged to decipher fully, as it was excavated in pieces with several fragments missing that made it impossible to know exactly what the contract specified. We know only that the merchant family were being asked to broker some extremely valuable item from the state treasury, making use of their established civilian transport infrastructure in a way that didn’t tie up limited military resources.’

  ‘But we don’t know what valuable item,’ Ben said.

  ‘It’s not spelled out, but other tablets found with it fill in certain gaps. They describe, in detail, the plans for loading an important and very large item of cargo, to be transported away by boat. The record even shows how many extra slaves had to be taken on to complete the loading, as well as the large number of armed guards hired to protect the cargo en route. Belshazzar presumably couldn’t afford to offer them a proper military escort as he needed every last soldier available to man the defences of the city.’

  ‘I understand. You’re suggesting that this cargo was Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, being sold to raise defence funds?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that a troubled state had to sell o
ff its treasures in times of crisis. Here we are in modern-day Greece, where not too long ago the government were talking about selling off national monuments such as the Acropolis to shore up the crippled economy.’

  ‘Next thing we’ll know, the Chinese will be buying it and carting it off to Beijing, stone by stone,’ Ben said. ‘But the problem with your idea is that no ship at that time would have been able to carry something as massive as a gold statue close on thirty metres in length. It would have sunk before it made it halfway down the Euphrates.’

  ‘This is why I wanted to speak to Theo Kambasis,’ Anna replied. ‘Because I, like you, found it hard to believe that you could just pick up such an object and transport it about. The task would be impossible, even with thousands of slave labourers at one’s disposal. Aside from the problem of finding a ship big enough to carry it, a pure gold statue of that size would be so heavy that it would tend to collapse on itself the moment it was moved. As a metal, gold is extremely dense but comparatively soft, with low tensile strength. Not to mention the fact that it’s very unlikely that enough gold even existed in Babylonia at that time, or even in the world, to fill a mould so large. Only about a hundred and eighty-five thousand tons of gold have been mined in the whole of human history. I pondered all these problems, until I hit on a new theory. One that Kambasis confirmed just a few minutes before he died, that poor man.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That Nebuchadnezzar’s idol could have been created the same way as the colossal statues of Phidias were made during the same era, such as his giant Athena. It’s been estimated that the quantity of gold in the original Athena would have amounted to forty-four talents’ worth. That’s about eleven hundred kilograms, a substantial proportion of the gold reserve of the treasury of Athens but still much lighter than if the statue had been cast solid. What enabled Athena to be transported all the way from Phidias’ workshop in Olympia to the Parthenon was that the builders used a brilliantly inventive modular technique, attaching separate plates to an internal core sculpted out of wood. The method makes it possible to create much larger monuments, which from the outside appear to be solid gold, sometimes combined with ivory and other precious materials. The parts could then be shipped to any destination and assembled there. The modular structure also enabled any section of the statue to be removed and repaired, in case of damage.’ Anna’s eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘Do you see? If the Babylon idol had been created the same way, it could easily have been dismantled for transportation to its new owner.’