On the last day of the Christmas and New Year break, I visited the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum. In spite of all the inconveniences, such as the inadequate information the website about the booking system, the overcrowding, and the annoying fatuity of loud remarks passed by my fellow visitors, I enjoyed it. I was fascinated by the original Babylonian sculptures, artefacts and clay tablets, and the astonishing freshness of the colours, 2,500 years later. Too much of the exhibition was devoted to how people have interpreted Babylon in the centuries since, in portrayals of the Tower of Babel, of Daniel in the lions' den or of Belshazzar's Feast. These were interesting, but how could they justify devoting space to a video of Rastafaraians maundering on about their use of the term Babylon? I'm told Berlin does it all much better and more impressively. I must see for myself.
Towards the end is a display about the representation of Babylon in literature and film, with a huge omission, nothing about E Nesbit, whose use of Babylon in Five Children and It was, apart from the bible, the introduction most British children had to the history of that period. I discovered recently that she had lived for a while with her husband, Hubert Bland, at Crowlink, not far from my home.
There's a video shown at the end about the damage to the site under Saddam Hussein and during and after the 2003 invasion. See the London Review of Books for an account by McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, subscription required: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/gibs01_.html
I remembered afterwards how, browsing the green degree subject guides provided in the school library while in the sixth form, I had been attracted by the idea of becoming an Assyriologist. I didn't, for the immature and stupid reason that , at that time, I think the only places to study it were Cambridge and SOAS. Having been brought up there, I desperately wanted to leave Cambridge, unlike my father and his father, who saw nothing odd in going to university in the town where they lived. I doubt, too, if I had the considerable skill at languages required.
