Babylon: Esagila and Etemenanki

Three arguments attach to Babylon and each is usually stated too confidently.

The tower. Etemenanki was a real ziggurat, rebuilt to enormous scale by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, and it is the most plausible thing Genesis 11 has in mind. That is as far as it goes. The biblical narrative is a short theological story about human presumption and the scattering of languages; it names no king, gives no date, and describes no architecture. Babylonian sources describe the building and say nothing about a confusion of tongues. The connection is one of setting, not of reporting, and the popular treatment that reads Genesis as an eyewitness account of Etemenanki's construction has the relationship backwards.

The gate. Robert Koldewey excavated from 1899 to 1917 and shipped the glazed brick of the Ishtar Gate and a section of the Processional Way to Berlin, where they were reconstructed inside the Pergamon Museum in the 1930s. This was done under Ottoman-era permits, which is the legal argument for retention, and it removed the single most recognisable object of Mesopotamian civilisation from the country that produced it, which is the argument against. Iraq has requested its return. The German position has been that the gate as displayed is a museum reconstruction incorporating substantial new material and could not be moved intact, a technical answer to a political question.

The base. In April 2003 Coalition forces established Camp Alpha on the site. Over the following months helicopter landing zones were built and used, trenches and revetments were cut, heavy vehicles moved across archaeological deposits, and thousands of sandbags and earth-filled barriers were packed with soil taken from the site itself, soil containing pottery and brick fragments, which destroys the context that makes such material informative. Sections of the Processional Way were damaged by tracked vehicles, and fragments were broken from the dragon reliefs of the Ishtar Gate. UNESCO documented the damage in a 2009 assessment, and the episode became the standard modern example of military occupation of a heritage site.

Between these sits Saddam Hussein's reconstruction, begun in the 1980s, which raised new walls directly on ancient foundations using bricks stamped with his own name in deliberate imitation of Nebuchadnezzar's practice. It damaged the archaeology and is now a stratum of it, and it complicates every conservation decision taken since, because removing it would destroy evidence of its own period.

Babylon was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2019, after a long delay in which the reconstruction and the military damage were both cited as obstacles.

Babylon's most famous legendary garden may never actually have grown in Babylon at all, and its most recent physical damage came from a modern army parking heavy vehicles on top of the ruins.

A garden that might belong to a different city

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the traditional Seven Wonders of the ancient world, are not confirmed by any Babylonian archaeological or administrative record discovered at the site itself, leading some scholars to argue the gardens may actually have existed at Nineveh, under the Assyrian king Sennacherib, with the description later misattributed to Babylon by classical Greek writers working from secondhand and garbled sources.

Rebuilt with a ruler's name on the bricks

Saddam Hussein's government undertook a large-scale reconstruction of parts of Babylon in the 1980s, using modern bricks stamped with his own name in imitation of the ancient practice of Nebuchadnezzar II, a project widely criticised by archaeologists for imposing modern, historically inaccurate construction directly onto and over fragile ancient remains.

Damaged again by a military base

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, coalition forces established a military base directly on and around the ruins, and subsequent assessments documented damage from heavy vehicle movement, levelling and excavation for defensive works, adding a very recent chapter of harm to a site whose ancient fabric was already compromised by earlier reconstruction efforts.