Indeed, there were some among his subjects who claimed that the horticultural traditions of the region stretched all the way back to the beginning of time itself. Beyond the wall that encircled the blossom-scented air of the royal gardens, amid the immense agglomeration of settlements that sprawled for miles along the banks of the Tigris, there lived people who believed that once, shortly after the making of the heavens and the earth, all of Ctesiphon, and far beyond it, had been a paradise. “And the Lord God,” it was recorded in their scriptures, “planted a garden in Eden, in the east.”76 Prior to that, under cover of a mist such as still often rose up from the Tigris, He had taken mud, and fashioned out of it, not bricks, not a city, but a man. The first man who had ever lived, in fact: “Adam,” which meant, in the language of the people who told the story, “Earth.”
The Jews, however, were not natives of Mesopotamia. Rather, they traced both their name and their origins back to a vanished kingdom—Judah—that had lain just inland from the Mediterranean Sea, some five hundred miles to the west. A fair distance, it might be thought—and all the more so because the directest route cut across burning and near-impassable sand. However, by taking a slightly longer course, along the arc of a well-watered crescent—northwards from Mesopotamia and then curving back south—it was possible to travel from the banks of the Tigris via a succession of cities, rather than across the open desert, and arrive in Judah within a matter of months. Eleven hundred years before the time of Khusrow, this had proved sufficient to doom the tiny kingdom’s independence. In 586 BC, a vast Mesopotamian army had descended upon its capital, a temple-topped city named Jerusalem, and put it to the torch. The wretched kingdom’s elite had been carted off into exile. Their god—who was believed by the Jews not only to have chosen them as the objects of his especial favour, but also to have been the creator of the entire universe—seemed to have abandoned them for good.
A thousand years on, however, and it was not the Jews who had vanished from Mesopotamia, but the very memory of the conquerors who had first hauled them there in chains. Preserved in the Jewish scriptures were the visions of a man named Daniel, said to have been one of the original exiles from Jerusalem. In a dream, he had seen a tempestuous sea, out of which had emerged “four great beasts.”77 These monsters, according to an angel who interpreted the dream for the prophet, were four great kingdoms that were destined to inherit the earth, until, at the end of time, “the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, for ever and ever.”78 That Daniel’s vision had been a true one, and that the course of history was indeed to be interpreted as a succession of mighty empires, each one consigning its predecessor to oblivion, was more manifest in Mesopotamia, perhaps, than anywhere else on earth: for the land was an entire graveyard of abandoned capitals. Its two great rivers, rather than flowing obediently within their banks, were like restless serpents, shaking their coils with such sporadic violence that entire cities were left high and dry, or else submerged and returned to mud. The Jews of Ctesiphon, when they wandered along the banks of the Tigris, could see the shells of abandoned buildings, partly dissolved by the turbid waters: remnants of Veh-Ardashir, the first capital raised by the House of Sasan and built according to a perfectly circular plan, but which, upon an abrupt and calamitous shifting of the river’s course, had been sliced in two. In turn, of course, beyond Veh-Ardashir, there loomed the sand-throttled ruins of Seleucia, its harbour choked by silt and reeds; and beyond them, some forty miles across the mud steppes, an even more battered monument to human vanity, a place that was now “nothing more than mounds and stones and decay” but once, long before, had been the greatest city in the world.79 Abandoned by the Euphrates, emptied of its population and despoiled of its brickwork, the name of the ruin was barely to be heard now on people’s lips. The Jews, however, did speak it. They had not forgotten the vanished city, nor the glamour and the terror of its reputation. They still remembered Babylon.
As well they might have done—for it was a king of Babylon who had burned their capital, enslaved their ancestors, and first embodied for the Jews that peculiar and terrifying intoxication which was the lust to rule all of mankind: “The nations drank of her wine; therefore the nations are mad.”80 Conversely, in the ruin of such a city, there had been offered to the Jews a precious reassurance: that there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces by their divine protector. All the convulsive rhythms of history, which over time had served to offer now one nation, and now another, the sceptre of the world, bore witness to nothing, in the final reckoning, save the purposes of the One God of the Jews. That was why, in the heartlands of Mesopotamia, it was the Jews themselves who still maintained the sacred habits of their worship, while all the temples of Babylon had “become a heap of ruins, the haunt of jackals, a horror and a hissing, without inhabitant.”81
Only in a single city—one that lay right on the margins of the one-time Babylonian world, at the uppermost point of the Fertile Crescent’s arc, just beyond the frontier with Rome—did “the ancient faith”82 of Mesopotamia continue to flicker: for in Harran, they still worshipped the ancient gods. The landscape beyond its walls was filled with idols: strangely preserved, withered corpses, both animal and human, were wedged into fissures above mountain roads; eerie figures framed by peacock feathers and crescent moons stood guard over desert lakes. The mightiest idol of all, however, and the glory of Harran itself, was a colossal statue of the city’s patron, Sin—the “Lord of the Moon.” Annually, the god’s worshippers would hoist him on their shoulders, carry him from his temple, parade him all around town, and then return him in triumph to his sanctuary on a barge. The rituals of this festival—the akitu—were of a quite staggering antiquity, and had once been practised across Mesopotamia; nor did the priests of Sin, who conducted them with a grave and sombre sense of reverence, ever forget it.83 Yet, in truth, the same obduracy with which the people of Harran clung to their ancient cult served only to emphasise their freakishness. In Mesopotamia, the balance of power had long since swung against any notion that the moon, the sun and the stars might conceivably be deities. The Harranian idols—demonic though they often seemed to nervous visitors—were the merest flotsam, left beached by a retreating tide. The Jews, whose prophets had long foretold the doom of all gods save their own, found a particular vindication in this: “By the purple and linen that rot upon them, you will know that they are not gods; and they will finally be consumed, and be a reproach in the land.”84
Nevertheless, for all the mingled scorn and dread with which they cast their backward stare upon the primordial traditions of Mesopotamia, the Jews had never ceased to be fascinated by them. The land that had served the first man and woman as an earthly paradise had also provided humanity with the wellsprings of its learning—a precious legacy from an otherwise vanished world. Just as the Tigris had turned all the grandeur of Veh-Ardashir to mud, a great flood had submerged the whole earth and dissolved all traces of Eden. Had a man named Noah not been given forewarning of the calamity, and built a massive ark, then life itself would have been obliterated. However, not every trace of the world before the Flood had been lost: for Noah’s descendants, digging amid the mud of Mesopotamia, had stumbled across a buried cache of books.85 These, when they were deciphered, had been found to contain the wisdom of the earliest generations of men—necromancers who had lived before the Flood. The consequence had been the reputation that had served to grace Mesopotamia ever since—not only among the Jews, but among peoples everywhere—as the land “where the true art of divination first made its appearance.”86