Once on site, Herodotus collects information. He would like to know in particular how the inhabitants went about constructing such a monumental city. First off, they explain to him, they dug ditches and then shaped and baked the earth into bricks. And that’s how they began, by building the walls of Babylon: layers of bricks cemented with bitumen and separated at every thirtieth course by lattices of woven reeds. The reeds aren’t a problem, they can be found just about everywhere; as for the bitumen, no need to look far for that: eight days’ journey on foot from the city, the Is, a small affluent of the Euphrates, spits out gobs of it at its source.
As much an explorer as he is a historian, Herodotus also assures us that the city’s ramparts are so wide that a four-horse chariot may pass along the top. There again we’re not much enlightened, however, for Ctesias of Cnidus — physician to the king of Persia, whose court spends several months a year in Babylon — claims for his part that two chariots can pass each other there without any difficulty. Strabo will say the same thing, but Diodorus of Sicily cites several authors who estimate that as many as six of these quadrigae could travel abreast there. Such increasing extravagance cannot be taken seriously anymore, so again, let’s move on. In any case, these outer ramparts designed to enclose the city, to absolutely armor-plate it, are backed up by other high walls, just as solid but a little less wide.
At the heart of one of the two sectors of Babylon is the palace of the king; at the heart of the other is a temple devoted to the principal deity and above which a tower supports another tower surmounted by a third tower and so on, up to eight towers girdled by a spiral ramp rising to an oratory furnished with a golden table and a bed. No one spends the night in this bed except, Herodotus is solemnly assured, the principal deity himself in the company of a local woman, but these hearsay stories — the explorer doesn’t believe a word of them. As for the great temple of this god, we won’t dwell on the tons of gold in its furnishings (throne, pedestal, statues) and the tons of incense burned every year for his festival and the two altars for animal sacrifice — one for young animals, another for older ones — and the huge quantities of offerings given by private individuals: forty liters of wine, fifty liters of flour, forty ewes, every day.
Let’s keep going, for it’s easy to imagine that Herodotus is exaggerating again about these offerings, unless, having acquired only the barest rudiments of Akkadian, he has not clearly understood what was explained to him during his stay in Babylon. As it happens, these offerings appear on the contrary rather meager when compared to the daily menu prepared, not far away and during the same period, for other local gods (648 liters of barley and spelt for the making of bread, cakes, and pancakes; 648 liters of choice dates, premium dates, dried figs, and raisins; 21 fine barley-fed sheep, 4 milk-fed superlative sheep, 25 ordinary sheep, 2 oxen, 1 suckling calf, 8 lambs, 20 turtledoves, 3 geese, 5 superlative ducks fed on poultry mash, 2 ordinary ducks, 3 duck eggs, and 3 ostrich eggs, all of this washed down with 216 liters of beer and wine) and therefore served, every day, in the temples of Uruk, a city 125 miles to the southeast of Babylon and likewise built on the shores of the Euphrates.
Swift, wide, and deep, the Euphrates cuts Babylon into two sectors in which the straight thoroughfares, running parallel or perpendicular to the river’s course on a grid layout, are bordered by houses of three or four stories, the roofs of which, in a country unused to rain, are not made of hard materials. Within the city, the Euphrates flows between high walls and all streets leading to the river gain access to the embankments through portals of the same bronze from which the great city gates were cast. Impetuous as well, capricious, subject to worrying floods, the Euphrates had posed a few problems for Babylon that Herodotus asserts were solved by the two queens Semiramis and Nitocris, one after the other. As for these queens, to begin with, although the reign of Semiramis is a familiar story, one cannot say the same for Nitocris, whose existence is much hazier, even though she is the one in the libretto of Handel’s Belshazzar who urges the more historically secure Balthazar to consult the prophet Daniel. There also appears to have been a phenomenon peculiar to Babylonian royalty: the queens were said to be the ones who, in male dress, wielded power, controlled construction, and waged war, while a number of effeminate and lazy kings preferred lives of indolence and debauchery, Sardanapalus being the model of this genre.
In any case, as the story goes, first the pugnacious and construction-minded Semiramis had great embankments built on the plain near Babylon to control the flooding of the Euphrates. Later, Nitocris built dikes to make the straight-flowing Euphrates more tortuous — sinuous enough to wind three times past the same village — in order to slow down its waters, confine them to the riverbed, and thus prevent flooding in the countryside. Then Nitocris had a vast artificial lake dug upstream of the city to absorb any overflow from the Euphrates. By chance — or not at all by chance — this lake and these river bends play a defensive role: they complicate the job for neighboring peoples suspected of taking too close an interest in Babylon by prolonging their spies’ journeys down the Euphrates, forcing them to take several detours at the end of which they must emerge, exposed to all eyes, upon the lake.
This supposed queen Nitocris, whom Herodotus is perhaps confusing with the wife of Nebuchadnezzar — or even with Nebuchadnezzar himself — took advantage of these projects to also simplify traffic in the city. Since the riverbanks were unstable, folks had to cross from one half of the city to the other by boat, which wasn’t always so convenient. So while the queen was diverting the Euphrates to fill up the new lake, thus drying up the riverbed dividing Babylon for a while, she set to work there. She lined the Euphrates’s banks within the city and the landing places at the river gates with baked bricks to make the comings and goings of the citizens much easier.
After this, eagerly continuing her urban improvements, Nitocris joined the two halves of the city with a bridge more than a hundred yards long made of stone blocks bound together with clamps of iron and lead — stone blocks she’d had cut during the digging of the lake and brought down from the north, for there is nothing of a mineral nature around Babylon but clay, sand, and mud. Once this work was done, the Euphrates was released into its former bed and the citizens pronounced themselves delighted with this new bridge, of which, for safety’s sake, only the piers were made of stone. Again, for safety, square wooden platforms were laid out across these piers during the day and then removed at night so that nocturnal prowlers from the newer western sector could not steal from people asleep in the eastern neighborhoods.
After the Euphrates resumed flowing, river traffic returned to the city. Well, in Babylon, the boats are really unlike any others and they amaze Herodotus, who has never seen the like. And in fact they are round, with neither stem nor stern, and covered all in leather. Constructed in the north, where there are trees, once their framework has been woven of willow branches, sheathed in skins, and those then stuffed with straw, they are launched to float at the mercy of the river. Their main cargo is jars of wine, accompanied by a donkey and two men with paddles standing upright to steer the boat. These boats being of various sizes, Herodotus claims that the largest can carry up to thirteen tons, which seems like a lot. Only another kind of boat, a raft floated by large buoys, can bear such a weight, but the explorer doesn’t mention this craft in his notes, in his zeal, perhaps, to astonish his readers with his report of round boats. And when these reach Babylon, the men sell the wine, the straw, the willow wood, and then load the skins on the donkey and walk back home to start all over again.