The Idea of Babylon

The Idea of Babylon is a study of the intricate and varied processes by which knowledge of the past is constructed, communicated and established in culture. The research brings the history of antiquarianism and archaeology together with cultural history, analysing the development of an archaeological approach within a broad cultural context for the representation of the ancient past that includes art, literature, music and theatre.

The research will examine how the ancient city of Babylon has been perceived and represented bring the in later, predominantly European, culture, together with the history of the site's fascination for travellers, its rediscovery, exploration and finally excavation.

Important areas include the views of Babylon contained in biblical sources; Greek histories; the accounts of medieval and later travellers; fine art, where the Tower of Babel and Belshazzar's Feast in particular have been major themes; literary representations; and antiquarian and archaeological writing themselves. These approaches to the ancient past are based on different epistemologies and produce very different kinds of information and meaning. This study is concerned with the interaction of these many sources, and the disjunctions between them, in the construction of knowledge.

The research will be of interest to specialists in Mesopotamian archaeology for its thorough treatment of these processes in relation to Babylon, but also has a much wider relevance to those with an interest in the history of ideas and the relationship between scientific research and cultural life. The completed book will make an original contribution to the study of the history of archaeological thought, exploring in detail the hybrids that are created when knowledge of the past derived from, e.g., biblical and classical sources combines with empirical research in the representation of the past. It will be argued that such revealing hybrids are neither aberrations nor the exception to the rule in the construction of knowledge about the past, but rather are frequently occurring and often influential in both popular and academic thought.

The book will also consider the recent history of the physical site of Babylon and its representation. This important aspect of the work will analyse the impact of serious damage to Iraq's cultural heritage on future archaeological research and in wider cultural terms. In this way the study will aim to allow the scale of Iraq's and the world's loss to be appreciated in broad context.