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Published by The Bridge Street Press

ISBN: 978-0-349-12846-7

Copyright © Caroline Campbell 2023

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For John, Isobel and Edward

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1518 the Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarotti visited Pietrasanta in Tuscany, north of Lucca, in the midst of a stormy argument with Pope Leo X. Michelangelo had come to this remote coastal town to source marble for a major commission for the pope, the façade of the Florentine church of San Lorenzo. The two men, born less than a year apart, had known each other since boyhood. San Lorenzo was Leo’s family’s parish church, and the pope was extremely invested in the project. But Pietrasanta was not where Michelangelo wanted to be. He declared to his brother: ‘Trying to tame these mountains and instilling skills here is akin to resurrecting the dead.’ He thought the most suitable stone for his task was a short distance up the coast. The pope disagreed, and in spite of several violent quarrels, Michelangelo was forced to follow his patron’s instructions. It was one of many such incidents in the artist’s long career, and in retrospect we know that he might have spared himself the effort of rage. That’s because the scheme never came to fruition; five hundred years on San Lorenzo is still missing its façade.

Michelangelo’s anger, however, did encourage him to produce another work of art, not that he would necessarily have regarded it as such. On the back of a letter dated 15 March 1518 is a shopping list written in a neat and readable hand. It is accompanied by a remarkable series of sketches, gradually getting bigger in size, of the objects it lists. Presumably Michelangelo’s servant was not able to read perfectly so the drawings made clear what he had to buy. What is preserved, therefore, is the artist’s vision of a simple series of meals for himself and a number of guests. It was Lent, and so meat was off the menu, but Michelangelo’s fish and vegetable dishes promised to be delicious. He wanted to eat tortelli (a stuffed pasta that remains a speciality of the area), anchovies (then just in season) and herring, presumably pickled or smoked, and imported from northern Europe, accompanied by a salad, spinach, fennel and bread rolls, washed down with jugs of wine. The artist was, unsurprisingly, concerned about how the food was to be served. The salad is in a wide, shallow bowl with a slim base, the anchovies’ tails are arranged over the edge of the serving vessel, and the herring is elegantly plated on a large dish.

Even geniuses – and if you subscribe to the concept then Michelangelo undoubtedly was one – had to eat. For all his success, he still had to occupy himself with banal and sometimes tedious detail, and he cared about it very deeply. The artist who enables us to soar and fall with his imagination, from the creation of mankind on the Sistine Chapel ceiling to the imprisoned souls of his marble slaves, spent a lot of his life arguing over money, how he would support his extended family, complaining about colleagues, fighting with his employers and dealing with his shopping. Artists, like everyone, have to live with circumstances that aren’t of their choosing or making, and events out of their control (although many endured far worse than not being able to have their first choice of marble).

To read most histories of art, the reader might be forgiven for supposing that great artists weren’t human, or weren’t bound by the same constraints that limit all of us – money, people and external events. Instead, these histories imply that artists’ exceptional talent gave them the opportunity to follow their own single-minded trajectory and mission, as if they were gods rather than mere mortals. Also, that loosely connected by influences, training or style, artists’ careers follow in neat relationship to each other as part of an overarching and progressive narrative defined by period labels – such as Medieval and Baroque – and filled with ‘isms’ – Mannerism, Impressionism, Cubism, Modernism, Post-Modernism. Of course, these period divisions and terms are helpful, as they enable us to set artists in historical context and to categorise them, or see that a number of individuals shared a purpose and motivation. They can show that artistic expression has tended to follow particular patterns and fashions at different moments in time. Yet their usefulness should not blind us to the problems they bring.

One of the most persistent is the idea that you need to know these words and concepts to understand art. You don’t actually need anything but your eyes or your mind to start thinking about a work of art. Art isn’t a novelty, but something that has existed for as long as there have been humans. It’s part of the fabric of our lives, including the buildings we live and work in, the streets we walk along, the objects we use from morning to night. We are all highly trained in looking at art and analysing its meanings. The terminology of art is further limited, moreover, because it tends to apply to art made in the Western world, and to objects that were made as art for its own sake, including paintings or sculpture, rather than with a functional purpose like eating or drinking, as is the case for many ceramics and furniture, or for wider cultural, social or religious purposes.

Looking at artistic style in isolation can also be problematic as it suggests that artists didn’t think about what they were representing in their image, object or building, nor about its function. Context – what things mean and what things are for – is as important as how things look. Take Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia, first exhibited publicly at the Salon in Paris in 1865. One analysis of this work would emphasise Manet’s expressive brushstrokes, his liking for lively, sketchy pictorial surfaces, and his interest in the work of earlier gestural painters like Velázquez and Titian, whose paintings he admired and studied, particularly those of beautiful women. All this is true. But it’s the subject Manet tackled that made Olympia infamous in his own time, more than the way he painted it. At the Salon it was hung high up the wall so that critical visitors wouldn’t damage it. By convention, art was for ideals, not reality, and some were disgusted that Manet had depicted a real woman, Victorine Meurent, in the persona of a goddess, with the accoutrements of a prostitute. The white artificial light made her face look sour and her skin old. She and the picture were ugly, not alluring. If Victorine was meant to represent a modern Venus, goddess of love, this suggested the corruption and lack of sensibilities of contemporary society.

In this book I’ve wanted to bring style, meaning and context together, to write a history that has the material world at its heart. Some historians remain unconvinced that buildings, objects and images provide useful evidence for the past. They worry about their subjectivity, in comparison to the written or spoken word. But there’s no such thing as an objective source, and documents are no less partisan or subjective than any other artefact made by humans. Art gains its power from its ability to fuel and drive our emotions. Because it is able to appeal to our inner beings, it can give solace and connection, linking us to people and experiences far removed from us by time or distance. Just as emotively, it can foment difference and dissent, intensifying our sense of dislocation, rage or violence. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles has particularly sensitised me to this issue. Art is dangerous, and it can influence us in eloquent and sometimes uncontrollable ways. But it is also uniquely able to connect us to the peoples and worlds of the past. Handling a ceramic bowl, looking at a painting or standing in a building makes us physically aware of those who have done the same before us, and of our similarities as much as our differences.

Art, like life, is about the interaction of people and society, and artists have always had to interact with the world at large. The wider conditions in which they’ve found themselves – including their difficulties and frustrations – have provided the stimulus for their artistic production. And although art has been made everywhere, it’s been particularly connected to cities. Today, over half the world’s population live in large urban centres, and by 2050 – if present trends continue – more than two-thirds of us will be city dwellers. Life in cities is not always civilised, but since the eighth millennia BCE they’ve been beacons for creativity and artistic dynamism. Cities bring people together from many places and backgrounds; they engender a spirit of competition; and the wealth concentrated within them gives people the opportunity to make and patronise art. Nowhere do we find more stimulation or interaction. Whether we love cities or loathe them, we can all identify with them.

This book brings together the stories of fifteen cities at moments in their history that coincided with intense creative activity, with fifteen of the qualities and emotions that make us human. It aims to explain what these cities were like and the forces that shaped them. In each chapter I have chosen a few objects that exemplify the artistic achievements of the particular place and time. My motivation has been to write a history of art centred on humans, the makers and users of art, but which also explains the social, cultural, political and economic contexts within which artists have worked. I want to tell the story of people as well as art. It’s true that art can convey the viewpoint of the elite, but it’s also been a powerful means of expressing counter-cultural views, division and dissent. I write this as a European, and that perspective inevitably shapes this narrative, but I have also deliberately set out to look beyond Europe and North America. For much of human history these continents weren’t the centre of the world but relative backwaters, responding after a time-lapse to what was going on elsewhere. Yet this wider artistic world is still barely known in the West.

If I have one hope for this book, it is that it inspires readers to think hard about the art that we see around us, the role it plays in our world, and in each of our lives – and the positive difference it can make to us all.

Stele with the Code of Hammurabi

1

BABYLON: RESILIENCE

1800–323 BCE

My first encounter with Babylon was within the pages of a children’s Bible. I was entranced by a picture of a towered metropolis, its turrets reaching high into the sky, populated by people scurrying like busy ants. The city rises like a mountain from the plain, as if it were built not by man but by nature. Hordes of tiny figures are busily constructing it, and it’s still covered in scaffolding. Boats arrive at the harbour crammed with building materials, including stone, wood and bricks. Men make mortar, lift huge blocks of stone onto a pulley, and carve more from the rock on which the city is founded. Others carefully transport equipment to a building site above the clouds. Tiny figures clamber precariously up dizzyingly high scaffolding.

This is the Tower of Babel, described in the Book of Genesis as the centre of the city of Babylon, built from mud bricks on the Plain of Shinar in what is now central Iraq. Genesis recounts that the Babylonians wanted to build a city and a tower that would reach to the heavens, making a name for themselves and gathering the nations together. The Hebrew God, rarely cowed by anything, was terrified by their ambition. Understanding that if these people continue to speak one tongue they will be capable of anything, even overthrowing God, he confounds them by introducing a variety of languages. For the first time, the people of the world can’t understand each other. They hear meaningless babble – hence Babel – making it impossible to continue with the building of the city. Just to be sure, God scatters the people over the face of the earth.

The picture my image was based on is by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel. It is one of the most influential and copied depictions of a story familiar to many. The story of Babel’s Tower, and the hubris of human achievement, was a stalwart of the Western European artistic imagination. The biblical text gives enough descriptive details to enable a talented artist like Bruegel to make a compelling and individual version of this tale. Babylon was also sufficiently distant, and so unfamiliar to Europeans in Bruegel’s day, that there was no concern about depicting it accurately. Its setting in green countryside, next to a river and with distant hills, recalls the topography of Antwerp itself, on the Schelde Estuary.

My story is very typical of how many Westerners encounter Babylon. We know it primarily from its appearance in the Old and the New Testaments: the city which exemplified pride and arrogance, a place of exile for the Jews, and – equally evocatively – the summation of all human evil. In the Book of Revelation, that crazed and beautiful vision of the end of the world, St John sets up Babylon as the polar opposite of the ‘New Jerusalem’, embodying human evil. He envisions the city as a gorgeous but monstrous woman, dressed in purple and scarlet, sitting upon a scarlet beast, with seven heads and ten horns. John goes on to relate the cataclysmic destruction of Babylon by fire from heaven, encapsulating the end of the world: ‘The fruit that your soul longed for has gone from you, and all the things which are rich and splendid have gone from you, and you will find them no more at all.’ The Christian and Jewish mythology of this metropolis is fascinating. But Babylon’s real story is one of the most thrilling of human civilisation. Both in physical and imaginative form, it is among the most resilient of cities.

Cradle of civilisation

During the third and fourth millenniums BCE, a number of urban centres developed in settled river valleys across the northern hemisphere. We will probably never know which of the many contenders, including Jericho, Mohenjo-daro and Çatalhöyük, was first. These cities housed tens of thousands of people, living in dwellings separated by regular streets, with irrigation, basic sanitation systems and fortifications. They were supported by a stable agricultural network, meaning that the inhabitants of these cities bought most of their food, rather than growing or gathering it themselves. These were prosperous places, where the comfortably off were able to fulfil more than their basic human needs, and able to devote themselves to activities and tasks which in other places might be considered luxuries. It was possible to build and to make art on a far larger scale than had previously been possible.

In comparison to these cities, Babylon was a relatively late bloomer. It was founded during the third millennium BCE in the Fertile Crescent. This is the land mass between Europe, Africa and Asia which stretches from the eastern end of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, bounded to the north by the Taurus and Zagros Mountains. The very first permanent human settlements, some twelve thousand years ago, were nestled in the north of this region, in the hills of northern Iraq and Syria. Some, including Mosul and Aleppo, are still inhabited today. Babylon is further south, at the top of Mesopotamia, the floodplain that reaches down to the Persian Gulf.

Each spring for thousands of years, until the construction of large barrages and reservoirs, rich alluvial deposits of mud and sediments would fertilise Mesopotamia (in ancient Greek the land ‘between the rivers’) as the influx of snowmelt from the mountains made the Tigris, Diyala and Euphrates rivers burst their banks. A network of canals, dykes and dams developed so that this valuable resource could be managed, and they spread across the cultivated land. As a result barley, wheat, millet, sesame and date palms could be grown successfully, in spite of the limited rainfall, enough to feed the population of large cities and to provide a surplus for offering to the gods and for trading. According to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, no other country – not even Egypt, the breadbasket of the subsequent Roman Empire – was so fruitful in grain. The rivers were a perfect conduit for the movement of goods in and out of the region, including the fine woollen cloth from the sheep herds of the upper Euphrates and Tigris, and the metals and semi-precious stones from Iran, Afghanistan and India which came down the Diyala from the Zagros Mountains.

The Mesopotamian miracle depended on the development of two further human skills: mathematics and writing. It would have been impossible to irrigate the land without a sophisticated numerical system. This came into being in order to reconcile the lunar and the solar calendars. Calculated in units of sixty, it is still how we tell the time and measure angles. It is hard to imagine how we could live our lives without it. The same could be said of writing. A set of symbols and logograms first used as an accounting system in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk developed into cuneiform script. It was flexible enough to record speech in a number of different languages over many centuries. Writing itself was done by impressing symbols into wet clay tablets and cylinders with a reed stylus – both materials easy to come by in an area subdivided by many rivers and streams. They provide most of the evidence we have about Babylon. Clay, when dried or fired, is remarkably durable, particularly in a climate with little rain. It was the essential element for the enduring creation of knowledge and architecture in this great city.

From the time of its foundation Babylon was one of the most important cities in the region. It was also the most resilient, changing and evolving after every invasion or change of regime: from the Hittites to the Kassites, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians and Greeks. Babylon’s name means ‘Gate of the God’, and the city was consistent in its veneration of Marduk, the tallest and mightiest god in the pantheon. According to one tale, Marduk created the earth by heaping mud on a raft floating on the sea. Then he made the cities of Eridu and Babylon and the Esagila temple. Humans, animals, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshes, vegetation and domestic beasts were the next to be created. Woods and palm groves soon followed, and other cities. Serving Marduk and the other gods, bringing food and drink to their temples, and caring for their property, would be key to Babylon’s identity. Not for nothing was the Esagila the heart of the city. Symbolically, Marduk – or rather his influential priests – chose Babylon’s king. They were the power behind the throne. Every year, as part of the New Year Festival, the king would ritually humiliate himself before Marduk. Without the great god, the king and the city were nothing and would fall.

The materials of Babylon

Without clay, neither Marduk’s temples nor the city of Babylon would have existed, nor would we know about them. Clay was formed into bricks to build the city, its fortifications and its irrigation system, and into the tablets and cylinders which recorded the life of the city, from state administration and religious affairs to private matters. The city’s rulers ordered hundreds of clay inscriptions celebrating their achievements – usually the building or reconstruction of a palace, temple, wall or gate – to be buried deep in the foundations of these structures. The intention – as indeed happened, thanks to the enterprising Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, and modern archaeologists – was that these would be discovered and praised by posterity.

This was even the case for those foreigners who seized control of this rich and cultured city state. Cyrus the Great, in his own words ‘King of the Universe’, placed one in the foundations of Esagila. This was to commemorate his speedy conquest of the city in 539 BCE, and his reconstruction of the great city wall and moat. Cyrus had seen similar inscriptions by other monarchs in Babylon, including one by the great Assyrian king Ashurbarnipal, which inspired him to do the same. The Cyrus Cylinder is the first surviving manifesto of what a ruler should do. He sees his role as saving Babylon from evil, and giving it peace, by maintaining the defences of the city and reverence for the gods. Cyrus records how he ‘sought the welfare … of Babylon and all its sacred centres’, relieving the people’s weariness and ‘settling all the lands in peaceful abodes’.

Less important tablets give us all sorts of information about the city’s life. For instance, we know that the Jewish exiles from Jerusalem in the early sixth century BCE were well fed, on cereals, dates and sesame oil, because of a cache of clay documents abandoned in the basement of the Southern Palace. We also know a lot about the lives of the city’s elite, particularly those who took responsibility for the temples, because they continued writing in cuneiform on clay tablets long after the civil service had moved on to papyrus and leather. Because these new materials were less robust, we know very little about the day-to-day work of Babylonian state officials.

Lengthy inscriptions, on mountain cliffs or crafted hard stones, are an invaluable source for how the Babylonian rulers saw themselves and how they wanted their subjects to behave. The most remarkable is a tall monument – termed a stele – of a black rock called diorite, dating to the eighteenth century BCE. Its inscription written in Akkadian, the language of the Babylonian court, it reveals the legal and moral code of King Hammurabi. His military and diplomatic success transformed Babylon into the political centre of Mesopotamia, and shaped the sophisticated artistic, literary and religious culture that endured until the Roman Empire.

The thin, curved stone, standing over two metres tall, shows Hammurabi with Shamash, god of the sun and of justice, who is sitting on a throne. Flames shoot from Shamash’s shoulders, a sign of his divinity, and he is handing the king the sceptre and ring of his royal office. Hammurabi, standing, is the same height as the sitting god, and is presumably also of divine status. Beneath the image is a great body of text in cuneiform script. It enumerates Hammurabi’s many titles, and three hundred laws, evidently divinely sanctioned. Diorite, imported from far-away Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, is hard, uncompromising, and difficult to carve. It resembles a meteor, something which has fallen from the sky, reflecting the king’s belief that his law and rule was divinely ordained. The stone’s unforgiving nature reflects the rigour with which the law should be applied.

Hammurabi’s code is the underpinning of Babylonian civilisation. It has been praised for its clarity, and its even-handedness. But it is also cruel. Here, a thousand years before the Bible, are the origins of the expressions ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth’. Essentially, the law code is determined to preserve the rights to property, both human (slaves and wives) and material (food, crops, houses, irrigation and land). To us, many of the laws seem hateful: a woman’s body is not hers to use as she wishes; slaves do not control their own destiny; a nobleman is punished less than others. And the punishments, of which at least a third involve bodily mutilation or death, seem shockingly harsh. But by the standards of their day, and many others since, Hammurabi’s laws were fair. Importantly, they established rules which bound members of the elite as much as the ordinary people. Hammurabi’s stated intention, as king, was to bring about ‘the well-being of the oppressed’, to ‘enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind’ and to maintain the state.

Only in the early twentieth century was it possible to glean some understanding of the urban environment in which Babylonians lived in accordance with the codes of Hammurabi and his successors. Generations of travellers, excited by the myth of Babylon and the hubris of its conquest, as prophesied in the Bible and told by Herodotus, were drawn to the site from at least the twelfth century. In 1899, the German artist, architect and archaeologist Robert Koldewey began the first serious archaeological investigation of Babylon. Until then, unsystematic digging had unearthed individual treasures but there had been little sense of the city’s sophisticated structure and order. Two years earlier, Koldewey’s eureka moment had come when he had uncovered strikingly bright turquoise-blue bricks. He was convinced that these were only the smallest elements of the city’s famed walls, as described by Herodotus and others. And he was right. The bricks had survived because they had been fired in a wood-fired kiln, a rare luxury in a dry land with little rainfall and limited wood, and a sign of their significance. Koldewey was able to demonstrate that they dated from the city in its heyday during the sixth century BCE, under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar II, a figure of exhausting vigour and energy. They were part of the Ishtar Gate, on the Processional Way that led to the centre of Babylon.

Koldewey’s excavations were halted by the arrival of British troops in 1917. He was unable to return to Babylon before his death. But his legacy was a fuller understanding of this multi-layered city than was ever possible before, as slow as it was meticulous. From 1927, hundreds of crates containing fragments of bricks were carefully unpacked by a team in Berlin. They were desalinated, and coated in liquid paraffin to intensify their coloured glazes. Carefully, the fragments were sorted into groups of the same colours and shapes. It was an intricate jigsaw puzzle which would last months rather than hours. It took two years to piece the remains of seventy-two animal reliefs together. Modern bricks were then used to complete the reconstruction, which then became whole in the kiln. The result – the reconstructed Ishtar Gate and Sacred Way in the Pergamon Museum Berlin – is stunning. Most modern archaeologists would decry this fusion of archaeological evidence with modern materials, but it undeniably gives a real sense of ancient Babylon, its innovation and modernity. The dry documentary record is translated with a bang into the firework hues of a living city, created more than 2,500 years ago.

Nebuchadnezzar II

Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, as recreated in twentieth-century Berlin, was a place of brilliant colour, built in brick of many hues – turquoise, blue, red, white, black and yellow. It appears not once but twice in the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon’s list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in around 140 BCE: first for its walls and second for the Hanging Gardens. Sadly there’s no firm evidence that these celebrated gardens, allegedly built on a series of terraces to assuage the homesickness of a Persian princess for her native mountains, ever existed, although the idea has been extremely resilient. It had a particular hold on the nineteenth-century Romantic imagination – John Martin, the extraordinary Northumbrian painter of apocalypse, depicted women running in panic from gardens that reach into the heavens as they flee Cyrus’ soldiers.

Even if the great gardens did not exist, the reality of Babylon is fabulous enough. This extraordinary city, largely as we see it today the work of Nebuchadnezzar, contained many wonders. In his own words, recorded on several clay cylinders, he had ‘no opponent from horizon to sky’. Born the son of a successful king, Nebuchadnezzar was resolved to surpass his father’s achievements. He rebuilt Babylon as a great imperial capital, with a grand temple to Marduk – the Esagila with its accompanying tower, Etemenanki – three royal palaces, and two lines of walls. The rectangular structure of the inner walls, punctuated with eight gates, housed approximately 180,000 people. The Euphrates ran through the middle of the city, roughly from north to south, bounded by a brick quay, and a great bridge connected its eastern and western sides.

The monarch was particularly proud of his new ‘strong wall that cannot be shaken’ encircling the entire city, which ‘no previous king had done’. Constructed with bitumen and baked bricks, Nebuchadnezzar ‘laid its foundation on the breast of the netherworld’, and ‘built its top as high as a mountain’. Herodotus tells us that the wall was so wide a four-horse chariot could pass (and turn) on top of it, and although his stories are often inaccurate, archaeological evidence confirms the immensity of the structure. This wall, protected the gardens and date plantations which were Babylon’s major source of food.

Its very bricks were stamped with the king’s name and his principal titles – ‘Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, provider for Esagila and Ezida, eldest son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon’. Nebuchadnezzar’s priorities were twofold: adding to the territorial might and power of Babylon so that it could support the city, its king and its gods; as well as beautifying and improving the city itself. In this, the requirements of Marduk and the king, his servant on earth, were of paramount importance. There were, cuneiform tablets tell us, about four hundred temples in the city, together with approximately a thousand shrines. Nothing was as important as Marduk’s temples. Every luxury was lavished on them, and on the members of the city’s elite who served the god in his dwelling places on earth.

The most important temple complex was the Esagila, the heart of the city. Its significance was underlined by its separation from the rest of Babylon. Visitors had to pass through the Pure Gate and cross a huge courtyard, the Sublime Court, which gave access to temple, as well as a number of shrines to lesser gods, including Marduk’s father Ea, his wife Zarpanitu and his son Nabu. The area is now a bleak ruin, but we can partially reconstruct the temple from the stories of travellers and cuneiform tablets, one of which even gives measurements for the space. The temple was enormous in size and height, with doorways nine metres tall. Its walls were adorned with lapis lazuli, a semi-precious blue stone mined in distant Afghanistan, and alabaster. The internal furnishings were made from a variety of precious woods, metals and stones. Nebuchadnezzar notes that the interior was covered completely in gold.

Golden statues of Marduk and Zarpanitu were the principal features of the temple. She was accompanied by her hairdressers, Marduk by a butler and baker, and other attendants, including a door keeper, and dogs. Winged gods called kurubs guarded the entrance. During the rituals of each day, the gods were groomed, dressed in valuable textiles and jewellery, fed and entertained by the temple’s priests. A well-stocked library gave answers to any theological questions that might arise. The priests and Marduk’s servants were extremely proud of the inherited positions they held, which granted exemption from public work and from taxation.

To the north of the temple, the traveller came to Etemenanki, ‘the link between Heaven and Earth’, on the east side of the Euphrates. It was under Nebuchadnezzar’s personal authority that this structure, the inspiration for the biblical Tower of Babel, was brought to completion. At sunrise, its shadow stretched across to the opposite bank of the river. It could be seen for many miles around. Etemenanki stood within a large square enclosure, surrounded by chambers for servants of the god. The tower was a huge mountain of clay bricks, tiles and wood, topped by a temple to Marduk. It was torn down by the Assyrian invader Sennacherib in 689 BCE. Nothing remains of Etemenanki today but a vast pond in a strange geometric shape, like a tall chimney attached to a rectangle, an image of the tower in negative form.

According to the cuneiform E-Sangil Tablet, it was a square building, 180 cubits (about 90 metres) wide and 180 cubits tall. From Nebuchadnezzar’s own words, we know he began this work as an act of filial piety, to finish the structure that Nabopolassar ‘had made pure through the craft of exorcism, the skill of Ea and Marduk’. If his father had fixed the tower’s foundations ‘on the breast of the underworld’, it was his son who finished it ‘so that it vied with the heavens’, setting the people of his empire from ‘the upper sea to the lower sea, the distant nations, teeming people of the world, kings of remote mountains and far-flung islands’ to build Marduk’s tower.

Majestic gates, each furnished with pure cedar door leaves, guarded the entrance to the complex. At the centre was the tower, rising upwards on a terrace of baked clay. Sturdy cedars from Mount Lebanon and special ‘musukkannu’ wood from the Indian subcontinent were coated with bronze and laid on top of this base as the foundation of a holy sanctum for Marduk, ‘a chamber of repose as in bygone times’. In a charming detail, Herodotus tells us there was a resting point with some little seats about halfway up, so that people could catch their breath before ascending to the summit. Marduk’s high sanctuary at the top of the tower may have been a two-storey structure. From this, it would have been possible to look over the flat plains of southern Iraq. At night it would have functioned as a marvellous observatory for the astrologers who were part of the temple’s religious staff.

For all the evidence, there remains no consensus about some important elements of the design, from the number of levels – were there six or seven? – to the correct order of the staircases that led from the courtyard to the upper levels. But what is clear from the disparate sources is that the top and bottom levels were considerably broader than the others. The external walls of the middle levels were probably made up of alternating buttresses and recesses, meaning that in the strong Mesopotamia sunlight the flat surfaces of the façade were broken up by the play of light and shade. This is very typical of Babylonian architecture.

In the northern section of the city, just inside the inner wall, stood the confusingly named Southern Palace. This was an administrative and military centre as well as a dwelling place. On a stone tablet discovered in the ruins of Babylon, and now in the British Museum, Nebuchadnezzar described this enormous structure as the ‘house of the people’s wonder’. It was reputed to have two hundred and fifty rooms, with a throne room at its heart, and was built around a series of five courtyards. These moved from the most public to the most private spaces, those reserved for the queen, her retinue and the rest of the king’s women, including those sent to him as tribute. Unfortunately, as we know from Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions, he considered the palace too small for comfort. It was also exceptionally damp. Almost immediately he began building the Northern Palace outside the city walls. Raised on an earth mound eight metres high, it seems perhaps a superfluous construction funded by cities and religious institutions from across the empire as a symbol of the king’s authority.

The Southern Palace was situated between the river and the Processional Way that led to the Ishtar Gate. Royal triumphs were celebrated here, and Nebuchadnezzar spared no expense on the construction of the gate and the avenue. He notes with pleasure his outlay on the road, paved with stone slabs, on top of a layer of bricks each inscribed with his titles and respect for Marduk. This was the ceremonial route that Marduk himself took on the occasions the god was processed through the city by his priests. The Ishtar Gate was dedicated to the chief goddess of the Babylonian pantheon, and was a structure of which Nebuchadnezzar was exceptionally proud:

I laid the foundation of the gates down to the ground water level and had them built out of pure blue stone. I covered their roofs by laying majestic cedars lengthwise over them. I hung doors of cedar adorned with bronze at all the gate openings. I placed wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways and thus adorned them with luxurious splendour that people might gaze on them in wonder.

Part of the gate, including this building inscription, survives in the reconstruction erected by Koldewey’s team in Berlin. In spite of the king’s words, the dazzling blue front is not stone but brick, fired with a cobalt glaze that came from ground-up blue glass, and further decorated with baked clay reliefs in brilliant yellow and orange. As Nebuchadnezzar states, these depict serpent dragons and aurochs, symbols of Marduk and Adad, the god of weather. Each beast is as tall as an average person, intended to impress and terrify. Marduk’s sinuous dragon, the mušh˘uššu, is both attractive and frightening. It has the head of a snake, the body and forelimbs of a lion with reptilian scales, and long talons on its back legs, like those of an eagle. These beasts stalk purposefully across the gate, tails as long and as erect as their necks. Adad’s animal form is simpler and somewhat less malevolent, though the auroch was notoriously vicious. It was an ancestor of domesticated cattle, with horns, a strong body and sturdy legs. These are not animals – or gods – to be trifled with.

The Ishtar Gate was important for the annual celebration of the Babylonian New Year, at the moment of the spring equinox, the first day of the month of Nisan. As part of this festival, the city’s creation myths were re-enacted, and several of the gods taken to the river in a funeral procession that represented their journey to the underworld. On the twelfth day of the New Year, they were triumphantly returned to the city in the House of the New Year’s Festival, through the Ishtar Gate and along the Processional Way. The cycle of birth and rebirth was complete, and the seasons could begin again.

North of the gateway, the sides of the road were lined with more aurochs and serpent dragons, as well as life-size lions with open, roaring mouths. The lion was a symbol of Ishtar, beautiful yet bellicose. Their presence served to protect the street, the ceremonial way connecting the city with the New Year festival. They are emblematic of the power of Babylon, and how it channelled artistic expression to convey its spirit, beauty and buoyancy.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq. As his rule lengthened and deepened, he came to believe that he was following in the footsteps of Nebuchadnezzar and other Babylonian heroes of the early world civilisations. He made explicit connections between the country’s antiquities, ‘the dearest relics that the Iraqi people have’, and the potential of modern Iraq. In 1981, it was at Babylon that Saddam celebrated the first anniversary of the war with Iran, using the slogan ‘Nebuchadnezzar yesterday, Saddam Hussein today’. A 1980s mural shows Saddam and Nebuchadnezzar together, separated by Hammurabi’s Law Code, and a recreation of a ceremony on the Processional Way at the Ishtar Gate.

In the midst of the Iran–Iraq war, Babylon’s walls were recreated, and raised to a height unsupported by the archaeological evidence. The Ishtar Gate and Southern Palace were reconstructed on their surviving foundations. This ‘restoration’ went far beyond internationally established norms, and was denounced by heritage conservators. Like Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam had bricks stamped with his name, with inscriptions in Arabic praising his own work. He also built a new stadium, and a palace for himself on the outskirts of the ancient city. From the balcony of his bedroom, he overlooked the ditches and broken walls of ancient Babylon, and the new walls he had built in the Babylonian style.

Further destruction occurred after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, when American and Polish troops turned part of the site into a military base. Soldiers filled sandbags with archaeological evidence; tanks crushed the remains of the sixth-century bricks of the Processional Way; there were reports of looters removing parts of the remaining beasts on the Ishtar Gate. As the leading archaeologist Dr John Curtis has commented, this was ‘tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or Stonehenge in Britain’. It is hard to understand why an encampment was required on an archaeological site, save as a provocation.

The omens are not promising, but Babylon has a history of resilience. Not for nothing is the Processional Way named ‘the enemy shall not prevail’. The recent recuperation of the Lion of Babylon gives some cautious grounds for hope: this 2,600-year-old basalt sculpture, representing a lion trampling a man, symbolising the power of the goddess Ishtar, was made by the Hittite peoples from Anatolia in modern Turkey and Syria, who conquered Babylon in 1595 BCE, although it is unclear if it was carved in Anatolia or in Babylon itself. The Lion is first mentioned by Western travellers in the late eighteenth century, and in 1852 it was the first statue to be excavated, somewhere in the northern section of the city rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar. Unfortunately, because of the paucity of the documentary record, we will never know exactly where, but it has been exhibited near that site since that date.

A photograph album compiled by a British army doctor during the First World War shows the Lion standing (rather precariously) on a mound of rubble. A scarcely credible story from 1917 alleges that local people damaged its face, searching for coins which a magician had apparently conjured from its mouth. More recently it has been placed on the Processional Way, near the site of the Northern Palace. For Iraqis the statue is a celebrated symbol of their country, appearing on bank notes, stamps, restaurant menus and napkins. But enthusiastic admirers had been damaging the Lion, climbing on its back, where a statue of Ishtar would originally have sat, and in 2016 it was placed on a list of antiquities at risk. Following work by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and the World Monuments Fund to repair the statue’s base and to protect it from visitors, the sculpture can once more admired in a manner that respects and preserves its antiquity and its historic value. The Lion, like Babylon itself, survives to endure.

An aerial view of the Temple Mount in east Jerusalem, looking north

2

JERUSALEM: FAITH

Tenth Century BCE

O Jerusalem the Holy City!

Isaiah, 51:1

Perhaps the most unlikely sporting anthem in the world is the song that the English bellow before their national rugby union team goes into action. As fans wait for a display of skill and brawn, they launch into some of the most impassioned and idealistic verses in the English language, written by the visionary artist and poet William Blake. Those who sing ‘Jerusalem’, set to Hubert Parry’s inspiring tune, are promising that they ‘will not cease from mental fight … / Till we have built Jerusalem, / In England’s green and pleasant land’. Why this improbable ambition and why such effort? The answer, of course, is bound up with the reputation and associations of this city.

Jerusalem is one of the holiest places for three of the world’s great monotheistic faiths, collectively known as the People of the Book. For Jews, it is home to the only, and lost, Temple, on the site of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. For Christians, it is the earthly gateway to Paradise, where the Passion of Jesus took place, while for most Muslims it is the place from where Muhammad ascended a ladder to Heaven, and where the Last Judgement will take place. In each and every regard it has inspired people who wish to remake the world in different images of the divine. As a result, this indomitable city has been built, destroyed and rebuilt – both in reality and in the imagination – for centuries.

The whole story of the Heavenly City on earth is exemplified in the life and afterlife of one remarkable building within it: King Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah, between the Mount of Olives and Mount Zion. First built in the tenth century BCE and twice destroyed, perhaps no other building in history has been so intensively missed, so fulsomely reimagined or regularly and widely copied. In the lost proportions and forms of this one structure have been seen the paradigms of wisdom and spirituality, beauty and paradise, divine order and perfect proportion. No wonder it has so obsessed subsequent generations.

The spiritual power of the original Temple has echoed around the world in the form of other sacred buildings that have been claimed to be built in its image. Reconstructing the Temple has enabled Jewish, Christian and Muslim architects and their powerful patrons to evoke the Heavenly City, in structures that reflect their times and their religions. The Temple has been a powerful blueprint for other architectural wonders, particularly in the two cities that have fought hardest for the title of the new Jerusalem – Rome and Constantinople. In these cities, at different moments, and in the service of different faiths, the authorities used the architectural structures and ideas associated with Jerusalem’s Temple to bolster and legitimise their religious and political authority.

The Jewish Temple

The Temple as first constructed is evocatively described in the Old Testament Book of Kings. This account was written after its destruction, by a Jewish exile in Babylon, but it constitutes the foundation for our understanding of this building. The text explains that Solomon’s father, David – poet, musician, soldier, adulterer and murderer – had united the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and brought the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. It was necessary, therefore, to build a temple to house this holy object. This would be the only place where the faithful could hope to experience the actual presence of God. Every Jew was required to come in person to Jerusalem three times a year for the major religious festivals, and to pay the temple tax.

Yahweh, ‘I am that I am’, by this account, was a deity of stern and forthright character. He countenanced no moral failings, no other competing deities, nor even any images of himself. And he decreed that David, because he was a man of war, could not build the Temple, so the work was passed to his son. Construction began in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign, in around 960 BCE. Because Yahweh considered iron an instrument of war, no iron tools, including the hammer and the chisel, were used on the building site. The walls were made of carefully worked stone imported to the site. Even heavy items such as window frames, doors and the altar itself were only shipped to the temple once they had been completed.

There are many complications to reconstructing the Temple as described in the Book of Kings, though many people have tried. All the dimensions of the building, for example, are given in cubits. These measurements, like all the numbers in the description, are probably symbolic rather than strictly accurate, to show the divinely inspired order of the holy structure. Added to which, we still do not know exactly what a biblical cubit was. Yet, paradoxically, in such ambiguities and in what the account fails to tell us, the description has even greater power for those who wish to use it as the basis for visualising this lost building.

The Temple was enclosed within a walled court that stood within a yet greater court that also enclosed Solomon’s palace. It was a rectangular building sixty cubits long, twenty wide, and thirty high, and made from the finest stone, quarried by a hundred thousand workers, and prized woods (sweet-smelling cedar, cypress, white broom and olive). The building comprised three internal elements: a porch, a chamber for worship and the sanctuary. This last, the home of the Ark of the Covenant, was entered through a set of olivewood doors, carved with cherubs, palms and flowers, and covered with gold. Its interior was lined entirely with cedarwood clad in beaten gold.

Two enormous golden angels, measuring ten cubits wing to wing and carved from olivewood, were the only moveable objects in the room, save the Ark itself. This contained the most precious items in the Jewish faith, the tablets on which Moses had received the Ten Commandments from Yahweh. Chains of beaten gold blocked off the altar from the Holy of Holies, where the Ark was placed under the sheltering wings of the angels, so that it and the poles it was carried on were invisible. We should imagine – although there is no evidence from the Jewish sources – that the sanctuary was built directly onto the rock of the Temple Mount. Perhaps this detail was too sacred to be put into words.

The Temple contained an astonishing range of opulent portable goods. This included numerous objects made from gold: ten lampstands; one hundred bowls for sprinkling lustrations; pots, shovels and meat forks for animal sacrifices; carved flowers, lamps and tongs; wick-trimmers for candles; as well as other miscellanea ‘and all related articles’. Solomon additionally commissioned numerous fixtures and fittings from the skilled bronze worker Hiram of Tyre.

These included two bronze pillars that framed the main temple portico, each eighteen cubits high and twelve cubits in circumference, and were named Boaz (‘Strength’) and Jachin (‘He Establishes’). They were crowned with capitals in the shape of the pure and sweet-smelling lily, surrounded by bronze chains and two hundred pomegranates, a fruit associated with fecundity and plenty. Hiram also created a vast fountain, the so-called Molten Sea. This was a brass basin, standing on a base supported by ten bronze bulls and with a rim as thin as ‘a lily blossom’ circled by hundreds of gourds. The basin was used for ritual ablutions and held enough water for three thousand baths.

After seven years of work, in the month of Bul, in the eleventh year of Solomon’s reign, the building was complete. The priests withdrew from the Holy Place, and, standing on the east side of the altar, musicians of the house of Levi, singing and playing cymbals, lyres and harps, joined with 120 trumpeters to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Kneeling in prayer before the altar, Solomon dedicated the temple to the service of God. He asked God to remember the covenant that he had agreed with the Israelites, and to ‘come to your resting place, you and the ark of your might … Lord God, do not reject your anointed one. / Remember the great love promised to David your servant.’

Fire immediately consumed the sacrifices, and the Temple was filled with the Cloud or presence of God. In the dead of the night, the Lord returned to Solomon, warning ‘I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.’ If Solomon and his people ever rejected the name of the Lord and worship other gods, he would abandon them: ‘I will uproot Israel from my land … and will reject this temple … This temple will become a heap of rubble. All who pass by will be appalled …’

Solomon’s Temple, planned for eternity, probably lasted less than five hundred years. In 587 BCE, the armies of King Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and razed it to the ground. The exiled Jews went, in the words of Psalm 137, to the ‘rivers of Babylon’ and ‘wept when we remembered Zion’. According to the Book of Ezra, the Jews were invited to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple at the behest of King Cyrus of Persia in 539 BCE.

It was to the second Temple that Jesus was brought for his circumcision as a baby, for instruction as a teenager, and for disputation and torment by the Pharisees as an adult. It was also here that, in fury, he overturned the traders’ tables and expelled the money lenders. Soon after his crucifixion in about 29 CE – the exact date is uncertain – the Temple was enhanced by Herod Agrippa, associate of the Roman emperors.

In 70 CE the Jews rebelled against the Romans and Jerusalem was besieged by the future emperor, Titus. During the sack of the city that followed, the building was destroyed. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, who witnessed the destruction, every stone, every floor, every foundation of the Temple was pulled down and its rich contents were carried in triumph to Rome. Following a second Jewish revolt in 132–135 CE, the city at large was re-founded by the Emperor Hadrian as a Roman colony and a new temple to Capitoline Jupiter was raised on Mount Moriah. Jewish access was forbidden and Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. In 324 Emperor Constantine restored the original name, reinventing Jerusalem as a Christian city.

Mourning the lost Temple and their Holy City would be the fate of the Jewish people for centuries, and came to be symbolically recalled in the actions of ordinary life. An item of a meal would be omitted, or a woman would fail to put on all her finery, in remembrance of Jerusalem. The Jews who had spread out all over the world looked towards Jerusalem in their prayers, and the Seder service on the Eve of Passover ends with the hope, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ The aura and spiritual power of the Temple Mount, meanwhile, remained palpable to others beside the Jews.

The Muslim Temple

When the Prophet Muhammad began to share his revelations in the early seventh century CE, he recounted a vision in which he rode on the lightning steed Buraq from the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest place in Islam, to the ‘furthest mosque’. This is identified in the hadiths, which record his sayings and actions, as the ‘Aqsā Mosque in the Holy House of Aelia’, at the southern end of the Temple Mount. There, in the company of the prophets Abraham, Moses and Jesus, Muhammad was tested by the Archangel Jibril (Gabriel to Jews and Christians) with the offer of a bowl of wine or of milk. He chose the latter, which Jibril said was the ‘natural instinct’, and was transported on a golden ladder – reminiscent of Jacob’s Ladder in the Book of Genesis – to Heaven.

At each of the seven levels of paradise, Muhammad spoke to the earlier prophets, including Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus, and at the summit, God instructed him that Muslims should pray five times a day. This narrative includes two key elements of Islamic faith, abstinence from alcohol and regular prayer. Recognising both Abraham (Ibrahim) – who attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac on the site of the Temple – and Solomon (Suleiman) as prophets sent to guide humanity, it was appropriate that the Temple Mount, which became known as the Haram al-Sharīf or Noble Sanctuary, was the first direction, or qibla, that Muhammad instructed his followers to face in their prayers.

From Muhammad’s journey derives a vast body of literature that places Jerusalem at the centre of Islamic beliefs concerning life after death. According to tradition, at the Last Judgement the saved and the damned will be sorted on the Haram al-Sharif and a rope as thin as a hair will stretch from it to the Mount of Olives, where the Garden of Eden will appear. Beneath the rope will open the pits of Hell. Those who trust their faith and cross this perilously narrow tightrope will enjoy Paradise; those who slip will fall to eternal doom and those too fearful to make the attempt will be saved, if they repent. The Haram al-Sharīf, therefore, is a place of peace that promises paradise, for those who are prepared to make the leap of faith.

Muhammad died in 632 and within six years Jerusalem, like most of the Near and Middle East, was under the rule of his followers. Caliph Umar, Muhammad’s father-in-law, is said to have built a wooden mosque on the Haram al-Sharīf, and the Islamic authorities lavished money and care upon it. It was not until the late 680s, however, that the present stone structure, called the Dome of the Rock, was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple by the fifth caliph, Abd al-Malik, who ruled from Damascus. He gave seven years of his Egyptian revenues to enable construction of a building to cover and venerate the exposed rock face that had witnessed the faith of Abraham, Solomon and Muhammad himself. At that point the caliph did not control the Kaaba in Mecca, and was fighting a civil war, so the Mount was the holiest site in Islam under his direct rule.

Since Abd al-Malik also aspired to rule those territories of the Byzantine Empire that he and his co-religionists had not already overrun in their triumphant march to the Mediterranean from the Arabian Peninsula, it is perhaps not surprising that this building, full of light and mystery, recalls Byzantine architecture, in particular the spirit of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It is also indebted to Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre, the domed church built on the site of Christ’s tomb, first constructed on the orders of Constantine the Great in 326 CE, and the fifth-century octagonal church of the Kathisma, now a ruin, but made to cover the rock where Mary was said to have rested on her way to Bethlehem.

The building’s octagonal plan is consciously halfway between the man-made perfection of the square and the God-given purity of the circle, a line without end, befitting a shrine that commemorates Muhammad’s transition between the earth and heaven. Two rows of columns create walkways, or ambulatories, around the building, between the outer walls and the first columns, and the second close to the rock itself. This was always intended as a site for pilgrimage. The Dome of the Rock (in Arabic, Qubbat al-Sakhra) is an egalitarian space for Muslims and women can enter as freely as men. Although the rock itself is protected by a screen, anyone can descend to the shrine beneath it.

Beautifully patterned grey and white marble, cut in sheets, clads the lower section of the interior. From the first row of columns, abundantly carved with acanthus leaf capitals, spring a series of arches. Brightly coloured mosaics, in gold, blue and green, with glints of white and red, show geometric and vegetal forms, interspersed with winged crowns. Many of these recall the mosaics found in Byzantine churches; the winged crowns were a symbol of the Sassanian emperors, whom the Arab Muslims had finally defeated in 651. This is a holy place, and a regal one too. It exudes its spirituality through joy, promise and confidence. The light which breaks in through the four open doors, the windows in the upper level of the octagonal base and the drum underneath the dome, makes the mosaics sparkle, and casts shafts of light on the variegated marble.

And if you raise your eyes upwards, you can see inscriptions running along the outer and inner arcades. This is one of the earliest examples of the architectural calligraphy that is such a key part of Islamic art. Starting from the qibla, the outer inscription proclaims the ineffable nature of God. In an unusually direct swipe at Christianity, and the figure of Jesus, the God made Flesh, it is written: ‘God is one; God is central – birthing no child, nor birthed in turn – nothing and no one is comparable’. In the inner arcade, this message continues, urging the reader to see Jesus as a messenger of God, but never as God: ‘Lord Almighty! That God would beget a child! Either in the heavens or on earth?’

Fourteen hundred years of repair and adaptation have done nothing to diminish the impact of this extraordinary building, though they have changed it. The striking blue tiles which cover the upper external walls of the octagonal base and the drum of the dome, for example, were not installed until the sixteenth century, under the patronage of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and most of those still in place were heavily restored in the 1920s, and again in the 1960s. Both the external and internal faces of the building were originally covered in gold and green mosaic (a feature unparalleled in any other ancient or medieval structure); however, the gleaming dome is the result of repairs during the 1960s and 1990s.

There is nothing quite like the Dome of the Rock. It commands by virtue of its location, impresses by the clarity of its conception and dazzles by the beauty and quality of its construction. As early as the tenth century CE the Jerusalem-born traveller Muqadisi wrote, ‘At the dawn, when the light of the sun first strikes the cupola, and the drum catches the rays; then this edifice is a marvellous sight to behold, and one such that in all Islam I have never seen its equal; neither have I heard tell of aught built in pagan times that should rival in grace this Dome of the Rock.’ More prosaically, but quite as affectingly, the fifteenth-century historian of Jerusalem and Hebron, Mujir al-Din, remarked that happiness was ‘eating a banana in the shade of the Dome of the Rock’.

The ‘New Jerusalem’: Solomon’s Temple in Turkey

For Christians, the Temple in Jerusalem – though it was a point of biblical reference and highly significant as a divinely ordained and proportioned building – was perhaps less important as a place than as an idea. If the New Testament superseded the Old Testament, should there not be a new Temple? In this regard it was helpful that in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, the Hebrew prophet recounts a vision that took place in 573 BCE, fourteen years after the first destruction of Jerusalem. He describes being transported to the top of a high mountain where he was presented with an apparition of a future Temple by a man, seemingly made of bronze, with a measuring rod. Perhaps, this vision described the Temple of the New Testament and authorised its construction.

In 324 Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, created a new capital on the site of a long-established Greek city, Byzantion, on the geographical border of Europe and Asia. Rome still retained some value, but his new creation emphasised a decisive shift in the centre of political and economic gravity from the ‘old world’ of Western Europe to Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. He named the new city after himself – Constantinople – and tried to recreate within it the topography of Rome. The character of the city as a second Rome was never wholly lost, but from at least the fifth century it also began to be identified as a new Jerusalem.

This idea found particular expression in the city’s principal church of ‘Holy Wisdom’ or Hagia Sophia, situated beside the Royal Palace on the acropolis, looking down to the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. The current church is the third on the site, built when Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire, was at its zenith. Like Solomon’s Temple, it was a prodigy building which brought God to the heart of the city. The structure we see today was built by Justininan, emperor from 527 to 565, whose energy was boundless and who reportedly never slept. Justinian wanted his new centrally planned church covered with a great dome to be a new Temple and in 537, when it was consecrated after only five years of construction, he was reported to have remarked pointedly, ‘Solomon I have surpassed thee!’

Although the emperor liked to take sole credit for the church, it was really the work of two mathematically minded architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. They seem to have had some understanding of Heron of Alexandria’s mathematical theories of how to span large spaces with vaults, written five hundred years earlier. Thus there was a connection to, and possibly some architectural knowledge of, the great domed and circular buildings of Imperial Rome. Hagia Sophia’s structure was daring to the point of foolhardiness. Its shallow foundations, vast scale and speed of construction made it particularly vulnerable to the earthquakes to which the Bosphorus region is prone. That it survives is nothing short of a miracle.

Despite many changes of use, from church to mosque to museum and now to mosque again, it retains its sixth-century form and character to a remarkable degree. Here we find a new Christian architecture at the heart of a Christian empire in which the church and state are one. In two related mosaics above the south-west doors, Constantine offers the city to God and the Virgin, and Justinian gives them the church itself. The emperor, of course, was also the head of the church and appointed the patriarch of the city. In this sense the building unites heaven and earth to create a spiritual heart of the empire.

The building combines a centrally planned space, based on a circle, with another on a longitudinal axis. Its central dome is enormous, at more than 180 feet high. Unlike earlier monumental domes, such as that over the Pantheon in Rome, which sat on circular buildings, this sits on a square one. To support the dome, therefore, the angles of the square plan are infilled with triangular segments termed pendentives. Forty windows pierce the dome, and their light moves across the interior during the course of the day in a manner that is at once magical and gentle.

Overall, it is clear that the architects were more interested in architectural form and the challenge of constructing a huge dome than creating a strictly functional space. Consequently, many spaces were designed as part of the monumental structure without knowing what they would be used for. It’s not clear, for example, if the north galleries ever had a defined function, although those in the south became the private quarters of the emperor and patriarch. An enormous silver screen protected the sanctuary and only the patriarch, the emperor and their attendants were allowed behind it. A vast body of clergy served the building, and from the eleventh century an elaborate daily liturgy was celebrated. Pilgrims also came from around the Christian world to venerate the relics that were gathered and displayed here.

The dedication of the church was to an idea – Holy Wisdom – and in the first phase of decoration a decision was made largely to avoid human or figurative imagery. Instead, the interior was decorated with marble quarried on the nearby Marmara Islands. Slabs were split and laid edge to edge with veins and patterns in mirror image so as to create abstract, or allusive, patterns and symbols. All the clear glass was originally coloured red and blue, and the floor consists of sheets of marble, worn by the passage of so many feet that it seems as if waves of water have shaped it.

There is also extensive architectural sculpture in the capitals and cornices. Amid the stylised acanthus leaves are the monograms of Justinian and his empress, Theodora. Opus sectile, a form of picture-making with marble, mother-of-pearl, glass and semi-precious stones, was used to decorate the gallery level. It includes birds and plants in white marble set against a dark background; the impression everywhere in Hagia Sophia is of a strong contrast between light and dark. The embassy of Vladimir, Prince of Kyiv, recording their impressions in the eleventh century, were profoundly struck by the unplaceable beauty of the place: ‘God dwells there among men … We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth.’

Justinian’s creation, in turn, exerted a powerful influence on later Muslim architecture in the city. In 1453, when Sultan Mehmed captured Constantinople, he converted Hagia Sophia into a congregational mosque with a marble mihrab (prayer niche) and minbar (raised pulpit), both oriented towards Mecca, together with a minaret to call the faithful to prayer. As adapted, the building became a source of inspiration for Ottoman architects, particularly the great Sinan, architect to Suleiman the Magnificent, in whose reign during the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire stretched from Central Europe to the Persian Gulf, encompassing both Jerusalem and Mecca.

We know that Sinan studied Hagia Sophia closely – he called it ‘unequalled in the world’ – and we are well informed besides about his thoughts on architecture because he dictated several autobiographical essays to his friend Mustafa Saˤi. In his view, while everything ultimately derived from God, a man could nevertheless build solid foundations, create adequate support and make his buildings look as ‘agreeable’ as possible. In this last regard he thought it his achievement to have refined the style of Hagia Sophia, a view exemplified in one of his greatest works, the mosque he created for Suleiman the Magnificent from the spoils of war in Belgrade, Malta and Rhodes.

The Süleymaniye Mosque, on a hilltop site above the Golden Horn, takes the shape of Hagia Sophia and, with its great central dome, is a direct challenge to the earlier building, about half an hour’s walk away across the city’s tightly packed streets. It formed part of a complex that also included several Islamic colleges or madrasas, a hospital, a hospice, a kitchen, a bathhouse, shops, a caravanserai and mausolea for the sultan and his principal wife. It was endowed by the sultan for the practice of religion and the study of the religious sciences, to ‘strengthen the mechanisms of worldly sovereignty, and to reach happiness in the afterworld’. The waqfiyya or legal document establishing the charity calls Suleiman ‘the Solomon of the age’; again we sense the long shadow of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Incorporated into the mosque are materials from all over the empire, including four colossal red granite columns, cut from single pieces of stone, that are said to have come from Baalbek and Alexandria. Baalbek was believed to be the site of the palace that Solomon built for the Queen of Sheba, while the Ottoman Sultans believed themselves to be sovereigns in the line of Alexander the Great. This assemblage of building materials from venerated locations recalls the gathering of precious materials from Mount Lebanon used in the original Temple in Jerusalem.

The light and airy structure is quite unlike most Islamic architecture of the preceding half century. There’s a sense, like in Hagia Sophia, of being in a divine space, one where the order and unity of Heaven and earth is expressed. The light is physical, but it expresses the divine and filters down from hundreds of small arched windows with pierced stone grilles. The effect, combined with the huge circular mosque lamps lit with oil in hundreds of glass vessels, suspended from the ceiling with ostrich eggs and reflective balls of mirror, must have been spellbinding, like the sky on a very clear night. The atmosphere is ethereal. Like the original Temple, this is a home for God on earth.

The Temple in Rome and Solomon’s Columns from Jerusalem

While Constantine was building his new capital on the Bosphorus, he was also involved in erecting a new church on the banks of the Tiber in Rome. This dignified the site of the tomb of St Peter, Jesus’ close companion, on the Vatican Hill. As first conceived this building had nothing to do with the Temple in Jerusalem, but many centuries later and by the most curious sequence of events, it came to represent it.

Peter, the first pope, leader of the disciples and founder of the Roman Catholic Church, had died in ignominy in the first century CE. Tradition holds that he was crucified and buried in Rome. His modest grave, initially marked by a small monument, has grown organically over centuries into what is today an extraordinary architectural presence, and the most easily recognised symbol of the Roman Catholic Church. Since the late sixteenth century its massive egg-shaped dome, designed by Michelangelo Buonarotti, has dominated the Roman skyline, while the encircling arms of its piazza, by Gianlorenzo Bernini, reach out to draw visitors into the building.

For all that St Peter’s has changed and grown, it still embodies the essentials of Constantine’s vision. The church was to be a sanctuary that enclosed the saint’s original burial site, in a building that was large enough to enable Christian worship and the development of the cult of St Peter. The solution – as in many early churches designed on a large scale – was to design a large rectangular building on the model of the ancient Roman basilica, a public building which contained meeting rooms and law courts.

St Peter’s tomb remains the focus of the Basilica, as it was in Constantine’s day, although its appearance has changed dramatically over time. In the fourth century, it was a primitive shrine, encased in marble and given architectural focus by the canopy that stood over it. This was held up by four of the six twisted columns that Constantine had brought from Greece to adorn the tomb. Two more supported the small curved structure, or apse, at the head of the interior behind the shrine. Alterations in the sixth century made the six columns even more prominent. They were made into a screen in front of the tomb, rendering it invisible. For most visitors to the Basilica, the six swirling columns were St Peter’s tomb.

The columns are extraordinary objects, elaborately fluted like a corkscrew or a piece of barley sugar. The sense of movement they embody is both wonderful and unsettling, because we expect columns to act as firm supports. This sense of dynamism is enhanced by their decoration with a combination of abstract and figurative forms. Parts of the columns are carved with sinuous lines moving upwards in a gentle spiral, tricking our eyes into believing they are animate. Alternate zones are populated with vines, with growing shoots, spreading leaves and bunches of luscious grapes. Little winged cupids fly in and out of the stalks, greedily grabbing the sweet fruit.

These cupids are acolytes of Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, festivity and ecstasy. Constantine’s use of such obviously pagan imagery for an important Christian shrine might seem strange, but his evident intention was to honour St Peter with innovative and striking pieces of architectural sculpture. And because of the role that wine plays in the Eucharist, the ceremonial re-enactment of the Last Supper when it becomes the Blood of Christ, they were appropriate in a Christian context.

The screen of columns (augmented by six more added by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century) became a defining feature of St Peter’s Basilica, and was mentioned in the increasing number of guidebooks written for real or armchair pilgrims to the Holy City. Admiration and familiarity extended by degrees to imitation, and copies began to appear in churches across northern Europe, for example as far afield as the eighth-century royal burial crypt of St Wystan’s Church in Repton, Derbyshire. By the late fourteenth century, when the popes returned permanently to Rome after a seventy-year period of exile in France, the columns were no longer just beautiful things.

Somehow, these twisted columns had assumed the character of relics from Solomon’s Temple, brought ‘triumphantly’ to Rome by Titus after his sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and stored in the Temple of Peace in the Forum. One of Gregory III’s additions was even accorded the special status of being the ‘Holy Column’ on which the teenage Christ had leaned when disputing with the doctors in the Temple. It was attributed miraculous powers. Collectively, these originally pagan objects were henceforth known as the Solomonic Columns.

How and why all this happened is not really clear. Reliable record-keeping had certainly suffered when the popes and their efficient civil servants left the city for France. More generally, throughout fourteenth-century Europe, elaborate provenances were often created for old and revered sacred objects. In the case of Constantine’s – or now Solomon’s – columns, a combination of specific factors was at play. Because they were very old, beautiful and part of St Peter’s tomb, they were particularly worthy of veneration. Perhaps most importantly, they could be connected – although they were not made of bronze – with Hiram’s marvellous columns that are so evocatively described in the Book of Kings.

It took two great artists and two ambitious popes to cement the special status of the Solomonic columns and to make these objects critical to how Solomon’s Temple was rebuilt in Rome. By 1515 Raffaello Sanzio, better known as Raphael, operated the most successful artistic workshop in Rome; he was the sworn foe of the equally talented (but less urbane) Michelangelo. Their rivalry was to produce some of the greatest works in the canon of Western art. Raphael had recently completed the redecoration of the pope’s private apartments, known simply as the Rooms, or Stanze, with paintings celebrating the intellectual, spiritual and military power of the papacy. The project had been begun by one pope, Julius II, and finished by the next, Leo X, who succeeded him in 1513.

It was under Leo’s papacy that the Protestant storm which had been brewing for almost a century finally broke. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses, identifying what he considered wrong in the Catholic Church, to a church door at Wittenburg in Germany. This was the beginning of a long, painful and multi-faceted upheaval within the Western Church, known as the Reformation, which transformed the political and theological face of Europe. In the face of this crisis, Leo concentrated on things he could actually achieve: securing the rule of his family, the Medici, in Florence, and transforming the Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica into a complex befitting its status as the premier church in Christendom, the headquarters of the papacy and the spiritual home of a pope who was convinced he was following in King Solomon’s footsteps.

Rebuilding the ancient church was never going to be quick – it took more than a century – although Raphael was eager to continue the process that had already been begun by his friend Donato Bramante. So Leo and Raphael came up with an ingenious, quicker and more impactful beginning to the lengthy process of re-creating Solomon’s Temple. This was interior decoration, although of a very expensive and prestigious kind: a series of tapestries depicting the miracles described in the Acts of the Apostles, as performed by Saints Peter and Paul after Jesus’ ascent into Heaven. These lavish hangings, designed by Raphael using huge drawings, known as cartoons, woven with silk, gold and silver thread, were destined for the Sistine Chapel, the spiritual heart of the papal court and the site of papal elections.

Although the subjects were hardly surprising, Raphael’s way of representing them was remarkable and closely connected to Leo’s manifesto for his papacy. The pope seems to have believed that he had been elected to cure evil and erase differences, like Solomon himself. It’s for this reason that Raphael made significant edits to the scene of St Peter’s Healing of the Lame Man. This was the first miracle performed by St Peter in Jerusalem, and crucial for establishing his spiritual leadership of Jesus’ followers, the community that would become the early Christian Church. The Acts narrate that Peter told a man, disabled since birth, to rise up and walk. Strength returned to the man’s feet and ankle bones, and he followed Peter into the Temple. Raphael moved the location for this miracle from its biblical setting beside the ‘beautiful gate’ at the entrance to Jerusalem’s temple complex to the portico of the building itself, where the great columns Boaz and Jachin are said to have stood.

Raphael’s scene of Peter curing the man in Solomon’s Temple, moreover, is framed by columns so large and dominant that they are almost protagonists in their own right. Their distinctive twists and curves, carved with panels of vines and cherubs, interspersed with sculpted lines, make it clear that Raphael is depicting the very objects that in his day still formed the screen protecting St Peter’s shrine. Neither Raphael nor Leo doubted that these columns came from Solomon’s Temple, and were the objects described in the Old Testament. Raphael crams his scene with spiralling Solomonic columns to give it greater veracity, and to explicitly connect St Peter’s to Jerusalem, Leo to Solomon, and the lost temple to its reinvention in Renaissance Rome.

It took two more centuries for the Solomonic Columns of St Peter’s to become an indivisible element of the fabric of the mother church of orthodox Catholicism. When the façade and dome of the Basilica were finally complete, the seventeenth-century pope Urban VIII turned his attention to the decoration of the vast interior. He largely entrusted it to his close associate and friend the sculptor, architect and painter Gianlorenzo Bernini. His biographer Filippo Baldinucci described his intensity, carving for perhaps seven hours a day, seeming to pour his life into hard marble and cast metal. It’s impossible to look at his works in a cold, collected way – they were made to elicit visceral responses.

Bernini created a spectacular centrepiece in the form of an enormous bronze tent that covers the saint’s tomb. It is experienced today as part of the building as a whole. Entering St Peter’s is a deliberately daunting experience. The visitor feels insignificant, dwarfed by the scale and magnificence, from the marble columns that reach up to the golden roof and the floor of polished hard stones, to the vast sculptures that flank the columns of the nave. Commanding the interior, however, is Bernini’s bronze baldacchino, which grows in scale as you approach the altar.

The structure is a permanent re-creation of the ephemeral constructions that were used in the open air to protect dignitaries or sacred objects from the people, as well from as the elements. Four curving bronze columns, sixty-six feet tall, twist majestically upwards to a framing cornice. Set on the top of each is an angel holding a garland that disappears under the cornice, giving the illusion that the angels themselves are holding the overarching crown of the structure. It’s not clear if Bernini was aware that Constantine had covered Peter’s tomb with a canopy borne by four spiral columns, but he certainly knew that Constantine had brought spiral columns from the Temple in Jerusalem.

Bernini’s massive bronzes comprise three rather than the four sections found on Constantine’s columns. The lower level consists of the abstract curved lines so familiar from the originals; the two carved upper sections are quite different. Although the (not so little) cupids are still present, the vines of the originals have been replaced with laurel leaves, and there’s a further addition of buzzing bees. Pope Urban’s family, the Barberini, used three bees on their coat of arms, interspersed with laurel leaves – which were also sacred to the sun god Apollo, considered by Christians of Raphael’s and Bernini’s days to be a pagan forerunner of Christ. Powerfully, and wordlessly, Bernini is imprinting his patron’s identity all over an object designed to honour the Christian God.

The original Solomonic Columns were not forgotten in all this majesty. The piers that hold up the dome were hollowed out by Bernini, somewhat terrifyingly given what they support, to create galleries. From these the Basilica’s most important relics – St Longinus’ spear, St Veronica’s veil, St Andrew’s head and the largest fragment of the True Cross – were exhibited at Easter and other major feasts. Each gallery was divided into two sections. The top part held a tabernacle, where the relics were shown, each framed by two of the spiral marble columns, while the lower areas contained triple-life-size sculptures of Saints Longinus, Veronica, Andrew and Helena (Constantine’s mother), designed by Bernini.

Bernini’s open canopy – you can see through and beyond it to St Peter’s throne in the apse – is the crowning glory of this great church interior. It makes the crossing a place of dramatic power, dignifying the tomb of the figure from whom the popes claim their authority and framing the spot on which the Mass is celebrated. No wonder that – despite the fabulous wealth of the papacy – it has never been replaced. The structure powerfully conveys, in architectural form, the claim of St Peter’s to be the seat of the Christian Temple and the site of a New Jerusalem.

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By any account, St Peter’s Basilica, the Süleymaniye Mosque, Hagia Sophia and the Temple Mount are among the greatest works of human architecture. At their core is the idea that a building could embody God’s presence, and enable people to make the leap in understanding that is faith. They are all shaped, in distinctive ways, by the blueprint of the lost Temple in Jerusalem.

These are very different buildings; not least because of the powerful and sometimes contending religions they serve. At a time when religious disagreement is often magnified to the extent that it can be hard to grasp any connection between faiths, it’s important to reflect on the shared inspiration behind some of the world’s most wonderful buildings made in the service of the divine. The spiritual power of a Temple destroyed almost two thousand years ago has stimulated a series of equally exceptional – and just as inspiring – structures. It is said that faith can move mountains, but buildings like these create and sustain faith.

The Roman Forum