Lady Nicola Aubrey-Thorne is the widow of a great Edwardian supporter. When Kenton and his army move in, all of that changes. It is a strategic castle and currently in the hands of Edward's forces. Kenton has been tasked with securing Babylon Castle, a fortress that secures a road between Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is no fiercer knight in Warwick's arsenal than Kenton le Bec, a powerful and cunning fighter. While Babylon itself is mainly a ruin, it's located just a few miles from the modern city of Hilla (or al-Hillah) which has a population of about 500,000 people.1471 AD - 10 years after the Battle of Towton, Sir Kenton le Bec, the Lion of the North, serves Warwick the Kingmaker as the man's attack dog. What else can you see in Babylon? "Visitors can stroll through the remnants of the brick and clay structures which stretch across 10 square kilometers, and see the famed Lion of Babylon statue, as well as large portions of the original Ishtar Gate," reported Reuters in 2019. Although some of the recreations were damaged during the prolonged occupations of the Iraq War (2003-11), many of the gaudily painted buildings remain and are open to the public, including Saddam's Babylonian palace. He even stamped his own name on the bricks, just as Nebuchadnezzar had done. It was Saddam Hussein who took up Nebuchadnezzar's mantle and tried to reconstruct some of Babylon's former glory, but ended up with what art historians decried as " Disney for a despot." Much to the consternation of archaeologists, Saddam raised city walls of 38 feet (11.5 meters) and built a Roman-style arena on the ruins of old Babylon.
It's not hard to believe that Old Testament authors may have modeled their Tower of Babel after the Marduk temple, known as the "house of the frontier between heaven and Earth." The Greek historian Herodotus, writing centuries after Babylon's heyday, described eight towers stacked on top of one another. One of Nebuchadnezzar's best-known construction projects was the temple of Marduk, which sat atop a 300-foot (91-meter) ziggurat accessible by a ramp that curved around its exterior. The Processional Way led to the Ishtar Gate, the city's grand northern entrance. In addition to building Babylon's colossal city walls, he was responsible for the stunning Processional Way, a wide thoroughfare lined with ornately tiled walls depicting lions and dragons in bright blues and yellows.
In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the " Whore of Babylon" makes an appearance "adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality."Īccording to historians, Nechuchadnezzar relocated conquered people around the empire to keep them from organizing rebellions against him - under his leadership, Babylon became the biggest and most modern city in the ancient world. In order to keep the peace among people without ties of blood or religion, Hammurabi created his famous Legal Code, essentially a detailed list of crimes and their associated punishments:īecause of Nebuchadnezzar's imperialist cruelty and penchant for golden shrines to pagan gods, Babylon appears as shorthand for everything ungodly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He concerned himself with food distribution and public safety in a city that represented something entirely new - the intermingling of hordes of people from wildly different cultures. Hammurabi ordered the construction of intricate canals to provide Babylon's citizens with fresh water, and fortified the city's walls against invaders. Not only did this famous king successfully conquer or forge alliances with Babylon's fiercest enemies during his 43-year reign, but he also built Babylon (which comprised southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria, now northern Iraq) into a showplace for innovations in engineering and criminal justice. The earliest king to unite warring Mesopotamian tribes into a single powerful city-state was the remarkable Hammurabi in the 18th century B.C.E.
Several empires rose and fell and rose again over the millennia on the same coveted soil between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Nebachadnezzar was the most famous of Babylon's rulers, but he wasn't the first.