"... on the breast of the netherworld, to make its top vie with the heavens.... I had them shape mud bricks without number and mould baked bricks like countless raindrops. I had the River Arahtu bear asphalt and bitumen like a mighty flood. Through the sagacity of Ea, through the intelligence of Marduk, through the wisdom of Nabû and Nissaba, by means of the vast mind that the god who created me let me possess, I deliberated with my great intellect, I commissioned the wisest experts and the surveyor established the dimensions with the twelve-cubit rule. The master-builders drew taut the measuring cords, they determined the limits.... I fashioned representations of my royal likeness bearing a soil-basket, and positioned (them) variously in the foundation platform. I bowed my neck to my lord Marduk. I rolled up my garment, my kingly robe, and carried on my head bricks and earth...."
From the inscription by King Nabopolassar at Etemenanki, the "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth," built in Babylon some time between the 14th and the 9th century BCE.
It may have been the basis for the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which I was reading about this morning not because of the fall of the Champlain Tower in Florida — blogged here at 5:43 a.m. — but because of "The Tower" by Frank Gehry — blogged here at 6:21 a.m. — which reminded me of an especially familiar painting of the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
... so you can compare it to a model of Etemenanki:
Bruegel imagined a circular building, which Wikipedia tells us was based on the Colosseum in Rome. The 1927 movie "Metropolis" has a Tower of Babel sequence — watch the crisp clip here — that uses the Bruegel design. "Metropolis" emphasizes the extreme division between the elite who thought up the design and the workers who built it. The building falls because the workers revolt. By contrast, according to that inscription at Etemenanki, the King himself rolls up his sleeves and gets to work carrying bricks.
But that's propaganda, isn't it? An inscription. Perhaps the King showed up at the wall one day and carried a few bricks the way a President of the United States might pick up a shovel and do a ground-breaking photo op.
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2 comments:
Joseph writes:
Photo ops back then were a pain...they took months of posing. Nobody wants to keep bricks on their head for that long.
Indeed.
Michelle writes:
Obviously you haven't been seeing the original Breughel properly. It was
a diptych! Here are images of the original paintings, with several
details enlarged.
Courtesy of "Fat Cat Art," a long-running art project involving a large
orange cat named Zarathustra, his owner, and a hell of a lot of (mostly)
classical art, though there are also some Modernist works not well-known
outside the former USSR.
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