Original subtitles

[Narrator] 10 miles outside of Baghdad in modern-day Iraq,

a pioneering team of investigators

unearths the remains of an ancient palace.

The wall is over there.

[Narrator] As they dig deeper,

they uncover treasures buried for nearly 3,000 years.

Fragments of painted plaster

which were discovered this morning.

Excavating these vivid colors from the past,

yeah, it's emotional, it's something that

when you figure it, you say, "Oh, wow."

[Narrator] These newly discovered wall paintings

reveal the power and wealth of ancient kings,

and could shed light on one of the Bible's

most infamous cities, Babylon.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

The stories in the Bible are famous across the world.

They tell of great battles between good and evil,

earthshaking catastrophes

and epic heroes.

Of all the cities and places mentioned in the Bible,

Babylon is one of the most infamous,

second only to Jerusalem

in how many hundreds of times it appears,

from the first Book of Genesis, to the last, Revelation.

A city that was described

as home to legendary megastructures

like the Tower of Babel,

as well as monstrous villains like King Nebuchadnezzar II,

who destroyed Jerusalem and captured its people.

[Historian] Biblical writers cast Babylon as a place

that pillaged, sieged and expelled people from their home.

[Narrator] In modern-day Iraq,

the city of Babylon still stands.

Much is modern reconstruction

built upon what little ruins remain.

And the reality of its links to the Bible

lies lost beneath the desert.

To piece together the historical world of Babylon,

international teams of experts must hunt for clues elsewhere,

in mysterious cities that share its secrets.

They dig through centuries of earth.

[Archaeologist 1] Wherever you basically put your spades

in the ground, you will find something new and exciting.

[Narrator] And decipher ancient inscriptions.

[Archaeologist 2] This is important,

this is a message for posterity,

this reaches us from the depths of time.

[Narrator] To answer the question,

why did Babylon have such a hold

over the writers of the Bible?

The first clue might be found some 10 miles west of Baghdad

at the archaeological site of Dur Kurigalzu.

♪ ♪

Here, it's not long after dawn and a team of archaeologists

from the University of Bologna in Italy

is already hard at work.

Look, expose this part here, this one.

[Narrator] Archaeologist Nicolò Marchetti and his team

are uncovering the remains of an ancient city,

the ruins cover over 1,000 acres,

making this site one of the largest in ancient Iraq.

The site is immense, so it's very exciting,

but it's also very challenging.

Usually in Near East archaeology we are not used

to this kind of spectacular preservation state.

[Narrator] This morning they are excavating the ruins

of a huge building, on a mission to discover evidence

of who built it and when.

♪ ♪

Already they're turning up finds.

The base should be further inside.

You see this is the direction,

so in theory it should be more or less here.

It's beautiful!

[Narrator] Many of these 3,400-year-old discoveries

are in amazing condition, giving Nicolò clues

about the kind of life and industry that went on here.

Let's dig this hole.

Then we'll see if there's a middle of the same width

as this one inside, immediately inside.

So now maybe I'll do it by hand.

♪ ♪

[Nicolò] And the ash has just started to come out.

[Narrator] This series of small chambers shows evidence

of being scorched by heat.

That's it, we have the entrance of the kiln.

[Nicolò] A beautifully preserved specimen,

and I expect the kiln to be fairly deep below my feet.

[Narrator] It's a kiln, an oven chamber used to make pottery.

[Archaeologist] We are finding in this level a lot of ashy soil

and the charcoal, this should be the bottom of this kiln.

We've found many of these complete vessels

on the bottom of it,

and this is the classic Kassite shape of pottery.

[Narrator] This characteristic style of pottery tells Nicolò

that Dur Kurigalzu was founded

by a people called the Kassites.

They were said to have originated

outside of Mesopotamia,

in the Zagros Mountains in modern-day Iran.

They seized control of the city of Babylon

in the 16th century BCE

and ruled it for over four centuries.

Today, the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon

have been restored, giving a glimpse of its former glory.

The Kassites ruled here for longer than anyone else.

So what might their civilization reveal

about Babylon, and why it held such sway

over the writers of the Bible.

Clues could come from exploring the city's architecture.

♪ ♪

Archaeologist Haider Almamori has devoted his career

to exploring Babylon's many mysteries.

[Haider Almamori] Babylon was my first love.

From the beginning, since I get in love with the city

and the ruins of Babylon,

I decided to be an archaeologist.

[Narrator] The first mention of Babylon in the Bible

is in the Book of Genesis.

It says it was one of the oldest cities in the world.

So when you walk around, you can feel that it's an ancient city.

It has temples, palaces,

streets, and even the landscape is very nice,

the ancient cross of Euphrates River

and Shatt Al-Hillah River

is still seen inside the city.

[Narrator] The site spans 2,500 acres.

At its height, Babylon had a canal network

and huge public spaces.

Historical documents also record that it had

a monumental tower called the Etemenanki ziggurat.

[Haider] Etemenanki means house, foundation,

platform of heaven and earth.

[Narrator] Ziggurats were stepped pyramids.

They had no cavities inside, unlike the Egyptian pyramids,

but staircases around the outside and a temple on top.

The ziggurat would be dedicated to the patron god of a city

which could be one of several thousand Mesopotamian deities

and served as their dwelling place on Earth.

Babylon's ziggurat was said to be the inspiration

for one of the Bible's most famous landmarks,

the Tower of Babel, a mythological tower

built to reach the heavens

that's described in the Book of Genesis.

Today, all that remains of the Etemenanki Tower

is the square base.

So what did Babylon's ziggurat actually look like?

Answers could lie back at the Kassite-built city

of Dur Kurigalzu.

Outside the city's urban center,

a very unusually shaped mound rises from the desert sands.

Standing 187 feet tall, this strange, layered monument

was first recorded by travelers in the 16th century.

Archaeologists now believe it is the core

of a ruined ziggurat.

Who built it and when?

Nicolò explores one of the religious buildings

next to the crumbling tower to unlock its secrets.

[Nicolò] So this was a very large temple area,

we do have walls standing more than four meters high.

[Narrator] The builders used bricks made of sunbaked mud

to construct the 13-foot-tall walls of the temple.

Close inspection reveals

they're stamped with ancient text.

[Nicolò] Some of the big bricks, they bear a stamp

with a cuneiform inscription by King Kurigalzu.

[Narrator] King Kurigalzu was a powerful ruler

from the Kassite Dynasty.

The bricks reveal that he built the ziggurat.

[Nicolò] So to the god Enlil,

he dedicates the construction of the temple.

[Narrator] Enlil is god of the wind, air and storms

and the king of all the gods.

[Nicolò] We counted 500 of these stamps,

both on the walls of baked bricks, like here,

or on the floors.

They wanted these inscriptions to be immediately visible,

not only to posterity, but also to their contemporary people

walking along the walls.

[Narrator] Archaeologists know the approximate period

of King Kurigalzu's rule, which helps them date the ziggurat.

The Kassites began building

this pyramid-shaped mudbrick monument around 1350 BCE.

Its vast base once covered nearly 50,000 square feet,

with three more layers of sunbaked platforms

stacked on top, rising towards the sky.

Three grand staircases led to a summit

that in its prime towered nearly 200 feet tall.

This is quite possibly what Babylon's ziggurat

would have looked like, too.

But for archaeologists working at Babylon, there's a puzzle.

Etemenanki's remains have been dated.

They're 300 years older than the ziggurat at Dur Kurigalzu.

It can't have been built by the Kassites

as it was here before they conquered Babylon.

So who did build this ziggurat immortalized in the Bible?

[Narrator] In Oxford, England, Lara Bampfield,

an expert in ancient Mesopotamian writing,

investigates who lived at Babylon before the Kassites.

She's one of the few people in the world

that can read and write Babylonian cuneiform script.

Cuneiform is the oldest known writing system,

established 5,000 years ago

and shared among many languages in Mesopotamia.

[Lara Bampfield] It's formed of small wedge shapes

that are joined together into words or phrases.

[Narrator] In 1901, archaeologists unearthed

a stone slab called a stele in Susa, modern-day Iran.

Made of polished black diorite,

it was just under eight feet tall

and covered in cuneiform writing.

[Lara] We have script that appears on all of its sides.

Its preservation is immaculate.

[Narrator] She begins to decode the symbols on the stele.

At the top of the stele lies an image

of the Babylonian sun god Shamash,

and a king who is named Hammurabi.

[Lara] We can see Hammurabi being bestowed with the tools

he would need to rule successfully by a god.

[Narrator] Hammurabi ruled Babylon in the 1700s BCE,

centuries before the Kassites.

Before him, Babylon was a minor town in a small state.

But during his 42-year reign,

grand building works transformed Babylon

into one of the most advanced cities in the world.

Through conquest and diplomacy,

he took over neighboring cities in the Near East.

[Lara] Hammurabi was best known for bringing together

the south and the central parts of Mesopotamia.

[Narrator] He forged an empire named Babylonia

with capital city Babylon at its center.

Babylon's ziggurat was built around the time of his rule.

But perhaps his most famous legacy is on this stele,

some of the first written laws in human history.

[Lara] Below this image we see 282 lines of cuneiform script

that talk about the laws themselves,

what you shouldn't do, and the punishments

that you would be put under if you were to break these laws.

[Narrator] Lara writes out law code number 22.

At the time of Hammurabi,

the language spoken by Babylon's residents

and many in Mesopotamia was called Akkadian.

[Lara] In Akkadian, it would read "su ma a wi lum hup tam ich

but ma itash bat a wilum shu itak."

Translated into English, it would be

"If a man committed a robbery, then he shall be executed."

They did rule with an iron fist,

some of the punishments that they state in the law code

are pretty harsh and pretty extreme.

[Narrator] But his laws also reveal a strong sense

of responsibility towards his citizens.

[Lara] They talk about marriage, they talk about property,

they talk about tenancy, wages, professionals, building works.

The epilogue at the start of the law code actually talks about

how Hammurabi protects the weak

and how these laws have been put in place to make sure

that the society functions

in a peaceful and harmonious way.

[Narrator] Hammurabi set down laws that influenced

many cultures that followed.

Some experts believe these laws may have inspired

writings in the Bible.

The 10 Commandments, the famous set of rules

given to the Israelites by God which shaped their society,

bear many similarities to Hammurabi's Code.

But in 1750 BCE, Hammurabi's reign came to an end,

and in 1595, the Kassites took over the empire he had built.

Evidence of what they did with this kingdom could be found

back at the vast archaeological site of Dur Kurigalzu.

The Kassite rulers originated from outside Mesopotamia,

but Nicolò believes,

rather than stamp their own culture on Babylon,

the Kassites preserved many of its customs,

whilst expanding the empire further still.

When the Kassite dynasty established itself,

they resided in Babylon which was the main cultic center.

Sometime they decided to move the capital 100 kilometers north

to here at Dur Kurigalzu.

[Narrator] In this new capital city built in the 1300s BCE,

the Kassites replicated Babylon's ancient architecture

in the form of the ziggurat.

But they also built a vast palace

which Nicolò and his team are now excavating.

We have walls standing up almost four meters high.

We are definitely in awe at the power of the thickness

of the monumentality of the architecture we are unearthing.

In the center of the city

we have this enormous royal palace.

[Narrator] Nicolò believes it could once have spanned

37 acres, making it potentially the largest palace

in the Middle East.

[Nicolò] The vastness of the Royal Palace,

this is unprecedented.

So this speaks volumes of the power and the wealth

of those who built it, the Kassite kings.

[Narrator] This season, the team has begun to unearth

something truly extraordinary,

it appears to be decoratively painted plaster,

an artwork known as a fresco.

[Nicolò] And it's a decoration

which is so peculiar and important.

For example, just here you can see fragments of painted plaster

which were discovered this morning,

and they have geometrical motifs,

they have these rosettes.

[Narrator] To see color preserved

after thousands of years is incredibly rare.

They are painted on stucco, and they use Egyptian blue.

They use a series of chemical mixtures

which are highly resistant.

They are actually still very vivid, the colors, today.

They haven't been oxidized.

I think it's a direct glimpse, into this opulent lifestyle.

This is the apex of palatial building.

[Narrator] The Kassite Empire brought stability to Babylonia

for over 400 years, preserving the architecture and culture

of the ancient city as well as its knowledge and history

through their written records.

[Nicolò] They were definitely successful,

they basically ruled for at least half a millennium

in a very unruly area.

[Narrator] But in the mid 1100s BCE,

the Kassite Empire began to collapse.

[Nicolò] When the state weakens,

the capital itself gets weakened,

so this is what happened to Dur Kurigalzu

in the late phases of its history.

The Painted Palace was destroyed.

[Narrator] What followed was a period

known as the Babylonian Dark Ages,

with few written records and frequent invasions.

The old Babylonian Empire of law, culture and architecture

which inspired the Tower of Babel story,

and perhaps the 10 Commandments,

seemed to be over.

But a new era, one that would inspire

some of the Bible's most dramatic moments,

was soon to begin.

[Narrator] In 729 BCE,

after centuries of turmoil and decline,

a group of notorious warriors claimed the city of Babylon

for their empire--

the Assyrians.

275 miles north of Babylon in the city of Mosul

in northern Iraq is the archaeological site of Nineveh.

In the 7th century BCE,

it became the capital of the Assyrian Empire.

Archaeologist Jan Heiler is part of a team of experts

exploring the city.

[Jan Heiler] It's every archaeologist's dream

to work at a site like Nineveh.

Every day we're finding something interesting,

and we're adding a little bit more information

to the historic records.

[Narrator] Nineveh also features heavily in the Old Testament.

Like Babylon, it was depicted as an enormous city.

[Jan] In the Bible it says that Nineveh

had about 120,000 inhabitants,

and it took three days to walk across the city.

[Narrator] Today, much of the city lies buried

under modern Mosul.

But archaeologists have deduced

that the circumference of the city walls

was in reality about eight miles,

making it one of the largest cities of its day.

Today, Jan and the team excavate a building

that dates to the late 7th century

and appears to be more than 10,000 square feet in size.

Conservator Justyna Hrabska is in charge

of preserving the new finds.

[Justyna Hrabska] We're just preparing for the consolidation

and a little bit of static stabilization of that slab,

which is fantastic.

[Jan] Yeah.

[Justyna] Because we found another inscription on it.

[Jan] Oh, nice, on the back, yeah.

[Justyna] Yeah, at the back of it.

[Narrator] The team has been hunting for evidence

of who owned this building

and finds clues inscribed in the slabs themselves.

[Justyna] So the front, which wasn't really decorated

with the relief, is flat and badly destroyed,

but at the back is a well preserved inscription,

actually two, and there is Sennacherib mentioned,

so we had something to work for.

[Narrator] Sennacherib was one of the most warlike

Assyrian kings.

During the 7th century,

he claimed the title of king of Babylon for himself,

to the irritation of the defiant Babylonian people.

Excavating this building could reveal more about his power.

But the archaeological team here faces a huge problem--

the walls are mostly made of a stone called anhydrite.

[Justyna] For the sculptors and artists,

it was a nice, soft stone.

[Narrator] But as soon as the team unearths the surface,

anhydrite begins to absorb moisture,

and any cracks in the stone could cause it to fall apart.

The team has to find a solution

that doesn't harm the precious remains,

so they use a chemically similar substance

called gypsum plaster to fill any cracks

and preserve the fractured stone.

[Justyna] Now we are at this stage when Jasim,

who is super experienced here,

is injecting the gypsum in between the cracks

to stabilize the stone.

[Jan] Yeah.

[Justyna] You need to be pretty fast

because gypsum sets rather quickly,

especially in these temperatures.

Hopefully it will survive even longer

after our consolidation and restoration treatment.

[Narrator] The team's mission is to stabilize this building

so that they can understand what it was used for.

Evidence for that could lie with the discovery

of something truly extraordinary

just outside the building's walls.

[Jan] We have these hooves that are carved so nicely,

even with these little lines here and the gap in between.

The surface was completely smooth.

This must have taken a lot of time and effort to do,

so it's very, very impressive work.

It must have looked really amazing

when it was still in its original shape.

And we imagine that these sculptures would have been

up to six meters in height.

[Narrator] These colossal stone hooves

are some of the largest ever found in Assyrian archaeology.

[Jan] This was all done from one single piece of stone,

it is a really impressive feat of engineering and artwork,

it definitely displays the might and power of the Assyrian kings

because they were just able to do something like that.

[Narrator] These feet once belonged to a mythical beast

called a Lamassu, a creature with the body of a bull,

the wings of an eagle, and the head of a man.

They guarded the entrance to a throne room

which archaeologists believe

was Sennacherib's military palace,

the royal residence and armory for a city

that reflected the military power

and might of the Assyrian Empire.

♪ ♪

Yet despite his display of authority here at Nineveh,

the Babylonians refused to stay subjugated

and rebelled against his rule.

After a siege lasting nine months, in 689 BCE,

a furious Sennacherib ordered Babylon

to be razed to the ground.

He plundered its temples,

diverted a river to flood the city,

and he destroyed the famous Etemenanki ziggurat.

[Jan] This sort of created a grudge that the Babylonians

held against the Assyrians until the very end,

and when the opportunity finally came

for them to pay them back, they did.

[Narrator] At the archaeological site of Nineveh,

Jan continues to explore the palace

originally built by King Sennacherib.

He's unearthed another statue,

but this one hasn't fared so well.

[Jan] And as you can see here, we have one of the Lamassu.

This one's been toppled down here,

so you can see the line of it goes this way,

so this is the line on the facade,

and it has toppled down that way,

so together with the mudbrick walls,

everything has come down here.

[Narrator] Jan has discovered clues that this damage

was not the natural result of time, but intentional.

[Jan] In all the places that we have excavated so far,

we have found remains of charcoal.

It's all over the place,

in the fill and in the debris from the walls.

Pieces of charcoal like these are from beams of a roof

or from other wooden features of the architecture.

[Narrator] It's evidence of fire damage,

damage that appears all over the site.

[Jan] And here we have these mudbricks,

they are from the walls but tumbled down,

and you can see that they are preserved quite well,

because the fire was so hot

that it started to, like, slightly burn these mudbricks,

so they are preserved as is, as you can see here.

This points us towards the theory that the whole palace

was completely destroyed by fire.

[Narrator] The evidence has been dated and found to match up

with historical records.

[Jan] On the inscriptions and the texts,

we know very well that Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC.

And the evidence that we found during the excavation

absolutely supports this.

We are quite sure that this represents

the destruction of 612.

[Narrator] Jan believes that the evidence found here

shows Nineveh's rivalry with the Babylonians

came to a destructive finale in 612 BCE.

[Jan] The Babylonians had been on the sort of rule

of the Assyrians since Sennacherib's time,

and so in the end,

when the Assyrians' power was already waning,

they decided that now was the time to get together

and put an end to it.

[Narrator] With the help of allies,

the Babylonians sacked Nineveh, obliterating the entire city.

[Jan] It was the end of the Assyrian Empire,

and the Babylonians took over rule in Mesopotamia.

[Narrator] The Babylonian Empire would soon become

even more powerful than in the days of Hammurabi.

Could this hold a clue to why the writers of the Bible

were so obsessed with Babylon?

Back at the ancient city of Babylon,

Haider explores the walls

of one of its most important monuments.

This is a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate,

the largest and most elaborately decorated entrance

to the inner city of Babylon.

It stood over the magnificent

half-mile-long processional way.

Its walls are inscribed with cuneiform,

which reveals one of the great rulers of Babylon,

Nebuchadnezzar II.

They use the stamp seal, usually made from metal,

they write the inscription on it

and then they stamp on the bricks.

The inscription mentioned

that Nebuchadnezzar II built this palace.

[Narrator] Nebuchadnezzar II's name appears

over and over again in the Bible.

He rose to power around 606 BCE and drove Babylon to become

one of the greatest, most advanced cities in the world.

It was a small city in his father's time,

but in his time it became larger and larger.

Its size became like Rome after 600 years.

So it was a huge city during Nebuchadnezzar II.

He built three palaces, at least we know.

[Narrator] All enclosed within five miles

of formidable city walls.

During a time when most settlements were mere villages,

Babylon may have been the first city on Earth

to reach a population of 200,000.

Nebuchadnezzar even rebuilt the famous ziggurat of Babylon.

We have texts and resources

mentioning that the tower was renewed and reconstructed

in the New Babylonian Period by Nebuchadnezzar II.

[Narrator] It was a time of prosperity for the Babylonians.

Yet there's a puzzle.

In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar II is painted

as a villain and tyrant.

So what did he do to inspire such rage

among the Bible's writers?

[Narrator] The investigation into why Nebuchadnezzar II

is portrayed as such an evil king finds clues

in accounts of a devastating event for the Jewish people--

an episode recorded in historical texts

from the 5th and 6th century BCE and in the Old Testament.

The Book of Kings tells how his armies besieged Jerusalem

in 586 BCE.

They looted gold and silver treasures

from the Lord's Temple.

The king's troops then set fire to the temple,

the most sacred site in Judaism,

and razed it to the ground,

taking the treasures that they had plundered to Babylon.

He then drove the people of Jerusalem from their homes

and exiled them to Babylon.

Up to 18,000 Jewish people were forced to live there.

Could this brutal event explain

the Bible authors' obsession with the city?

♪ ♪

It certainly suggests why Nebuchadnezzar II

was immortalized as one of the Bible's most evil kings.

[Nicolò] The biblical writers,

they applied their own point of view, of course,

and so foreign rulers were violent tyrants

aiming at depriving the Jewish people of any kind of freedom.

[Narrator] Today, historians believe

that many of the Bible's stories were written

by Jewish people in Babylon during this time of exile.

One such tale appears in the Book of Genesis

and was likely inspired by the Etemenanki ziggurat,

which would have stood right in front of the eyes

of the Jewish exiles--

the story of the Tower of Babel.

♪ ♪

The Bible says that a mighty hunter called Nimrod

ruled Babylon, or Babel, as the Old Testament also calls it.

Jewish traditions describe how he encouraged his people

to build a tower in the city

that would reach into the heavens.

Genesis tells how God resented their ambition

and scattered the people of Babylon across the Earth,

leaving the tower unfinished.

The tower that seemingly inspired the story

had been restored to its former glory in the 6th century

by Nebuchadnezzar II.

Yet it's now nothing

but a square pile of rubble in a field.

Why didn't it survive, when others are still standing?

♪ ♪

One possible clue could be found

back at the archaeological site of Dur Kurigalzu.

Nicolò continues to investigate the secrets of the ziggurat.

Most mudbrick structures this old

have completely disintegrated,

but the central core of this ziggurat

still stands at almost full height.

For archaeologists, its preservation is a puzzle.

This ziggurat has been so resilient in time from erosion

it actually has eroded much less than other ziggurats, for example.

[Narrator] The exposed brickwork here offers a rare insight

into how this mysterious structure was built.

Nicolò spies an additional element

in the ziggurat's construction that could be key

to its surviving for more than 3,000 years.

In this specific case, the ziggurat

is made of mud bricks, but they are also

paused at intervals with reed mats.

Now, this is quite an act of genius.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] A ziggurat built of mudbrick alone would crumble

under compressive stress before it ever reached full height.

So builders wove mats of reeds

between every eight layers of brick in the core

to distribute weight

and prevent any cracks from spreading.

They sealed the outer layers with bitumen,

which waterproofed the walls against heavy rains,

and preserved the ziggurat from erosion.

It was these techniques that allowed the Mesopotamians

to build their ziggurats as tall as 300 feet.

But few other ziggurats have survived

as well as Dur Kurigalzu.

Nicolò believes another engineering feature

is the unique secret to its success.

A closer look at the structure reveals

an intriguing regular pattern of holes.

They're not just using this solution,

they're also using ventilation shafts horizontally

so that it keeps this mass of mud bricks dry inside.

There is no humidity basically.

[Narrator] The lack of moisture has stopped the mudbricks

disintegrating inside the core

and saved this ancient monument.

The preservation of this architectural wonder

allows today's visitors some idea of what the Jewish exiles

would have seen dominating their daily view,

a site they may well have written

into their stories in the Bible.

According to the Old Testament, the Jewish people would remain

in exile at Babylon for around 70 years,

a trial that would come to an end with their liberation,

but also with the brutal conquest

and destruction of the city itself.

So who was responsible for the fall of Babylon?

[Narrator] The fall of Babylon is recorded

in one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament,

Belshazzar's feast.

King Belshazzar, grandson of Nebuchadnezzar II,

was holding a feast in the city of Babylon.

He drank wine from the sacred vessels taken from the temple,

mocking the Lord.

In the midst of the revelry, a hand appeared,

etching words of divine judgement on the palace wall.

That very night, Belshazzar was slain

and Babylon fell to invaders.

But does the biblical version of events match up

with the historical records?

And who was responsible?

♪ ♪

In Oxford, Lara Bampfield, an expert in Mesopotamian writing,

investigates an ancient document

called the Cyrus Cylinder.

[Lara] This is a very important artifact,

and it was excavated at Babylon in the 1800s.

[Narrator] It records the victories of a Persian king,

Cyrus the Great, who ruled the vast Persian Empire.

Archaeologists believe he conquered Babylon in 539 BCE.

[Lara] This once former, impressive, monumental city

that controlled trade over the whole of Mesopotamia

absolutely fell apart and was abandoned.

[Narrator] To peoples like the ancient Greeks and Egyptians,

the Persians were adversaries;

but to the authors of the Bible, Cyrus is a hero.

Lara decodes the cylinder for clues as to why.

[Lara] There is one line on the Cyrus Cylinder

that a lot of people have attached to,

and this is because it talks about the return of people.

Line 32 reads, "I returned the images of the gods

who had resided there, to their place,

and I let them dwell in eternal abodes.

I gathered all their inhabitants

and I returned them to their dwellings."

[Narrator] The cylinder doesn't name these people,

but a tantalizing theory links them to biblical history.

[Lara] There is a lot of speculation

about whether this is actually the Judeans

returning to Jerusalem;

the return of exiled people to their home.

[Narrator] The act of liberating the exiled Jews in Babylon

cemented the heroic status of Cyrus in the Bible.

But for Babylon's reputation, the damage was done,

immortalized throughout many books of the Bible

in the very strongest terms.

Babylon is depicted as the mother of prostitutes,

her golden cup filled with abominations,

intoxicating the nations with her immorality.

The Babylonians are said to be as greedy as the grave--

like death, never satisfied,

gathering all nations and taking them captive.

The city was called "the hammer of the whole earth,"

renowned for violence and burning the holy temples.

Until Babylon's arrogance and pride led to its downfall,

its grandeur reduced to ruins

among the nations it once dominated.

This season's excavations at some of Iraq's

biggest archaeological sites have shed light

on one of the Bible's most infamous cities.

Babylon was the most important city.

With its richness, with its power,

represented in the eyes of biblical writers,

a corrupt power. But in fact, it was

in a way misrepresented, if not misunderstood altogether.

[Narrator] At Dur Kurigalzu,

the excavation season is nearly over.

After months of work inside the Painted Palace,

the team has excavated 340 feet of frescoed wall

to a depth of six feet in places.

The archaeologists here have unearthed the lost world

of the Kassites,

whose careful custody over nearly half a millennium

preserved the architecture and laws

that would inspire the writers of the Bible.

Excavating these vivid colors from the past,

yeah, it's emotional.

It's something that when you figure it, you say, "Oh, wow."

[Narrator] At Nineveh,

home to one of Babylon's greatest adversaries,

archaeologists unearth a story of revenge

that propelled Babylon

to become perhaps the greatest city in the world.

[Jan] Defeating the Assyrians and destroying Nineveh

definitely led to a huge shift in power.

[Narrator] Together, these excavations,

along with the historical records of forced exile,

reveal what made Babylon so extraordinary

that the Bible's authors turned to it for inspiration

hundreds of times.

[Lara] I think Babylon has a place

in biblical writers' history

because the Judeans were part of the Babylonian history.

They lived it, they were traumatized through it,

and as a result of that it was a hot topic

for the biblical writers.

[Narrator] And so, Babylon's status was cemented

as a truly legendary city of the Bible.