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Art Of The Day Weekly

#428 - from 28 April 2016 to 4 May 2016

What we know about the Tower of Babel

STRASBOURG – An exhibition with a mysterious title (“Ana ziqquratim”, which in Akkadian means “Towards the ziggurat”) tries to bring together all our knowledge of an Oriental myth. While the tower of Babel has acquired an enviable reputation through Biblical marketing –it is mentioned negatively as we know in Genesis, as a symbol of man’s vanity-, the architectural form under which it has been made popular (in particular through engravings of the Renaissance or in the paintings by Bruegel) partly corresponds to reality. The tower of Babel was the last avatar of the ziggurat, a stepped pyramid with a temple on its last floor. At the beginning (Vth millennium B.C.), it was simply an elevated modest building. Under the neo-Babylonian period (VII and VI centuries B.C.), it reached its most completed form, and became a gigantic edifice dedicated to the god Marduk. The Hebrews, exiled in Babylon, looked upon it with fear and admiration and identified it with the decadent and cosmopolitan civilisation that persecuted them. The drama of the archeologists is that those raw brick structures do not withstand the passage of time as the Egyptians’ stone pyramids did. In the dry and scorching weather conditions they crumbled down to dust. The exhibition presents various models that bring them back to life, from Eridu to Mari, from Ur to Uruk, all the way to Babylonia-Babel, which won its own place in our imaginations till the end of time.
Ana Ziquratim, at the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire of Strasbourg, from 27 April to 21 June 2016.

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