The Babylon Idol

Chapter 27

‘I know you don’t believe me,’ Anna said. ‘That’s your privilege. But a good researcher never accepts defeat so easily, and we don’t like mysteries getting the better of us. So, as ever, we begin our hunt by going to the records. Thankfully, even though it was so long ago, that period of Babylonian history is very well documented. Since the nineteenth century archaeologists have uncovered thousands of business documents in Babylonia, written on clay tablets in the Akkadian language. Any trading business of any importance would have teams of scribes employed to chisel away all day long at flat sheets of stone, just like secretarial staff typing notes. These ancient records are typically found in large collections relating to the business transactions of a single extended family, often covering several generations’ worth of accounts. Loans, mortgages, contracts, receipts, everything, together with dates of when those transactions were made or agreements struck.’

‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘Nothing changes. People in history were just the same as people today.’

‘Which is exactly what my book was originally going to be about,’ Anna explained. ‘A new angle on those ancient times, exploring the human hearts and minds beneath the dust of history, revealing who these people really were, bringing them to life for today’s reader. At least, that was the idea I was working on to begin with. To that end I spent two months of last year in Iraq, in the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, adjacent to the site of ancient Babylon itself. The area has been something of a war zone in modern times.’

‘Just a little bit,’ Ben said, with a thin smile.

‘But since 2009 the provincial government of Babil has reopened the ancient site to tourism, and archaeologists and cultural organisations were able to resume the restoration efforts that had long been impossible thanks to political and military upheavals. I spent my time working with a team of dig volunteers from all over the world, supervised by a Turkish archaeologist and specialist in ancient languages. It was very physical and exhausting work.’

Now it was Ben’s turn to be surprised, at the idea of the refined, elegant and ever-polished Anna Manzini getting stuck into the grinding heat and dust of a Middle East archaeological excavation, shovel in hand, knee-deep in sand and rock, sweating under the blaze of the same Iraqi sun that had scorched him and his SAS comrades so mercilessly, back in the day.

‘But so rewarding,’ Anna continued. ‘Especially when we uncovered a hitherto-unknown store of ancient Babylonian clay tablets that had lain buried for over two thousand years under the sand. It was when we began to catalogue them and the translation work got underway that I first realised the implications of what we had discovered. Until then, so little had been known about the Muranu family.’

‘The who?’

‘The Muranus were a merchant dynasty who were active from around 600 BC right through until the fall of Babylon to the Persians. Thanks to this discovery, it’s been possible to piece together a great deal of detail about their business affairs. They made their start as rural food merchants, going out into the countryside to buy supplies such as grain, dates, onions and so on, then selling the goods in the city. From such humble beginnings they might never have flourished, but this was a golden age for Babylon, when the economy was booming, the city expanding, fortunes were being made and the spirit of the times was highly optimistic. When King Nebuchadnezzar drafted in thousands of workers to man the construction sites for ambitious new projects like the Ishtar Gate and the famous Hanging Gardens, the Muranu family saw an opening and became caterers to the armies of labourers. The profits they made from feeding the workforce they reinvested into farmland and urban real estate, allowing them to diversify still further by going into manufacturing. As they grew wealthier they also became important moneylenders, making loans of silver for interest rates of as much as twenty per cent a year. The daughters of the Muranu clan married other important businessmen and city officials, so that they gradually worked their way into the highest echelons of the state. Thanks to these connections they received tax breaks, as well as access to state-owned ships and river ports on the Euphrates, on whose banks the city of Babylon was built. The Euphrates runs all through Syria and Iraq and joins up with the Tigris near Basra, becoming the great Shatt-al-Arab River before it empties into the Persian Gulf.’

‘I know where the Euphrates is,’ Ben said.

Anna replied, ‘Then you can appreciate how such a trading route allowed the Muranu family to become even richer, by distributing all kinds of goods throughout the region. Now, as I said, we know a lot about the Muranus from the cache of clay tablets that were found. But one tablet is of particular interest. It dates from 539 BC, which of course was a significant year in Babylon’s history.’

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘By then, Babylon was in terrible disarray politically, economically and militarily. It had been just twenty-three years since the death of King Nebuchadnezzar, who for all his faults was an effective ruler, made the kingdom strong and was adored by the mercantile class. Since his son Amel-Marduk took power in 562, the Muranu family had been watching anxiously as the economy began to slowly unravel under a succession of bad rulers, none of whom lasted very long.’

‘Sounds like present-day Europe,’ Ben said, swallowing the last of his wine.

‘You said it,’ Anna chuckled. ‘What changes?’

At that point, Talia came to collect their dishes. Ben asked if he could have another bottle of wine, which she brought a moment later. Anna declined a refill of her glass. As Ben got to work on the fresh bottle, she went on:

‘But things reached a low point with the rise to the throne of King Nabonidus after his predecessor, the child king Labashi-Marduk, was murdered just months after his inauguration. Nabonidus was a lousy king, almost universally disliked, especially as he spent much of his seventeen-year reign absent from the kingdom, in self-imposed exile in the oasis area of Tayma in present-day Saudi Arabia, having little to do with his kingdom and leaving everything in the control of his son and coregent Belshazzar.’

‘Belshazzar, as in, Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall in blood,’ Ben interjected. ‘Daniel, Chapter five.’

Anna nodded. ‘The same. Nabonidus’ neglect of Babylonian affairs was much resented by the general public, the priesthood, and of course the merchant families. They were right to be anxious, because all the while King Cyrus of Persia was growing ever stronger and his shadow hung over Babylon. Invasion and war were coming, and the elite knew it. There was talk of evacuation, as many people were convinced that the Persians would enslave or execute the entire population of the city. Belshazzar, a strong warrior but a worthless politician, began to panic. Babylon’s gold reserves were at a critical low and he desperately needed to raise money to fight off the threat of the Persians.’

‘War is an expensive business, right enough,’ Ben said. ‘Always was, always will be. But what’s so important about this one clay tablet you mentioned?’

‘It’s important because it’s one of the very last records from ancient Babylon, prior to the Persian invasion of 539,’ Anna said. ‘Not just one of the last surviving records; one of the actual very last due to its date. And also because it’s so unusual in itself. It’s a legal document, an official contract agreement between Belshazzar and the Muranu family. Unfortunately, it was too damaged to decipher fully, as it was excavated in pieces with several fragments missing that made it impossible to know exactly what the contract specified. We know only that the merchant family were being asked to broker some extremely valuable item from the state treasury, making use of their established civilian transport infrastructure in a way that didn’t tie up limited military resources.’

‘But we don’t know what valuable item,’ Ben said.

‘It’s not spelled out, but other tablets found with it fill in certain gaps. They describe, in detail, the plans for loading an important and very large item of cargo, to be transported away by boat. The record even shows how many extra slaves had to be taken on to complete the loading, as well as the large number of armed guards hired to protect the cargo en route. Belshazzar presumably couldn’t afford to offer them a proper military escort as he needed every last soldier available to man the defences of the city.’

‘I understand. You’re suggesting that this cargo was Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, being sold to raise defence funds?’

Anna shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that a troubled state had to sell off its treasures in times of crisis. Here we are in modern-day Greece, where not too long ago the government were talking about selling off national monuments such as the Acropolis to shore up the crippled economy.’

‘Next thing we’ll know, the Chinese will be buying it and carting it off to Beijing, stone by stone,’ Ben said. ‘But the problem with your idea is that no ship at that time would have been able to carry something as massive as a gold statue close on thirty metres in length. It would have sunk before it made it halfway down the Euphrates.’

‘This is why I wanted to speak to Theo Kambasis,’ Anna replied. ‘Because I, like you, found it hard to believe that you could just pick up such an object and transport it about. The task would be impossible, even with thousands of slave labourers at one’s disposal. Aside from the problem of finding a ship big enough to carry it, a pure gold statue of that size would be so heavy that it would tend to collapse on itself the moment it was moved. As a metal, gold is extremely dense but comparatively soft, with low tensile strength. Not to mention the fact that it’s very unlikely that enough gold even existed in Babylonia at that time, or even in the world, to fill a mould so large. Only about a hundred and eighty-five thousand tons of gold have been mined in the whole of human history. I pondered all these problems, until I hit on a new theory. One that Kambasis confirmed just a few minutes before he died, that poor man.’

‘Which was?’

‘That Nebuchadnezzar’s idol could have been created the same way as the colossal statues of Phidias were made during the same era, such as his giant Athena. It’s been estimated that the quantity of gold in the original Athena would have amounted to forty-four talents’ worth. That’s about eleven hundred kilograms, a substantial proportion of the gold reserve of the treasury of Athens but still much lighter than if the statue had been cast solid. What enabled Athena to be transported all the way from Phidias’ workshop in Olympia to the Parthenon was that the builders used a brilliantly inventive modular technique, attaching separate plates to an internal core sculpted out of wood. The method makes it possible to create much larger monuments, which from the outside appear to be solid gold, sometimes combined with ivory and other precious materials. The parts could then be shipped to any destination and assembled there. The modular structure also enabled any section of the statue to be removed and repaired, in case of damage.’ Anna’s eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘Do you see? If the Babylon idol had been created the same way, it could easily have been dismantled for transportation to its new owner.’

‘Piece by piece,’ Ben said. ‘Like the Acropolis going to Beijing. Makes sense. But there are too many ifs and buts. What you’re saying is only supposition.’

‘Wrong,’ Anna said firmly, fixing him with a serious look. ‘The circumstantial evidence is strong enough to be taken seriously. Because the same clay tablet shipping records specifically mention not just one item of cargo, but many large pieces, all wrapped up and packaged aboard an entire small fleet of merchant vessels, which set sail from Babylon’s river port in early October 539 BC. We even have a kind of passenger manifest, listing the names of all the important Muranu family members who accompanied their precious cargo down the Euphrates as they fled the coming war. We know, for instance, that one of the passengers was a young Muranu boy named Ashar, who according to the family birth records listed on other clay tablets was around eight years of age at the time.’

‘All you need now is a buyer’s receipt, so you know where the idol ended up.’

‘Sadly, that’s something we’re missing. No further transactions were recorded, for the reason that events unfolded so quickly afterwards. Belshazzar’s plan had come too late to rescue Babylon from the mobilising Persian army. Just days after the ships sailed, Cyrus the Great’s forces swept in and invaded the city. The Book of Daniel describes how Babylon fell in a single night. Nabonidus fled but was soon caught. His fate is uncertain: it’s very possible that Cyrus had him executed by burning, his favourite method of punishment, though some historians have believed Nabonidus was spared and allowed to live in exile, in what is now Kerman Province in modern-day Iran. We do know for certain that Belshazzar was killed in the defence of Babylon, during what little fighting took place against the massively superior Persian army. And with his death and the collapse of the state, the contract between him and the Muranu family was effectively rendered null and void, along with the need to sell the idol to raise money for the war effort.’

‘So the question is,’ Ben said, ‘what happened to the idol?’

Anna nodded pensively. ‘I ask myself, if I had been an elder of the Muranu family, fleeing with our children to a new life in exile far away from our beloved Babylon and probably leaving behind much, if not all, of our worldly wealth, what would I have wanted to do with it? Sell it to restore our fortunes? Melt down the vast quantity of gold into ingots or coins, or smaller statues that we could trade? Or would we perhaps have chosen to keep it for ourselves, passing it down from generation to generation in whatever new place we had made our home, preserved in its original state, in honour of a king we believed to have been the last great ruler of their land, and to commemorate the Babylon that once had been? I like to think that’s what I would have done, and what they did.’

‘Then they’d have had to hide it pretty well,’ Ben said. ‘You couldn’t leave a ninety-foot golden statue sitting in your backyard and not expect it to draw attention.’

Anna heaved a sigh. ‘Who knows what became of it? But one thing’s for sure. If just one surviving fragment of the idol could be rediscovered and verified, what an incredible find that would be.’

‘Another thing’s for sure, too,’ Ben said. ‘Whether this theory of yours is right or wrong, either way we’re beginning to understand why Usberti ordered his men to take you alive. Whatever Gianni told him about what you’re searching for, it wouldn’t take much for Usberti to suss out the rest. He knows the Bible better than most people.’

‘That would make sense, given his former profession,’ Anna said.

‘And he also lusts after gold more than anyone. When I say he’s obsessed with it, I’m not joking. He believes that the Nazis were using some kind of alchemy to create gold bars out of base metals, and he tried to do the same. I guess that didn’t work out for him, and now he wants to get his hands on as much of the real thing as he can. He also has a long history of kidnapping people he thinks can help him achieve his goals. That would be you, Anna. He wants you to lead him to the Babylon idol.’

‘And if he gets it, he’ll kill me,’ she said with a shiver. ‘It’s the only thing keeping me alive.’

‘Not the only thing,’ Ben said. ‘I’m here.’