I treasured those lazy evenings by the lakeshore, pitching camp as the clouds darkened and the setting ochre sun bled into the distant sand dunes. We gathered sticks and larger branches for the campfires, ever watchful for sleeping scorpions or the remnants of mortar shells that the army had used for target practice. We chatted, played guitars, everyone filled with the exciting feeling that for the rest of the world there may be a horrific tomorrow, but we were together, protected by an invisible shield of our own indifference. The fires raised our hearts, and as we sat together watching the crackling embers, the idea arose that somebody should approach Hassan to take a party of us in the hospital coach to visit the city of Babylon. Hassan was a middle-aged Kurd with devilish brown eyes, who knew everybody in the hospital by name and spoke fairly good English. He was devoted to his  family, who came from Sulayimaniyah in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and by tradition he mostly wore the ginger-brown woolen sharwal of his people. We all knew that since the formation of the Iraqi State, the Kurds had suffered in their struggle for autonomy but nobody openly discussed the issue, in case Hassan was a mukhabarat, or planted government agent. Being apolitical was essential for survival and we appeared insensitive when he talked about his family, which was indeed a pity, because one finds in the Kurd features such as story telling and humour which are startlingly similar to our own. Often, as we boarded the coach to go to the social club, Hassan would look up from the driver’s seat and say,

“Where to boys!, Rath-far-nam?”

Then he would turn round in an amused expression and look at some new nurse, whom he didn’t recognise and continue,

“Jesus, more fresh Irish meat in Baghdad!” his fleshy cheeks laughing in unison with the rest of the passengers.

It was on a weekend before St. Patrick’s day that Hassan took the coach and we set out for the floodplains of Shinar and the fabled city of Babylon. He followed the  highway south from Baghdad, and then branched off along the ribbon settlements of the Euphrates valley. We reached the ruins as the markets were coming to life and parked the coach in a small clearing near an overgrown temple. For a while, I stood in silence and looked back along the dusty road that snaked back along the broad plains that had given birth to the world’s first cities. History bled from its curves. This was the roadway that King Nebuchadnezzar had used to drag the Jews in chains from Jerusalem to their final captivity in Babylon. Alexander the Great had marched his army east along its route to the mouth of the river Indus on the borders of India.

I waited alone, as the rest of the party made their way to the entrance of the ruins. I listened for the voices in the wind, the echoes of dead civilisations, now lost and forever gone. I had read that in its long history, Babylon had two periods of greatness. Initially, it was a small village in Mesopotamia, until Hammurabi made it the capital of an empire that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the borders of modern Turkey. The king was known for writing the earliest code of law ever found. When Hammurabi died, the empire decayed and the Babylon was overthrown by the Assyrians who razed it to the ground. When the Assyrian Empire fell, Babylon rose again, this time to its greatest glory under Nebuchadnezzar. Its huge gates and walls were decorated with bulls and dragons in coloured ceramic and in the distance stood the Hanging Gardens, built by him to remind his wife of the greenery of her homeland. Dominating the skyline was a huge stepped pyramid, dedicated to the god Marduk, probably the great tower of Babel mentioned in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar had told his architects to "raise the top of the tower so that it might rival heaven”. After his death the Persian Cyrus diverted the flow of the Euphrates and his men crossed the dry river bed and took the city without a fight. It was later  plundered by the Persian Xerxes and finally abandoned when Alexander the Great 's engineers calculated it would take 10,000 men more than two months just to clear away the rubble. It appeared that nobody wanted a civilisation to flourish in the area. For many years the statues and blue tiled walls of the city lay crumbling in the desert sun, a sort of interesting archaeological artefact to remind a vanquished people of some distant glorious past. The beautiful arch with it’s glazed-brick panels were eventually stolen by the Germans, and placed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The French took a large shaft of black basalt inscribed with Hammurabi’s code of law and put it in the Louvre. The British then raided the old city and put what was left in the British museum. I looked in silence at the ruins that I was going to visit and was reminded of the words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah who had predicted, "The wild beasts of the desert shall dwell there."

At the entry gate, an official guide called Nadia joined us and brought us along the Street of Processions to the restorations at the Blue Isthar Gate. A knot of emotion arose in my throat, when she showed us the remains of the Hanging Gardens, and informed us that we were walking on the original bituminous paving that had been used by Alexander the Great many years before. She told us that since 1978, Saddam Hussein had shown special interest in the revival of Babylon and had adopted it as a personal  project. Recent excavations had uncovered the Tower of Babylon’s sacred wall and dwelling-places in the Ishtar Temple. A number of buildings had recently been reconstructed, such as parts of the Ishtar Gate, the temples of Ishtar and Nabushcari, the Greek amphitheatre, and some model Babylonian houses. The world had protested that Saddam should leave the artefacts of the past alone, but somehow I felt proud of him and understood his xenophobic passion to preserve the great treasures   of the past on Iraqi soil. Much less attention had been paid to the restoration of ancient Greece temples including almost a total refit of the Parthenon. Nadia showed us the walls 's which once were so wide at the top that she said a four-horse chariot could gallop along, then make a U-turn without difficulty. In the walls she showed us a group of bricks with an Arabic inscription that read,

“Saddam Hussein was responsible for restoring the walls of ancient Babylon”

“This is the spot where our famous city of Babylon once stood…during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar it was known it’s beautiful hanging gardens which were one of the seven wonders of the world and it is now being restored to it’s glory in the reign of our great leader Saddam Hussein”.