Et in Akkadia Ego

It's too late to do anybody any good, but I can't resist offering a word about the Louvre's “Babylon” show, which closes June 2.

In one sense, it is a marvel, something that perhaps only the Louvre (or perhaps the Shiekhdom of Dubai) could bring off. The core is any array of objects from the Ancient Mesopotamian, spanning the millennia from 2000 to the time of Alexander the Great. They're intelligently displayed with a lot of helpful commentary (although too much of it has to be in the vein of “we have no idea.”) The space is pretty tight for the crowds it handles, but that is perhaps inevitable any more with any blockbuster show.

But all this undoubted achievement is shadowed over by two kinds of marketing hype.

One is the very idea of “Babylon”--as if the near 2000-year span represents one civilization, even if in one place. The designers themselves seem to have a bit of a guilty conscience—they gloss over the 900-pound gorilla of Assyria which inserts itself in between the two separate and discontinuous Babylonian hegemonies.

The other is a bit more devilish. The Babylonian collection itself,though stunning, is fairly small—one long room. Evidently the marketers told them they couldn't mount blockbuster show on so small a res. So the planners fleshed it out with another corridor, devoted to cultural responses to Babylon. The fulcrum here is the Biblical book of Revelations, represented by an impressive array of illustrated manuscripts; then other stuff down throw the ages, including a Brueghel Babel, a Blake drawing of Nebuchadnezzar as he becomes a beast, and even a bit of D.W. Griffiths film.

This is all good fun and some of it is first-rate stuff, although hardly as stunning as the first part. The trouble is that the relation between the two is only notional. The author of Revelations himself can hardly have known anything about the “real” Babylon, except as filtered through a highly stylized Biblical tradition, already several hundred years old. Everything else is even farther removed.

It seemed to me that the crowd thinned out pretty fast after the first cramped but brilliant corridor. Can hardly blame them. There is only so much culture you can take in a day, and after the ancient finds, the second batch seemed like something of an afterthought.