B... COMME BABYLONE

of GEORGE Bernard

FRANCE, 2008, 00:55:00

Production : FILMS DU TAMBOUR DE SOIE, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, ARTE
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : History, History of art, Society

Summary :
The mythical city of Babylon was born in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago. Disappeared 2000 years later, it was finally rediscovered at the edge of the twentieth century. The famous Ishtar Gate, excavated in 1898, and then transported stone by stone and rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Code of Hammurabi, precursory justice treaty, kept in the Musée du Louvre, or the famous cuneiform clay tablets which testify a real explosion of writing, are all moving traces of this society signing the birth of our civilizations. The history of Babylon through the centuries is that of a perpetual motion that oscillates between destruction and reconstruction. Even rebuilt by Saddam Hussein, and then besieged by a U.S. military base during the war in Iraq, Babylon remains today a legend, always fantasized in the multiple representations that have been made: the Tower of Babel, Nebuchadnezzar or Semiramis painted by Degas, the legend of the hanging gardens, the stories of Herodotus, or Italian epics ... B ... comme Babylone goes on search of the discovery of this civilization by meeting those who have explored this site, today inaccessible, like Béatrice André-Salvini of the Louvre, one of the very few people in the world reading the Babylonian "in the original" or Joachim Marzahn in Berlin. We follow Salam Jawad, young iconographer of Iraqi origin, who collects Babylonian objects to design an online Encyclopedia. While walking with him, we leave for a fascinating journey, at the same time scientific, cultural and human ...

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