The Idea of Babylon

巴比伦的概念是对复杂而多样的过程的研究，通过这些过程，过去的知识被构建、交流和建立在文化中。这项研究将古物学和考古学的历史与文化史结合在一起，分析了考古学方法在广泛的文化背景下的发展，以再现包括艺术、文学、音乐和戏剧在内的古代历史。这项研究将考察巴比伦古城是如何被感知和表现的，以及后来引入以欧洲为主的文化，以及该遗址吸引游客的历史，以及它的重新发现、探索和最终挖掘。重要的领域包括圣经资料中包含的巴比伦观点；希腊历史；中世纪和后来旅行者的记述；美术，其中巴别塔和伯沙萨的节日一直是主要主题；文学表现；以及古董和考古写作本身。这些研究古代历史的方法基于不同的认识论，产生了非常不同的信息和意义。这项研究关注的是在知识建构过程中，这些来源之间的相互作用，以及它们之间的分离。这项研究将引起美索不达米亚考古专家的兴趣，因为它彻底处理了与巴比伦有关的这些过程，但对那些对思想史和科学研究与文化生活之间的关系感兴趣的人也具有更广泛的相关性。这本完成的书将对考古思想史的研究做出原创性的贡献，详细探索从圣经和古典来源获得的关于过去的知识与代表过去的实证研究相结合时产生的混合。有人会争辩说，在构建关于过去的知识的过程中，这种具有启发性的杂交体既不是对规则的反常，也不是例外，而是经常发生，并经常在流行和学术思想中产生影响。这本书还将考虑巴比伦物理遗址的近代史及其代表性。这项工作的这一重要方面将分析严重破坏伊拉克文化遗产对今后的考古研究和更广泛的文化方面的影响。通过这种方式，这项研究的目的将是在更广泛的背景下认识到伊拉克和世界损失的规模。

The Idea of Babylon is a study of the intricate and varied processes by which knowledge of the past is constructed, communicated and established in culture. The research brings the history of antiquarianism and archaeology together with cultural history, analysing the development of an archaeological approach within a broad cultural context for the representation of the ancient past that includes art, literature, music and theatre. The research will examine how the ancient city of Babylon has been perceived and represented bring the in later, predominantly European, culture, together with the history of the site's fascination for travellers, its rediscovery, exploration and finally excavation. Important areas include the views of Babylon contained in biblical sources; Greek histories; the accounts of medieval and later travellers; fine art, where the Tower of Babel and Belshazzar's Feast in particular have been major themes; literary representations; and antiquarian and archaeological writing themselves. These approaches to the ancient past are based on different epistemologies and produce very different kinds of information and meaning. This study is concerned with the interaction of these many sources, and the disjunctions between them, in the construction of knowledge. The research will be of interest to specialists in Mesopotamian archaeology for its thorough treatment of these processes in relation to Babylon, but also has a much wider relevance to those with an interest in the history of ideas and the relationship between scientific research and cultural life. The completed book will make an original contribution to the study of the history of archaeological thought, exploring in detail the hybrids that are created when knowledge of the past derived from, e.g., biblical and classical sources combines with empirical research in the representation of the past. It will be argued that such revealing hybrids are neither aberrations nor the exception to the rule in the construction of knowledge about the past, but rather are frequently occurring and often influential in both popular and academic thought. The book will also consider the recent history of the physical site of Babylon and its representation. This important aspect of the work will analyse the impact of serious damage to Iraq's cultural heritage on future archaeological research and in wider cultural terms. In this way the study will aim to allow the scale of Iraq's and the world's loss to be appreciated in broad context.