Pythagorus Read Online Free Page B

high walls – stalked the men and women on the road. At the city’s Ishtar Gate, bulls and dragons took over from the lions. This entrance was one of eight massive, bronze-armoured portals in a double-walled, moated fortification system that surrounded the city. Inside, the avenue continued and crossed the Euphrates on a bridge with supports high enough and far enough apart to allow the largest ships to pass. A temple complex housed the jewel-studded shrine of Marduk, god of the city, in a chamber lined with gold. Pythagoras and others who were not royalty or among the most elite of the priests would not have entered this chamber, but they would have known about it.
    Beyond the temple precincts, the city spread on both sides of the Euphrates and included a royal palace with state rooms, private quarters, courtyards, and a harem for the queen and concubines brought from all parts of the empire. If they are not only legendary (the archaeological evidence is ambiguous but not entirely absent), the Hanging Gardens were part of this complex, and they, like the ziggurat, were a prominent landmark visible from a distance above the surrounding buildings – a terraced hill of earth, supported by massive vaults built so that their floors were waterproof and could support enough soil to plant large trees, watered from the nearby Euphrates by complicated irrigation machinery. Similar irrigation wizardry and a series of canals watered gardens and orchards in the newer part of the city and carried water to distant suburbs. The practical knowledge of mathematics and geometry that made possible these buildings and the surveying for the irrigation was evidence of how well the scribes of Babylon understood these subjects – or, at least, had understood them many centuries before, when the building techniques were developed. It is likely that the theory and deeper mathematical understanding underlying the techniques had been forgotten by the time of Pythagoras, though the techniques themselves had become routine and were still in use.
    Because people who came to Babylon for whatever reason often chose to stay, her streets and passages were a cacophony of languages. There were Hurrians, Cassites, Hittites, Elamites, Jews, Egyptians, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and all mixes thereof. Centuries of captives (including the Jews brought from Judea and Israel, who were there during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign), conquerors, and visitors had lived in the city long enough and mixed sufficiently well to interbreed, until Babylon had become, in the words of the twentieth-century scholar H. W. F. Saggs, ‘a thoroughly mongrel city’. Ancient tablets give evidence of an astounding variety of jobs, careers, and crafts, and a rich array of goods that arrived, some by caravan but mainly by way of the river. Women had authority over slaves or servants in their households, but probably wore veils in public.
    Pythagoras, exploring these streets and passageways and listening to all the languages, would have seen house walls that glowed in bands of light and shade, an effect ingeniously produced by a ‘saw-toothed’ treatment that made the surface reflect the brilliant desert sunlight in this variegated manner. He would have stayed in private houses oriented almost entirely towards interior courtyards, their entrances guarded by a porter and a confusing, indirect entryway to discourage unwanted visitors and peeping toms. Whether he lived in a house like that or in the temple precincts – for his success among the priests and scribes should not have been any less here than in Egypt – his diet was probably mostly vegetarian, not by choice but because, in a city fed from irrigated fields surrounded by desert wastelands, meat was a luxury item.
    What could Pythagoras have learned in Babylon? He was familiar with her art and design, for Hera’s temple on Samos included many examples. He would have sought out the