Receiving knowledge from the past. Narratives of Babylon in medieval Arabic culture

Medieval Arabic literary sources, from historiography to geography — and more generically adab literature — assign to Babylon and its remains a peculiar place. Interest for the ‘after-life of Bābil’ (as Caroline Janssen calls the whole phenomenon in her Bābil, the City of Witchcraft and Wine: The Name and Fame of Babylon in Medieval Arabic Geographical Texts, University of Ghent, Ghent, 1995, 91), is often connected with a wider issue cherished by Medieval Islamic culture, which inherited it from Late Antiquity, that is to say the world history of lost books and of dispersed knowledge. Actually, memories of Babylon depend on one hand on the biblical tradition, and on the other hand on the Persian Sasanian tradition, the latter focused on the destruction of Babylon and the negative feature of Alexander. As a result, the fusion of the historic-mythical traditions in Medieval Arabic culture generated the inclusion of Babylon and its memories in a history of catastrophes which caused the dramatic loss of knowledge and libraries of the past. Thus Babylon becomes part of a second general issue, focused on translation as a historical device capable of saving libraries and knowledge otherwise destined to loss and oblivion. Translating the ancient knowledge had a specific relevance in the Abbasid age, being an aspect of the cultural policies of what can be called ‘an Empire ideology’. In that sense, Babylon is given a role in the reflection on the roots of Islamic civilization, and the process sounds like a synthesis of myth and fantasy. Ibn al-Nadīm, with his catalogue of books, provides an unexplored, tenth-century instance of such a process, in which Babylon stands as a fruitful reference to the past: high culture and collective imagination combine with each other in order to fulfil a public request of reading in the Abbasid society of the time. Lost novels, whose only surviving trace is the title mentioned by Ibn al-Nadīm, are located in a Babylonian context, orienting the ancient memories towards the realm of fiction.