THE BABYLON EXHIBITION at the British Museum is reviewed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. Excerpt:

Thanks to a soundtrack, sometimes the tablets speak to us of kings, dreams and battles. This mid-sized exhibition never claims blockbuster status. So the great intellectual adventures that led to our detailed knowledge of life in Babylon – the excavations by Robert Koldewey in the 1900s, or the decipherment of cuneiform by Henry Rawlinson – get slightly short shrift in these displays. Frustrated visitors might want to invest in the superb book, edited by Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour. It fills in the gaps.

Sin and doom hogs the limelight. Whether this works depends on the standard of "legacy" material. We get drippy Victorian paintings of the Jewish exile, while Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast has not made it up the road from the National Gallery. A collection of music inspired by Babylon, from Verdi's Nabucco through the inevitable Bob Marley and down to Boney M, looks like the fruit of a Google trawl. Modern art prompted by images of the Tower of Babel – especially by Pieter Bruegel's crumbling helter-skelter – shines brighter, in the eerie digital city of Julee Holcombe's Babel Revisited or MC Escher's never-to-be-finished skyscraper.

Again, I wanted a show that invites analogies between ancient and modern to go the whole Babylonian hog. Burning and collapsing towers, a panic-stricken city, rumours of a vile oriental despot: this show's processional way leads the mind inexorably back to Saddam and Bush.

Background here.