![]() ![]() Mao Zedong, who killed as many, but not all of them on purpose, came up with the biggest engineering project in human history, the massive Three Gorges Dam, which made a million people homeless.īut it was Hitler who most understood the nexus between architecture and power. Stalin, who was probably the biggest murderer in human history, with 40 million corpses to his debit, named a whole city after himself. The great 20th-century dictators employed the same psychology. ![]() ![]() Now the megalomaniacal Saddam had declared himself to be the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar and would soon rule over the world's next great empire. Then, 1,500 years later, it held the throne of Nebuchadnezzar II, one of the most ruthless conquerors in history who built what was the most powerful nation in the world. Some 4,000 years earlier, the city had been the capital of Hammurabi, emperor of Babylonia, and the man responsible for the world's first legal code. ![]() I had gone there to see the work begun by Iraq's then leader, Saddam Hussein, who had conceived a grandiose plan to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. "Where did you find that?" a diplomat at the British embassy in Baghdad, whose hobby was antiquities, asked me, adding: "It's Seleucid, about 150BC." I had picked it up several hours' drive to the south from a pile of debris pushed aside by a bulldozer. Somewhere in my cellar, in the collected treasures of my travels, is a shard of patterned clay pottery. ![]()
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