Atlas Obscura: Starting in 1983, Saddam Hussein, imagining himself as heir to Nebuchadnezzar, ordered the rebuilding of Babylon. Like Nebuchadnezzar, Hussein had his name inscribed on the bricks, which were placed directly on top of the ruins, some 2,500 years old. A sample inscription translates to: ”In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilization, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done in 1987.” Hussein also added huge portraits of himself and Nebuchadnezzar at the entrance of the ruins.

As most Iraqi men were fighting the bloody Iran-Iraq war, he brought in thousands of Sudanese workers to lay new yellow bricks over the old mud construction where Nebuchadnezzar’s palace had stood. No one is sure what the palace looked like, but that didn’t stop Hussein’s garish and quick reincarnation of the old splendor.

At the end of the Persian Gulf War, he commissioned a palace over more Babylonian ruins, in the same pyramid style as a Sumerian ziggurat, calling it Saddam Hill. The massive gaudy structure almost completely covered the original ruins, outraging archaeologists. Hussein’s plans for a cable line running over the Babylon site were halted with the 2003 invasion.

Before Hussein’s reconstruction, there had already been destruction from the shifts in rivers and deserts, and still more from colonial powers. Germans took the Ishtar Gate, which is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, while the French took ceramics, and the Turks used Babylonian bricks to build dams on the Euphrates. Read more…

“the Turks used Babylonian bricks to build dams on the Euphrates.”

Jeremiah 51:26. “They will not take from you even a stone for a corner
Nor a stone for foundations,
But you will be desolate forever,” declares the Lord.

When God destroys Babylon, at the end of the tribulation period, her building materials will not be reused.