Babylonian Memory

In-between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, the city of Babylon rose from near obscurity to become a mighty multinational empire which then plunged into the dust. However, Babylon continues to live in competing strands of popular memory. For within the strands of popular memory, Hammurabi propagated his first codified law, Nebuchadnezzar grew his Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel fell, and its future Whore will reign anew in anticipation of the Second Coming. These twin strands of memory have endured and propagated the meaning of Babylon as a locus more than a city. The prime memory is a Judeo-Christian one where Babylon is a negative space: a place of captivity, degradation, and misery offset by a future redemption. On the second strand of memory, Babylon is a historical and impressive seat ruled by powerful and mighty kings and laws.
In doing so, they invoked the twin strands of Babylonian memory, both the scriptural and the historical, to give assistance and shape to their analysis of political economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the collective memory of Babylon as employed by the radical and influential Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. It postulates that the memory of Babylon persisted in twin strands, one religious and one historical. All conceivable citations of the memory of Babylon will be analyzed in the two philosopher's writings and connections will be made to them and to the wider collective memory of