IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 255

Babylon, on the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, was among the largest cities of the ancient world, and it reached its greatest splendour under Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 562 BC. The wealth that flowed into his capital from an empire stretching to the Mediterranean was spent on temples, palaces and fortifications, and the king recorded his projects on clay cylinders in cuneiform script. Among the works he listed was a ceremonial gateway in the inner city wall, dedicated to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and standing at the northern entrance to the city.

The gate was a double structure. An outer gateway faced the open ground beyond the wall, and a short distance behind it stood a second and taller gatehouse, so that anyone who forced the first would find themselves trapped in a narrow courtyard overlooked from both sides. The towers of both gatehouses were faced with bricks glazed in a deep blue, broken by bands of white and gold. Across this surface ran alternating rows of two creatures: bulls, the animal associated with the storm god Adad, and the mušḫuššu, a scaly dragon with a snake's head and a lion's forelegs that was sacred to Marduk, the patron deity of the city. The figures were modelled in raised relief so that they stood out from the wall.

Approach to the gate was along the Processional Way, a paved street more than two hundred metres long, lined by walls faced in the same blue glaze. These walls carried an even larger company of animals, mainly lions, the creature of Ishtar, shown in many poses and in a continuous procession; in the reconstruction in Berlin more than a hundred can be counted. This street was not built for ordinary traffic. It was a sacred route, used on the days when the gods were carried through the city, and its decoration was designed to be seen at close quarters.

Building in glazed brick on this scale was an achievement in itself. Southern Mesopotamia had no good stone and little timber, so clay from the river plain was the natural material. Brick that has merely been dried in the sun is soft and porous, and a gateway made of it would soon have crumbled in the rain.

The answer was to fire the bricks in kilns and to coat one face with a glaze coloured by metal oxides, producing a surface as hard and as brilliant as glass. The blue was intended to imitate lapis lazuli, an expensive stone brought from what is now Afghanistan. Moulds gave every creature its form, which meant that the same animal could be repeated hundreds of times without being carved separately.

For two and a half thousand years the gate lay under rubble. Its excavation was the work of Robert Koldewey, a German architect who had turned to archaeology, and who began digging at Babylon in 1899 for the German Oriental Society. He remained there for eighteen years, and his methods were unusually careful for the period: the position of every fragment was recorded, which is why the decoration could later be reassembled. Most of the gate had collapsed, and its glazed bricks lay in pieces, but a great many still preserved their original faces.

The finds were divided among museums. The largest share went to Berlin, where ancient fragments were combined with newly made bricks to construct a reconstruction that opened in the Pergamon Museum in 1930. Roughly fourteen metres high and thirty metres wide, it stands at the end of a rebuilt stretch of the Processional Way. Further material stayed in Iraq, and other pieces went to Istanbul, where a smaller reconstruction can be seen. The Berlin display has never been free of controversy, because it is a mixture of ancient masonry and modern filler, and nobody can now say precisely how the gate looked when it was new.

What the gate meant to those who passed through it is harder to recover than how it was built. The most important date in the city's year was the New Year festival. On that day the statue of Marduk was brought out of his temple and carried along the Processional Way, accompanied by the king and by crowds of inhabitants. The decoration also had a political purpose, since a visiting envoy would have understood without being told that he had entered a city of extraordinary resources.

Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions do not describe the gate as glazed brick at all. In his account of the work he claims to have laid its foundations at the level of the groundwater and to have built it from blue stone. The phrase shows how completely the imitation was accepted as the real thing. Clay cylinders bearing this text were buried in the foundations, and some of them were recovered by the excavators. That is how the date of the gate and the name of its builder can be stated with confidence.

The original foundations are still in place at Babylon, though little of the gate itself remains there. In the 1980s the Iraqi authorities erected a new gate on the site, faced with modern brick, so that the structure visitors see today marks the position of the original. Conservation is difficult: salts in the ground and a rising water table attack both brick and glaze, and the survival of what is left depends on measures that have often been interrupted by war, by neglect and by the simple shortage of money.

For several centuries before paper money appeared, the Chinese economy ran on coins. Copper was the standard metal, cast into round pieces with a square hole in the middle so that they could be strung together. A thousand of them made a string, the unit in which large sums were reckoned. The trouble was that copper was scarce. The state minted less than the market needed, and in the province of Sichuan, in the west, the government resorted to iron. Iron coins were heavy and worth little: a string of them weighed several kilogrammes, which made any substantial payment a matter of carts rather than purses. Merchants in Sichuan therefore had an obvious motive to find something lighter.

The solution came from commerce rather than from government. Traders began leaving their coins with a trusted merchant in exchange for a paper receipt, which could be used to pay a third party or redeemed later for the metal. Because the state itself had issued similar credit instruments, in the form of drafts that could be cashed in another province, the idea was not unfamiliar. For a time private houses issued these notes, and they worked well enough while the issuers remained solvent. In the 1020s, however, the government took the business over, and the world's first state-issued paper money, known as jiaozi, was produced in Chengdu under official supervision. From then on the notes were the responsibility of the state, not of merchants.

The notes themselves were printed from wooden blocks on paper made from mulberry bark and other plant fibres, and their design was far from plain. Each carried a serial number and an official seal, together with a printed warning that counterfeiting was a capital offence. Later issues were printed in more than one colour, so that a copyist had to reproduce a complicated pattern exactly. The blocks were cut with considerable skill, and the paper was manufactured under supervision to make it harder for outsiders to obtain the right material. The notes were denominated in strings of coins, so that a merchant could carry in a fold of cloth the equivalent of a cartload of iron.

Official notes were issued in series. Each series had a fixed term, at first of a few years, after which the notes were withdrawn and exchanged for a new issue. Holders brought in their old paper and received new, and the authorities could in principle use the occasion to check how many notes were in circulation. The system gave the government a lever that metal coinage never had. If the number of notes grew too large, an issue could be shortened, and if the state needed money quickly it could add to the number printed. Both things happened.

For a long time the notes were confined to Sichuan, and paper money might have remained a provincial curiosity. Instead it spread. In 1160 the southern Song government began issuing a note called the huizi, and by the end of the twelfth century paper was being used for large payments far beyond the west. The decisive step was to accept the notes in payment of taxes and in the state monopolies of salt and tea. Once a farmer or a merchant knew that the government would take paper in settlement of what he owed, the notes acquired a value independent of any private firm. The state had created a demand for its own paper.

War changed the arithmetic. From the early thirteenth century the Song faced first the Jin and then the Mongols, and the cost of defence rose far beyond the ordinary revenues of the state. The printing press was too convenient a source of money to be resisted. Issues of huizi multiplied, printing was authorised in more places, and the quantity of notes in circulation grew much faster than the economy could absorb. The result was the pattern familiar wherever paper is over-issued: prices rose, the notes lost value against metal, and the government responded by printing more rather than by withdrawing notes. Officials understood the danger, and some argued for limits, but the pressure of military spending overrode them.

Counterfeiting was treated as a crime against the state. The law provided the death penalty, and the notes themselves carried the warning in print. Informers were offered rewards, and officials who detected a workshop could expect promotion. Enforcement was never complete. Forgers could sometimes obtain genuine paper, and the profits were enormous while the risk, though severe, was remote. Cases appear in the records throughout the period, which suggests that the penalties did not deter everyone. The government responded by changing the design of the notes and by restricting access to the printing blocks.

The Song fell to the Mongols in the 1270s, but the paper currency survived the dynasty that had invented it. The Mongol rulers issued their own notes, which a European visitor described with astonishment; Marco Polo's account of the Great Khan's paper money was received in Europe with disbelief. The Ming, too, issued paper money in the fourteenth century, though they never managed it as successfully, and the notes eventually fell out of use in China for several centuries. The idea, however, had been proved, and the printing of money is one of the technologies that travelled furthest from its origins.

Public history is the history that reaches people outside classrooms and journals: the museum exhibition, the television series, the podcast, the historical novel, the battle re-enactment and, increasingly, the video game. For many people it is now the principal way in which they encounter the past. The question I want to examine is whether this has turned history into a branch of entertainment, and whether that matters. My answer, briefly, is that the techniques of entertainment are not the problem; the concealment of interpretation is.

The case for treating public history as entertainment is easily stated. Scholars write for a few hundred readers; a documentary may reach millions. If a dramatised account of the Norman Conquest sends a fraction of its audience to the library, or persuades a family to spend a wet afternoon in a museum, something has been gained. Museums and heritage sites depend on visitor numbers for their income, and the exhibitions that draw crowds are those that tell a story with people in it. There is also a democratic argument: the past belongs to everyone, not to a profession that has, until recently, been drawn from a narrow section of society.

The case against is equally familiar. Drama requires compression, and compression means selection. A film cannot show a battle as it was: it must show a few men doing something intelligible in the time available, and the camera prefers a face to a supply line. The difficulty is not that films simplify, since a lecture simplifies too, but that simplification in a visual medium is invisible. A viewer sees a battlefield and believes it because it looks real, whereas a reader of a book can see the author's argument on the page and disagree with it.

Examples are plentiful. In Braveheart, a film that introduced many people to the Wars of Scottish Independence, the Battle of Stirling Bridge is fought on open ground without a bridge. The thirteenth-century Scots in it wear kilts, a garment that did not exist in that form for another three centuries. Such choices are easy to laugh at. But the effect is not neutral, because the film presents itself as a version of events rather than as a fantasy, and the audience has no way of knowing where invention begins.

Behind these complaints lies a larger issue, which is presentism: the habit of judging the past by the standards of the present, or of using it to confirm opinions we already hold. Popular history is especially vulnerable to this, because it must please an audience, and audiences prefer to be flattered. A film about empire that invites its viewers to feel virtuous about their attitudes will sell more tickets than one that explains how ordinary people came to accept an institution we now find indefensible. Yet the temptation to moralise is not confined to popular work. Academic history has its own orthodoxies, and they change.

It is also true that popular history is constrained by money. A blockbuster exhibition needs sponsors and ticket sales; a television series needs a presenter the audience will watch. Neither pressure requires an outright falsehood, but both encourage emphasis. The difficult, contested, largely empty areas of a subject are unlikely to be given much space when a simpler story will do. I do not think this makes popular historians dishonest. I do think it should be acknowledged.

Here, though, the argument takes a turn that critics of popular history seldom follow. Entertainment is a set of techniques, not a measure of seriousness. A well-made documentary can be more scrupulous than a badly written textbook. A historical game in which the player must manage a medieval harvest may teach more about the fragility of pre-industrial life than a chapter of statistics. The question is not whether a work entertains but whether it is honest about what it is doing. A novel that announces itself as a novel is under no obligation to be accurate; a museum label, a caption and a narrated documentary are under a considerable one.

That distinction suggests where the real danger lies. It is not in simplification, or in narrative, or in the wish to hold an audience's attention, but in the presentation of interpretation as fact. When a reconstruction shows a room as it might have looked, and the label says only that it is a room, the visitor is being quietly misled. When a presenter says that archaeologists now agree, and does not add that a minority of them do not, an argument has been turned into a finding. Such manoeuvres are rarely deliberate, which is what makes them hard to correct. When they are exposed, the damage is done to the whole enterprise, because the audience concludes that it has been misled about everything.

Public history, then, is not a branch of entertainment, although it borrows its methods. It is a form of translation. The translator of a poem does not pretend that the translation is the poem, and does not apologise for making it readable; the obligation is to be honest about what has been changed and why. History in public should be judged by the same standard. The proper test is not whether a visitor was amused, but whether a visitor leaves with a better question than the one they arrived with.