Babylon: Myth and Reality, British Museum, London

Mother Goose had us sing, "How many miles to Babylon? Can I get there by candle-light?" In one ancient version, safe arrival depends on good horses and bright spurs. To the final query of, "How many men have ye?" comes the relevant retort, "More than you dare come and see!"

Babylon is rarely absent from the news. As the most recent Gulf war limps on, daily horrors are reported from Baghdad and Basra. We have learned where those cities are through the geography of atrocity. But now we know how far it is, what do we actually know of Babylon?

Few recall that there was once in classical antiquity a city of that name that dominated western civilisations. The site, now mostly damaged or buried, is spread over 2,500 acres. Saddam Hussein partly developed the area as a heritage zone, while American and Polish forces created military barracks, latrines, ammunition and fuel stores plus a helipad in the very centre of the ancient city.

Iraq contains many thousands of important archaeological sites and the British Museum has rightly highlighted the looting of these and many of the country's museums. And it is to be congratulated for joining forces with fellow museums in Paris and Berlin to produce a cycle of three exhibitions on Babylon.

Rather than a broad sweep of ancient Mesopotamian history, the British Museum has concentrated attention on the later Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar and of the myths, fantasies and imagery that flow from history.

Chambers Dictionary defines Babylon as, "a place of luxury and decadence, used formerly by Protestants in reference to the Roman Catholic Church, more recently by Rastafarians of western culture". So why has Babylon, praised in its day for the splendour of its medicine, science, laws and architecture, become a word of opprobrium? The answer lies in religion.

Our knowledge of Babylon is based on the Old Testament prophets' accounts of the Tower of Babel, the capture of the Jews, Belshazzar's Feast and the ordeal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Daniel in the fiery furnace and the lions' den.

Reinforced by the imagery of the apocalyptic last days in the Book of Revelation, with its reference to the Whore of Babylon and, given that the Mesopotamians left little or no literature of their own, it is hardly surprising that Babylon has become synonymous with depravity and sin.

The curators of the exhibition, Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour, have skillfully amassed lots of information and illustrations in their publication Babylon: Myth and Reality. It is a model of its kind in terms of scholarship and style. Some of the artefacts and too few illustrations from the book are incorporated in the present exhibition at the British Museum.

Unlike the book, the exhibition is not a total success. The room allocated is insufficient for the scale of the project. Space is cramped and movement between one exhibit and another is often narrow and contorted. Given that this is a museum project, there is too little reality and too much myth, an imbalance between artefacts and artifice.

The exhibition features a large photographic blow-up of Breughel's The Tower of Babel. (The original painting is too fragile to travel.) Nearby are loans from Berlin of ancient glazed blue and green panels from the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way, with their barbarically sophisticated bulls, lions and dragons. These are great to see, but there is no sense of scale and they are inefficiently lit.

The central and most important core of the exhibition is a selection of clay tablets or cylinders inscribed in cuneiform. These records tell us so much of the past but the interpretation, though precise, is not well managed. The labelling is too small and the clarity of the soundtracks was erratic on the day I visited.

Then, in a series of gallery spaces, we are exposed to paintings and prints inspired by the Biblical legends. We are told that, "the most compelling visual representation" of the myths is Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast, but this shown in reproduction only, the original failing to make the small journey from the National Gallery. We have instead John Martin's sprawling picture, plus his mezzotint print of The Fall of Babylon.

Some delightful 12th-century illuminations of Daniel are overwhelmed by mawkish Victorian paintings of the lions' den. The visions of the Babylonian Captivity are dominated by the late Victorian droopiness of Evelyn de Morgan, Eduard Bendemann and Edward Poynter.

There is a plethora of Dutch, Flemish and other representations of the Tower of Babel in various stages of collapse, plus a whole wall of more recent interpretations by MC Escher, Julee Holcombe and Michael Lassel.

These are all fascinating, but the art takes up space that might have been more usefully given to museological exhibits. The most eloquent of the pictures, the famous print by William Blake, traces the story of the fall of Nebuchadnezzar.

It is ironic that both the Bible and Blake have wrongly ascribed the experiences to the wrong king, but the potency of the image remains undiminished. We are shown the visual influences on Blake via Dürer's The Penance of St John Chrysostom and Hans Weiditz's woodcut, A Man Transformed into a Brute by his Passions, images that now seem to presage the capture of Saddam.

The latest manifestations of the rule of the former Iraqi president bring us into a final display of images collated by the British Museum's keeper of Middle East collections, John Curtis. He shows how the Ba'ath governments used images of Babylon on stamps, coins and banknotes to show that the legacies of Nebuchadnezzar "transcended time and history to fuse with the great strides and magnificent splendour of HE President Saddam Hussein".

Posterity will be judge of who did most damage to the physical site of Babylon - the absurd heritage reconstructions and palaces of Saddam or the military camps around the cultural equivalent of the Great Pyramid. By the waters of Babylon we all need to sit down and weep.

Peter Lewis is a writer and a retired museum curator