Babylon is the most famous city from ancient Mesopotamia whose ruins lie in modern-

day Iraq 59 miles (94 kilometres) southwest of Baghdad. The name is thought to derive
from bav-il or bav-ilimwhich, in the Akkadian language of the time, meant ‘Gate of God’
or `Gate of the Gods’ and `Babylon’ coming from Greek.

The city owes its fame (or infamy) to the many references the Bible makes to it; all of
which are unfavourable. In the Book of Genesis, chapter 11, Babylon is featured in the
story of The Tower of Babel and the Hebrews claimed the city was named for the
confusion which ensued after God caused the people to begin speaking in different
languages so they would not be able to complete their great tower to the heavens (the
Hebrew word bavel means `confusion’).

Babylon also appears prominently in the biblical books of Daniel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah,
among others, and, most notably, The Book of Revelation. It was these biblical
references which sparked interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and the expedition by
the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey who first excavated the ruins of Babylon in
1899 CE.

Outside of the sinful reputation given it by the Bible, the city is known for its impressive
walls and buildings, its reputation as a great seat of learning and culture, the formation
of a code of law which pre-dates the Mosaic Law, and for the Hanging Gardens of
Babylonwhich were man-made terraces of flora and fauna, watered by machinery,
which were cited b ancient writers as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

THE OLD CITY & HAMMURABI

Babylon was founded at some point prior to the reign of Sargon of Akkad (also known
as Sargon the Great) who ruled from 2334-2279 BCE and claimed to have built temples
at Babylon (other ancient sources seem to indicate that Sargon himself founded the
city). At that time, Babylon seems to have been a minor city or perhaps a large port
town on the Euphrates River at the point where it runs closest to the river Tigris.

Whatever early role the city played in the ancient world is lost to modern-day scholars
because the water level in the region has risen steadily over the centuries and the ruins
of Old Babylon have become inaccessible. The ruins which were excavated by
Koldewey, and are visible today, date only to well over one thousand years after the
city was founded.

The historian Paul Kriwaczek, among other scholars, claims it was established by the
Amorites following the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur. This information, and any
other pertaining to Old Babylon, comes to us today through artifacts which were
carried away from the city after the Persian invasion or those which were created
elsewhere.

EVERY ANCIENT WRITER MENTIONS BABYLON

WITH A TONE OF AWE AND REVERENCE.
The known history of Babylon, then, begins with its most famous king: Hammurabi
(r.1792-1750 BCE). This obscure Amorite prince ascended to the throne upon
the abdication of his father, King Sin-Muballit, and fairly quickly transformed the city
into one of the most powerful and influential in all of Mesopotamia.

Hammurabi’s law codes are well known but are only one example of the policies he
implemented to maintain peace and encourage prosperity. He enlarged and heightened
the walls of the city, engaged in great public works which included opulent temples
and canals, and made diplomacy an integral part of his administration. So successful
was he in both diplomacy and war that, by 1755 BCE, he had united all of Mesopotamia
under the rule of Babylon which, at this time, was the largest city in the world, and
named his realm Babylonia.

THE ASSYRIANS, CHALDEANS,

& NEBUCHADNEZZAR II
Following Hammurabi’s death, his empire fell apart and Babylonia dwindled in size
and scope until Babylon was easily sacked by the Hittites in 1595 BCE. The Kassites
followed the Hittites and re-named the city Karanduniash. The meaning of this name is
not clear. The Assyrians then followed the Kassites in dominating the region and, under
the reign of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (r. 705-681 BCE), Babylon revolted.
Sennacherib had the city sacked, razed, and the ruins scattered as a lesson to others.

His extreme measures were considered impious by the people generally and
Sennacherib’s court specifically and he was soon after assassinated by his sons. His
successor, Esarhaddon(r.681-669 BCE), re-built Babylon and returned it to its former
glory. The city later rose in revolt against Ashurbanipal of Nineveh (r. 668-627 BCE)
who besieged and defeated the city but did not damage it to any great extent and, in
fact, personally purified Babylon of the evil spirits which were thought to have led to
the trouble. The reputation of the city as a center of learning and culture was already
well established by this time.
 Babylon at the
time of Hammurabi

After the fall of the Assyrian Empire, a Chaldean named Nabopolassar took the throne
of Babylon and, through careful alliances, created the Neo-Babylonian Empire. His son,
Nebuchadnezzar II (r.605/604-562 BCE), renovated the city so that it covered 900
hectares (2,200 acres) of land and boasted some the most beautiful and impressive
structures in all of Mesopotamia. Every ancient writer to make mention of the city of
Babylon, outside of those responsible for the stories in the Bible, does so with a tone of
awe and reverence. Herodotus, for example, writes:

The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a hundred and twenty stadia in
length each way, so that the entire circuit is four hundred and eighty stadia. While such
is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches to it. It is surrounded, in
the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall fifty
royal cubits in width and two hundred in height.

Although it is generally believed that Herodotus greatly exaggerated the dimensions of

the city (and may never have actually visited the place himself) his description echoes
the admiration of other writers of the time who recorded the magnificence of Babylon,
and especially the great walls, as a wonder of the world. It was under Nebuchadnezzar
II’s reign that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are said to have been constructed and
the famous Ishtar Gate built. The Hanging gardens are most explicitly described in
a passage from Diodorus Siculus (l. 90-30 BCE) in his work Bibliotheca Historica Book
II.10:

There was also, because the acropolis, the Hanging Garden, as it is called, which was
built, not by Semiramis, but by a later Syrian king to please one of his concubines; for
she, they say, being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains,
asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive
landscape of Persia. The park extended four plethra on each side, and since the
approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose
from one another tier on tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of
a theatre. When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed
beneath them galleries which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose
little by little one above the other along the approach; and the uppermost gallery, which
was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park, which was made level with the
circuit wall of the battlements of the city. Furthermore, the walls, which had been
constructed at great expense, were twenty-two feet thick, while the passage-way
between each two walls was ten feet wide. The roofs of the galleries were covered over
with beams of stone sixteen feet long, inclusive of the overlap, and four feet wide. The
roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen,
over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third layer a covering
of lead, to the end that the moisture from the soil might not penetrate beneath. On all
this again earth had been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees;
and the ground, which was levelled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that,
by their great size or any other charm, could give pleasure to beholder. And since the
galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained many
royal lodgings of every description; and there was one gallery which contained openings
leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the garden with water, the
machines raising the water in great abundance from the river, although no one outside
could see it being done. Now this park, as I have said, was a later construction.

This part of Diodorus' work concerns the semi-mythical queen Semiramis (most
probably based on the actual Assyrian queen Sammu-Ramat who reigned 811-806
BCE). His reference to "a later Syrian king" follows Herodotus' tendency of referring to
Mesopotamia as `Assyria'. Recent scholarship on the subject argues that the Hanging
Gardens were never located at Babylon but were instead the creation Sennacherib at his
capital of Nineveh. The historian Christopher Scarre writes:
Sennacherib’s palace [at Nineveh] had all the usual accoutrements of a major Assyrian
residence: colossal guardian figures and impressively carved stone reliefs (over 2,000
sculptured slabs in 71 rooms). Its gardens, too, were exceptional. Recent research by
British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has suggested that these were the famous
Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Later writers
placed the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, but extensive research has failed to find any
trace of them. Sennacherib’s proud account of the palace gardens he created at
Nineveh fits that of the Hanging Gardens in several significant details (231).

If the gardens were in Babylon they would have been part of the central complex of the
city. The Euphrates River divided the city in two between an `old’ and a `new’ city with
the Temple of Marduk and the great towering ziggurat in the center where, most likely,
the gardens were also located. Streets and avenues were widened to better
accommodate the yearly processional of the statue of the great god Marduk in the
journey from his home temple in the city to the New Year Festival Temple outside
the Ishtar Gate.

Lion of Babylon
Statue, Babylonia

THE PERSIAN CONQUEST & BABYLON'S

DECLINE
The Neo-Babylonian Empire continued after the death of Nebuchadnezzar II and
Babylon continued to play an important role in the region under the rule of Nabonidus
and his successor Belshazzar (featured in the biblical Book of Daniel). In 539 BCE the
empire fell to the Persians under Cyrus the Great at the Battle of Opis. Babylon’s walls
were impregnable and so the Persians cleverly devised a plan whereby they diverted
the course of the Euphrates River so that it fell to a manageable depth.

While the residents of the city were distracted by one of their great religious feast days,
the Persian army waded the river and marched under the walls of Babylon unnoticed. It
was claimed the city was taken without a fight although documents of the time indicate
that repairs had to be made to the walls and some sections of the city and so perhaps
the action was not as effortless as the Persian account maintained.

Under Persian rule, Babylon flourished as a center of art and education. Cyrus and his
successors held the city in great regard and made it the administrative capital of their
empire (although at one point the Persian emperor Xerxes felt obliged to lay siege to the
city after another revolt). Babylonian mathematics, cosmology, and astronomy were
highly respected and it is thought that Thales of Miletus (known as the first western
philosopher) may have studied there and that Pythagoras developed his famous
mathematical theorem based upon a Babylonian model.

When, after two hundred years, the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great in 331
BCE, he also gave great reverence to the city, ordering his men not to damage the
buildings nor molest the inhabitants. The historian Stephen Bertman writes:

Before his death, Alexander the Great ordered the superstructure of Babylon’s ziggurat
pulled down in order that it might be rebuilt with greater splendor. But he never lived to
bring his project to completion. Over the centuries, its scattered bricks have been
cannibalized by peasants to fulfill humbler dreams. All that is left of the fabled Tower of
Babel is the bed of a swampy pond. (14)

After Alexander’s death at Babylon in 323 BCE, his successors (known as `The
Diadochi’, Greek for `successors’) fought over his empire generally and the city
specifically to the point where the residents fled for their safety (or, according to one
ancient report, were re-located). By the time the Parthian Empire ruled the region in 141
BCE Babylon was deserted and forgotten. The city steadily fell into ruin and, even
during a brief revival under the Sassanid Persians, never approached its former
greatness.
In the Muslim conquest of the land in 650 CE whatever remained of Babylon was swept
away and, in time, was buried beneath the sands. In the 17th and 18th centuries CE
European travelers began to explore the area and return home with various artifacts.
These cuneiform blocks and statues led to an increased interest in the region and, by
the 19th century CE, an interest in biblical archaeology drew men like Robert Koldewey
who uncovered the ruins of the once great city of the Gate of the Gods.