The city of Babylon lay on the River Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq. Although it was not among the oldest cities in this part of the world (the earliest of which is normally considered to be Uruk), in ancient Mesopotamian mythology it came to be seen as the first city, made at the creation of the world by its patron god, Marduk. Today little is known of the city’s actual origins; it first appears in texts toward the end of the third millennium B.C.

Babylon rose to prominence in the eighteenth century B.C. when, through a combination of political alliances and military campaigns, Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 B.C.) was able to unite a large state under his rule. A terracotta plaque (32.39.2) shows a Mesopotamian king of this period in heroic pose, while finely made gold jewelry incorporating divine symbols (47.1a–h) gives some sense of the luxury metalwork of the period; some larger examples of sculpture (1972.96) also survive. From this point on, Babylon would remain the most important city in southern Iraq (Babylonia) until the time of Alexander.

Babylon was ruled by Hammurabi’s successors until 1595 B.C., when a Hittite incursion into Mesopotamia reached as far as Babylon itself, bringing a dramatic end to what historians today call the Old Babylonian period. In time, a new dynasty emerged. The new rulers, non-Babylonians known as Kassites, adopted Babylonian conventions in their royal iconography and inscriptions. The art of the Kassite period is best known for a type of stone monument known as a kudurru (1985.45). These monuments, which were once thought to be boundary stones erected in fields (more likely they were placed in temples), carry inscriptions detailing grants of land, often by the king to high officials, and a wealth of religious imagery. The images, which included astral symbols, animals, and other divine attributes associated with particular gods, served to sanctify and protect the commitment made in the text.

Kassite-period cylinder seals are also distinctive. The designs of many are composed of a long and pious dedicatory inscription and the image of a king or sometimes other figures in a position of prayer (1985.357.44). Babylonian art of all periods places a heavy emphasis on the piety of the king, and similar images recur throughout Mesopotamian history. In some seals, the king is replaced by a goddess, Lama, who in Mesopotamian art is often depicted interceding or praying for a human donor to a more powerful deity. The same goddess is represented in the pendants of the necklace (47.1a–h), and a stone monument, also of the Kassite period (61.12) depicts Lama at large scale.

The end of the second millennium B.C. saw power over Babylon change hands several times, with Babylonia briefly falling under Assyrian domination. More traumatizing was the sack of the city by an army from Elam, in southwestern Iran, in ca. 1159 B.C. Treasures including the cult statue of Marduk, Babylon’s patron deity, were carried away to the Elamite capital at Susa. The statue was later recovered by Nebuchadnezzar I (r. 1125–1104 B.C.), but the period of Babylonian self-rule that followed was ended by the eighth century B.C., as the region was incorporated into the expanding Neo-Assyrian empire.

Assyrian rule in Babylonia faced frequent and violent opposition, yet Assyrian kings revered the great temples of southern Mesopotamia, and sought to be recognized as legitimate kings of Babylon. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 704–681 B.C.) sacked the city in 689 B.C. in the course of crushing a rebellion, the act was considered so sacrilegious that his successors avoid mentioning it in inscriptions, alluding instead to a natural disaster. A cylinder (86.11.283) describes restoration work at Babylon by Sennacherib’s son and successor Esarhaddon (r. 680–669 B.C.). Esarhaddon in turn attempted to solve the problem by making one son, Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 B.C.), king of Assyria and the empire, and another, Shamash-shum-ukin (r. 667–648 B.C.), king of Babylon. The two brothers ruled in this way for sixteen years, but finally Shamash-shum-ukin himself rebelled, leading to four years of war and a devastating siege of Babylon. Ashurbanipal emerged victorious and installed a puppet king, Kandalanu (r. 647–627 B.C.), on the Babylonian throne. Within a generation, however, the Assyrian empire was itself collapsing, and under threat from a resurgent Babylonia. A later copy of a letter (86.11.370a,c–e) preserves an appeal from one of the last kings of Assyria, Sin-shar-ishkun (r. 622–612 B.C.), apparently pleading to retain his throne by making an alliance with the Babylonian king Nabopolassar (r. 625–605 B.C.). By this stage, however, the Assyrian state was doomed: Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604–562 B.C.) came to rule most of its former empire, a swathe of territory reaching from the shores of the Persian Gulf to those of the Mediterranean Sea.

Nebuchadnezzar II took his name from the king who had recovered the statue of Marduk from Susa. The later king was ultimately to become far more famous than his predecessor, however: it is Nebuchadnezzar II who appears in the Bible. As king of Babylon, he rebuilt much of the city (86.11.60), constructing an imperial capital with vast palaces and well-appointed temples, colossal city walls, and a great northern entry point, the Ishtar Gate, approached via a long Processional Way lined with colorful glazed-brick reliefs depicting roaring lions (31.13.1; 31.13.2). At this time, Babylon is thought to have been the largest city in the world. Its population was surely very cosmopolitan: Nebuchadnezzar continued the Assyrian practice of moving large groups of people across the empire, in order to break up potential centers of opposition, to provide labor, or both. In the case of the state of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, such acts earned him biblical infamy. The powerful language used against Babylon by the biblical prophets would eventually be incorporated into Christian visions of the Apocalypse (18.65.8). By contrast, Babylonian kings saw and presented themselves as pious figures, as can be seen in the emphasis on temple restoration in Nebuchadnezzar’s own inscriptions, or in the many fine stamp seals of the period, usually showing a single figure before altars and divine symbols, often including those of Marduk and his son Nabu (86.11.35).

The Neo-Babylonian empire was short-lived: in 539 B.C., Cyrus II of Persia conquered the city, building a vast new empire centered on Iran. This was by no means the end of Babylon itself: the city retained its importance and would continue as one of several Achaemenid Persian royal capitals. Two hundred years later, when this empire fell in its turn, Alexander intended Babylon to be the capital of his new Asian empire. He died in the city in 323 B.C., before such dreams could be realized. From the wars of succession that followed, Seleucus I Nicator emerged as the dominant force in the Asian part of Alexander’s empire. He founded a new city, Seleucia on the Tigris, which would gradually supplant Babylon. The older city survived, and the presence of a Greek-style theater and other discoveries at the site show how Hellenistic culture influenced the ancient capital during the Seleucid and Parthian periods, but from this time on Babylon began to shrink. It was sacked by a Parthian army in the second century B.C. and did not recover, although a wealth of tablets show that the city’s temple institutions continued as one of the last centers of cuneiform scholarship (86.11.286a): the last dated cuneiform texts were made in the first century A.D. Villages remained around the edges of the vast site, as indeed they do today, and the medieval traveler Benjamin of Tudela described a substantial Jewish community there. The last reference to a living village actually called Babil on the site comes from the tenth century, in the Abbasid period. Also in the tenth century, a new city, Hillah (originally called al-Jami‘ayn), was founded nearby. The inscribed baked bricks of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon were a major building material for the new settlement, and continued to be recycled for use in new buildings into the early twentieth century, when Babylon’s excavators reported frequently seeing them incorporated into houses in the town.

In recent decades, the site of Babylon has suffered considerable damage from problematic reconstructions of ancient buildings, several large-scale modern building and earth-moving works, the interruption of regular conservation work, and in 2003–4 from the presence of a military base in the center of the ancient city. Today Iraqi archaeologists are working to conserve and manage the site, which remains among the most important in the entire ancient world.