The city of Babylon lay on the River Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq. The city played a major role in the history of ancient West Asia, and at its height in the sixth century BCE, it was the capital of an empire that stretched west from Iraq to the Mediterranean. Until the late nineteenth century, the main available sources on Babylon were biblical and ancient Greek texts, which for different reasons often painted unflattering pictures of the city and its rulers. Archaeology and studies of Babylonian texts have produced a far more rounded image of a complex city and its politics, as well as temples that were among the most important in Mesopotamia and whose scholars played a major role in the history of science.
Although it was not among the oldest cities in this part of the world, in Babylonian 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 BCE.
Babylon rose to prominence in the eighteenth century BCE when, through a combination of political alliances and military campaigns, Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 BCE) was able to unite a large state under his rule. A terracotta plaque features an idealized image of heroic or divine kingship from around this time, while finely made gold jewelry incorporating divine symbols gives some sense of the luxury metalwork of the period. From this point on, Babylon would remain the most important political, economic, religious, and cultural center in southern Iraq (Babylonia) until the time of Alexander.
Babylon was ruled by Hammurabi’s successors until 1595 BCE, 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, or naru stele . 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 . 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 gold jewelry pendants , and a stone monument, also of the Kassite period depicts Lama at large scale.
The end of the second millennium BCE 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 BCE. 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 BCE), but the period of Babylonian self-rule that followed was ended by the eighth century BCE, 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 BCE) sacked the city in 689 BCE in the course of crushing a rebellion, the act seems to have been considered so sacrilegious that his successors avoid mentioning it in inscriptions, alluding instead to a natural disaster. A cylinder describes restoration work at Babylon by Sennacherib’s son and successor Esarhaddon (r. 680–669 BCE). Esarhaddon in turn attempted to solve the problem by making one son, Ashurbanipal (r. ca. 668-631 BCE), king of Assyria and the empire, and another, Shamash-shuma-ukin (r. 667–648 BCE), king of Babylon, thus restoring to Babylon its own kingship for the first time since Sennacherib's destruction of the city. The two brothers ruled in this way for sixteen years, but finally Shamash-shuma-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 BCE), 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 preserves an appeal from one of the last kings of Assyria, Sin-sharra-ishkun (r. 622–612 BCE), apparently pleading to retain his throne by making an alliance with the Babylonian king Nabopolassar (r. 625–605 BCE). By this stage, however, the Assyrian state was doomed: Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604–562 BCE) 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 , constructing an imperial capital with vast palaces and well-appointed temples, colossal city walls, and imposing gates. The grandest of these, the Ishtar Gate, was approached via a long Processional Way lined with colorful glazed-brick reliefs depicting roaring lions, potent images that added another layer to the city's divine protection ; . The Processional Way was also the site of a culminating event in the spring New Year festival. The statue of Marduk, accompanied by those of other gods who had come to Babylon to visit him, would be carried from the great temple Esagila (House Whose Top is High) out of the city to the Akitu (New Year) Temple, where the Babylonian king would "take the hand" of the god, renewing a compact between the divine and human worlds. Many rituals took place in the days leading up to this event, including reciting the Epic of Creation in front of the statue of Marduk, its hero, in his shrine in Esagila. In the Epic, Marduk defeats Tiamat, goddess of the chaotic primordial sea, and creates the world and the city of Babylon from her body.
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 . 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 .
The Neo-Babylonian empire was short-lived: in 539 BCE, 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 BCE, 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 BCE 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, with subject matter ranging from mathematics and astronomy to religious texts and hymns . The last dated cuneiform texts were written in the first century CE .
Babylon was never fully abandoned. Villages grew up on and around the vast site, and there are still several modern villages around the edges of the site today. In the twelfth century, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela described a substantial Jewish community living nearby. 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 a few miles to the south. 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 the 1980s and '90s, the site of Babylon suffered considerable damage from problematic reconstructions of ancient buildings, several large-scale modern building and earth-moving works, and the interruption of regular conservation work. This period also saw the forced removal of a living village near the center of the site. In 2003–4, further damage was caused by the presence of a US military base in the center of the ancient city. More recently, Iraqi and international teams have worked on documentation, conservation, and site management. In 2019, Babylon was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and today Iraqi archaeologists are engaged in ongoing conservation projects aimed at preserving its remains for future generations.