Babylon

• 1. Introduction

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  Babylon ends its recorded life as a "small village of Babel", a phrase attached to the site in the 11th century. That was the last known sign of people living at one of the most important urban centres of the ancient Near East. The ruins lie on the lower Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq. They sit about 85 km south of Baghdad.

  In 2019, UNESCO inscribed Babylon as a World Heritage Site. Visitors come in the thousands each year, and almost all of them are Iraqis.

  How did a place that began as a small town become a name the whole world knows? Why do the ancient sources about it disagree so sharply? And what happens when governments, armies and builders treat a ruin as their own?

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• 2. A Name Without Origin

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  The cuneiform spelling KÁ.DIG̃IR.RA looks like a simple label. Its first sign means "gate" and its second means "god". The third closes the word with a genitive suffix, and a final sign marks the whole as a place name. Read that way, Babylon means "gate of god".

  Archibald Sayce, writing in the 1870s, thought the Semitic name translated an older Sumerian one. Many scholars now see "gate of god" as a Semitic folk etymology laid over an unknown, non-Semitic original. In 1955, I. J. Gelb argued that the first name was Babilla, of unknown meaning. He pointed out that no other Sumerian place-name is known to have been replaced by an Akkadian translation. Paul-Alain Beaulieu proposed a different root, suggesting the name could mean "shining", "glowing", or "white".

  A fragmentary limestone inscription from around 2700 BC may mention a governor building a temple, possibly to Marduk, in a city that might be Babylon. Scholars consider the attribution doubtful. Later scribes also wrote the name as TIN.TIR.KI, which was widespread in the 1st millennium BC. Ancient records sometimes used "Babylon" for other cities, including Borsippa, and for Nineveh briefly after the Assyrian sack of Babylon.

  In the Hebrew Bible the name appears as Babel, which the text interprets as "confusion", from the verb bilbél. The English verb "to babble" is popularly thought to come from it, but there is no direct connection. Genesis 11 describes a united human race, speaking one language, migrating to Shinar to build a city and a tower. God halts the work by scattering people across the earth and confusing their speech.

  The Book of Revelation reaches for Babylon many centuries after the city ceased to be a major political centre. It personifies the city as the "Whore of Babylon", riding a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. Some scholars read this as a hostile code for the Roman Empire. In Jewish tradition Babylon stands for an oppressor, and in Christianity it stands for worldliness and evil.

  In reggae music and the Rastafari belief system, Babylon names the materialistic capitalist world and any form of imperialist evil. Elsewhere the word has simply come to mean a large, bustling, diverse city. The science fiction series Babylon 5 uses it for a space station where many cultures meet. Babilonas, the Lithuanian form of the name, now labels a real estate development in Lithuania.

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• 3. Hammurabi's Kingdom

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  Ctesias claimed to have seen Babylonian archives that dated the founding of the city to 2286 BC, under a first king named Belus. Berossus, as reported by Pliny, implies 2243 BC. Stephanus of Byzantium, counting back from the siege of Troy, arrives at 2231 BC. All three place the founding in the 23rd century BC, yet no cuneiform record has been found to match them.

  The firmest early evidence is humbler. A tablet from the reign of Shar-Kali-Sharri of the Akkadian Empire (2217-2193 BC) records the founding of temples to Annunitum and Ilaba in a place thought to be Babylon. At that point it was neither an independent state nor a large city. An appointed governor, called an ensi, ruled it for the empire. Known holders of the post include Abba, Arši-aḫ, Itūr-ilum, Murteli, Unabatal and Puzur-Tutu.

  The Weidner Chronicle states that Sargon of Akkad built Babylon "in front of Akkad". Van de Mieroop has suggested that this may refer instead to the much later Assyrian king Sargon II. After the Akkadian collapse, the Third Dynasty of Ur gathered the whole of Mesopotamia, including the town, under one administration.

  Around 1950 BC, Amorite kingdoms appeared in Uruk and Larsa. A Babylonian king list says Amorite rule in Babylon began with a chieftain named Sumu-abum, who declared independence from the city-state of Kazallu. Sumu-la-El, whose dates may overlap with his, is usually named as the first of the First Babylonian dynasty. Both are credited with building the walls of Babylon. The first four Amorite rulers did not even take the title of king, and the older powers of Elam, Isin and Larsa overshadowed them.

  Then came Hammurabi, who founded the Old Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC and declared himself king of Babylon. He is famous for codifying the laws of Babylonia. He conquered cities across southern Mesopotamia, including Isin, Larsa, Ur, Uruk, Nippur and Lagash, and joined them into one kingdom. He also took Elam to the east and the kingdoms of Mari and Ebla to the northwest. Southern Mesopotamia became known as Babylonia, and Babylon eclipsed Nippur as its holy city. The city is estimated to have been the largest in the world around 1770 BC.

  Hammurabi's empire destabilized after his death. The far south broke away as the Sealand Dynasty, and the Elamites seized land in the east. Babylon shrank again into a small city-state. Old Babylonian texts often treat Shamash, the sun god of Sippar, as a supreme deity and Marduk as his son. Marduk was later raised above his father, which may reflect the rising political power of Babylon itself.

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• 4. Sacked and Rebuilt

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  The Telepinu Proclamation, written about a century later, describes a Hittite raid in blunt words: "Subsequently he marched to Babylon, and he destroyed Babylon, and defeated the Hurrian troops, and brought captives and possessions of Babylon to Hattusa." From this line, the sack is dated to 1595 BC under Mursili I. It fell during the 31-year reign of Samsu-Ditana, last ruler of the First Dynasty. The Agum-Kakrime Inscription once seemed to say that cult statues, including Marduk, were carried off to the Kingdom of Ḫana. It is now generally considered a much later forgery.

  The Kassites then took power and renamed the city Karduniash. Their dynasty lasted 435 years. Under them Babylon grew weak enough to pay tribute to the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III after his eighth campaign against Mitanni. It later became subject to the Middle Assyrian Empire to the north and to Elam to the east, and both vied for control. By 1155 BC the Kassites were deposed, and for the first time an Akkadian dynasty from southern Mesopotamia ruled. Even so, its kings could not stop newcomers from the Levant, among them the Arameans and Suteans in the 11th century BC and the Chaldeans in the 9th century BC.

  In 689 BC, Sennacherib of Assyria put an end to Babylon's constant revolts, led by a chieftain named Marduk-apla-iddina II in alliance with the Elamites. He razed its walls, temples and palaces. The rubble was thrown into the Arakhtu, the sea bordering the older Babylon to the south. The destruction of a religious centre shocked many. When two of Sennacherib's own sons murdered him while he prayed to the god Nisroch, it was considered an act of atonement.

  Esarhaddon, his successor, hurried to rebuild the old city and made it his residence for part of each year. After Esarhaddon died, his elder son Shamash-shum-ukin governed Babylonia, and in 652 BC he started a civil war against his brother Ashurbanipal, who ruled from Nineveh. Shamash-shum-ukin recruited Elam, Persia, the Chaldeans, the Suteans, the Canaanites and Arabs from the southern deserts. Babylon was besieged and starved into surrender, and the allies were defeated.

  Ashurbanipal held a "service of reconciliation" but did not dare to "take the hands" of Bel. He appointed an Assyrian governor named Kandalanu to rule the city. Texts from Babylon also traveled north, because Ashurbanipal gathered them for his large library at Nineveh.

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• 5. Nebuchadnezzar's City

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  Between 626 BC and 609 BC, allied Medo-Babylonian armies under Nabopolassar destroyed the Assyrian Empire. Babylon, now free, became capital of the Neo-Babylonian empire, sometimes called the Chaldean Empire. Around 612 BC it may again have been the largest city in the world. It was perhaps the first city to hold more than 200,000 people. The site covers about 1,000 ha, with about 450 ha inside the walls, which run for several kilometres.

  Nebuchadnezzar II, the son of Nabopolassar, ruled from 604 to 561 BC and ordered the grounds of the imperial city rebuilt from scratch. That included the Etemenanki ziggurat and the Ishtar Gate, the most prominent of eight gates around Babylon. Under his reign, baked brick came into heavy use, where earlier building had relied mostly on unbaked brick. A reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate now stands in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

  Today the city survives as mounds. Kasr, the palace mound, rises 19 m above the plain and holds the base of Etemenanki. Amran Ibn Ali, about 22 m high, marks the Esagila, a temple of Marduk that also housed shrines to Ea and Nabu. The mound called Babil, about 25 m high at the northern end, held a palace built by Nebuchadnezzar, and its bricks have been looted since ancient times.

  Tradition credits Nebuchadnezzar with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, said to have been built for his homesick wife, Amytis. The gardens and the walls of Babylon were both ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Yet no surviving Babylonian text mentions the gardens at all. Robert Koldewey speculated that he had found their foundations, but many historians disagree. Stephanie Dalley has argued that they stood near the Assyrian capital, Nineveh.

  The Hebrew Bible ties Nebuchadnezzar to the Babylonian exile of the Jews. It says he destroyed Solomon's Temple and carried the Jews to Babylon, a form of pacification the Assyrians used as well. The Babylonian Chronicles also record the defeat. In the book of Daniel, the prophet lives in Babylon for most of his life, and Nebuchadnezzar makes him ruler of the whole province after he interprets a dream.

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• 6. Cyrus and After

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  In 539 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia in a military engagement known as the Battle of Opis. Babylon's walls were considered impenetrable, and the only ways in were through the gates or along the Euphrates. Metal grates installed underwater let the river pass through the walls while keeping intruders out. During a national feast, Cyrus's troops diverted the Euphrates upstream and waded in through the lowered water. Most Babylonians in the city centre did not know the breach had happened.

  Herodotus elaborated this account. He also described a moat, an enormously tall and broad wall cemented with bitumen and topped with buildings, and a hundred gates. He wrote that Babylonians wore turbans and perfume, buried their dead in honey, practised ritual prostitution, and that three tribes among them ate only fish. The hundred gates look like an echo of Homer. After Archibald Sayce's pronouncement in 1883, scholars largely treated Herodotus as Greek folklore. Dalley and others have recently urged taking him seriously.

  According to 2 Chronicles 36, Cyrus later issued a decree letting captive peoples, including the Jews, return home. Biblical scholars have traditionally read the Cyrus Cylinder as supporting this. The reading is disputed, because the text names only Mesopotamian sanctuaries and never mentions Jews, Jerusalem or Judea. In the book of Daniel, the fall comes at a banquet of Belshazzar, where fingers of a hand write on a wall. Daniel explains that God has ended the kingdom, and Belshazzar is killed that same night.

  Under Cyrus and Darius I, Babylon became capital of the 9th Satrapy and a centre of learning. Babylonian astronomy and mathematics revived, and scholars completed maps of constellations. By the reign of Darius III, over-taxation and the strain of constant wars had worn down the main shrines and canals. Native kings briefly regained independence in 522 BC, 521 BC and 482 BC, but each revolt was quickly crushed.

  In October of 331 BC, Alexander the Great defeated Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela and occupied Babylon. Alexander demolished the Etemenanki ziggurat that year, and most of its remains were heaped onto the mound called Homera. Alexander died in 323 BC in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. His generals, the Diadochi, divided the empire, and Babylon declined in importance under the Seleucids while remaining active.

  Under the Parthian and Sassanid empires, Babylon was a province for nine centuries, until after AD 650. The Roman emperor Trajan took it briefly in AD 116, but his successor Hadrian gave up the lands east of the Euphrates. Its Aramaic-speaking people kept their own culture, and Babylon was seat of a bishop of the Church of the East. Their world produced the Babylonian Talmud, Mandaean religion, and Manichaeism, founded by Mani.

  In the mid-7th century, the expanding Muslim empire conquered Mesopotamia and dissolved Babylon as a province. Ibn Hawqal in the 10th century and al-Qazwini in the 13th century both describe Babil as a small village. Al-Qazwini mentions a well called the "Dungeon of Daniel", visited by Christians and Jews on holidays. Medieval Arabic writings say people mined its bricks to build cities from Baghdad to Basra.

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• 7. Digging Up Babylon

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  Before modern excavation, Western artists pictured Babylon as a hybrid of ancient Egyptian, classical Greek and contemporary Ottoman culture. Real knowledge began with 18th-century travellers such as Carsten Niebuhr and Pierre-Joseph de Beauchamp. Beauchamp's memoir appeared in English in 1792 and pushed the British East India Company to have its agents in Baghdad and Basra gather relics for London.

  Claudius Rich, working for the company in Baghdad, excavated Babylon in 1811-12 and again in 1817. Captain Robert Mignan explored briefly in 1827 and completed a map in 1829. Fulgence Fresnel, Julius Oppert and Felix Thomas dug heavily from 1852 to 1854. Much of their work vanished in the Qurnah Disaster of May 1855, when a transport ship and four rafts carrying over 200 crates sank in the Tigris after a pirate attack near Al-Qurnah. In May 1856, the equivalent of 80 crates was loaded on a ship for Le Havre. Few antiquities from the mission reached France, and later recovery efforts, including a Japanese expedition in 1971-72, have largely failed.

  Hormuzd Rassam dug for the British Museum from 1879 to 1882, prompted by widespread looting. Using industrial-scale digging, he recovered a large quantity of cuneiform tablets, but his zealous methods badly damaged the archaeological context.

  The first scientific excavation was led by Robert Koldewey for the German Oriental Society, working daily from 1899 until 1917. Koldewey struggled against the large-scale mining of baked bricks, mostly from Nebuchadnezzar's time. His team focused on the temple of Marduk, the processional way and the city wall. Pieces of the Ishtar Gate and hundreds of tablets went to Germany, where Walter Andrae reconstructed them in the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. The finds included 967 clay tablets. The Germans fled oncoming British troops in 1917, and again many objects went missing.

  The dig also changed life on site. By 1905, Qwaresh, a village inside the ancient inner walls, held about 200 households, and it grew because the excavation needed labourers. Later teams followed, among them Heinrich Lenzen in 1956, Hansjörg Schmid in 1962, and Italian and Iraqi institutes in the 1970s and 1980s. The earliest Iraqi excavation came in 1938. Wider publication has been limited, and most of the known tablets from all modern excavations remain unpublished.

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• 8. A Contested Ruin

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  In February 1978, the Ba'athist government under Saddam Hussein launched the "Archaeological Restoration of Babylon Project", which rebuilt features of the ancient city on top of its ruins. It reconstructed Nebuchadnezzar's Southern Palace, with 250 rooms, five courtyards and a 30 m entrance arch. It also reinforced the Processional Way and the Lion of Babylon, and rebuilt a Hellenistic amphitheater. In 1982, the government minted seven coins showing the city's iconic features. The Babylon International Festival ran from September 1987 until 2002, skipping only 1990 and 1991. The reconstructions of the Hanging Gardens and the Ziggurat of Ur were never carried out.

  Hussein set a portrait of himself beside Nebuchadnezzar at the entrance and inscribed his name on many bricks. One frequent inscription reads "This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq." After his downfall, those bricks became collector's items. In the 1980s he removed the village of Qwaresh entirely and displaced its residents. He then built a palace called Saddam Hill over some of the old ruins, in the pyramidal style of a ziggurat. In 2003 he planned a cable car over Babylon, but the invasion of Iraq halted it.

  After the 2003 invasion, US troops controlled the area before handing it to Polish forces in September 2003. US forces under General James T. Conway built Camp Alpha, with a helipad, on ancient ruins. John Curtis of the British Museum reported that parts of the site were levelled for helicopter landing areas and parking for heavy vehicles. He wrote that the forces "caused substantial damage to the Ishtar Gate" and that military vehicles "crushed 2,600-year-old brick pavements". Donny George, head of the Iraqi State Board for Heritage and Antiquities, said the "mess will take decades to sort out".

  Poland resolved in 2004 to return the city to Iraqi control, and presented a condition report in December 2004. The site went to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture in 2005. In April 2006, Colonel John Coleman offered to apologize for the damage, though he claimed the US presence had deterred far greater damage by looters. Two museums and a library holding replicas and local maps and reports were raided and destroyed.

  In May 2009, the provincial government of Babil reopened the site to tourists, and over 35,000 people visited in 2017. An oil pipeline runs through an outer wall of the city. Thousands of people live inside the ancient outer walls, in villages such as Zwair West, Sinjar Village, Qwaresh and Al-Jimjmah. Most depend on daily wages or government jobs in Al-Hillah, and some grow dates, citrus fruits and figs, though farming alone cannot support a family. Housing is spreading into sprawling suburbs despite laws restricting construction.

  The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage is the main authority guarding the site, assisted by the Antiquity and Heritage Police and the World Monuments Fund. Its provincial headquarters sits within the ancient inner city walls on the east side. Several staff members and their families live there in subsidized housing.

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