Babylon ( ) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-speaking region of Babylonia. Its rulers established two important empires in antiquity, the 19th–16th century BC Old Babylonian Empire, and the 7th–6th century BC Neo-Babylonian Empire. Babylon also served as a regional capital of other empires, such as the Achaemenid Empire. Babylon was one of the most important urban centres of the ancient Near East until its decline during the Hellenistic period. Nearby ancient sites include Kish, Borsippa, Dilbat, and Kutha.
Both the Hanging Gardens and Walls of Babylon were ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The gardens purportedly existed between approximately 600 BC and AD1, but some scholars question their historical reality, as they are not mentioned in any extant Babylonian text.Finkel (1988) P.58.Finkel, Irving and Seymour, Michael (2008). Babylon: City of Wonders. London: British Museum Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-7141-1171-1.
The earliest known mention of Babylon as a small town appears on a clay tablet from the reign of Shar-Kali-Sharri (2217–2193 BC), of the Akkadian Empire.Beaulieu, Paul-Alain (2017). A History of Babylon, 2200 BC – AD 75. Blackwell History of the Ancient World. Wiley. p. 50. ISBN 978-1-119-45907-1. Retrieved 2022-08-27. Babylon was a religious and cultural centre at this point but was neither an independent state nor a large city, merely a town of the Akkadian Empire. The collapse of the Akkadian Empire was followed by a few decades under the south Mesopotamian Gutian Dynasty, then the Third Dynasty of Ur ruling the whole of Mesopotamia, including the town of Babylon.
The town became part of a small independent city-state in the early second millennium BC. The Amorite king Hammurabi founded the Old Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC. He built Babylon into a major city and declared himself its king. Southern Mesopotamia became known as Babylonia, and Babylon eclipsed Nippur as the region's holy city. The empire waned under Hammurabi's son Samsu-iluna, and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. After the Assyrians destroyed and then rebuilt it, Babylon became the capital of the short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire, from 626 to 539 BC. After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the city came under the rule of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman, Sassanid, and Muslim empires. The last known habitation of the town dates from the 11th century AD, when it was referred to as the "small village of Babel".
It has been estimated that Babylon was the largest city in the world , and again . It was perhaps the first city to reach a population above 200,000Tertius Chandler. Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (1987), St. David's University Press (). . See Historical urban community sizes. in an area of about . The main sources of information about Babylon—excavation of the site itself, references in cuneiform texts found elsewhere in Mesopotamia, references in the Bible, descriptions in Herodotus and other classical authors, and second-hand summaries of the work of Ctesias and Berossus—present an incomplete and sometimes contradictory picture of the ancient city, even at its peak in the sixth century BC.
UNESCO recognized Babylon as a World Heritage Site in 2019. The site receives thousands of visitors each year, almost all of them Iraqis. Local construction is rapidly increasing, threatening to encroach upon the ruins.
Names
The spelling Babylon is the Latin representation of Koine Greek Babylṓn (), derived from the native . The cuneiform spelling is , corresponding to the Sumerian phrase . The sign () is the logogram for "gate", () means "god", and () represents the coda of the word (-r) followed by the genitive suffix . The final () is a determinative indicating that the previous signs are to be understood as a place name.
Archibald Sayce, writing in the 1870s, postulated that the Semitic name was a loan-translation of the original Sumerian name. However, the "gate of god" interpretation is increasingly viewed as a Semitic folk etymology to explain an unknown original non-Semitic placename.Liane Jakob-Rost, Joachim Marzahn: Babylon, ed. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Vorderasiatisches Museum (Kleine Schriften 4), 2nd ed., Putbus 1990, p. 2 I. J. Gelb in 1955 argued that the original name was Babilla, of unknown meaning and origin, as there were other similarly named places in Sumer, and there are no other examples of Sumerian place-names being replaced with Akkadian translations. He deduced that it later transformed into Akkadian Bāb-ili(m), and that the Sumerian name Kan-dig̃irak was a loan translation of the Semitic folk etymology rather than the original name. The retranslation of the Semitic name into Sumerian would have taken place at the time of the "Neo-Sumerian" Third Dynasty of Ur (Bab-Il).
A fragmentary limestone votive inscription dated by paleography to the Early Dynastic II period (c. 2700 BC) was suggested to include the name of Babylon. It read "en5-[si] BAR.KI.BAR dumu a-hu-ì-lum ̆lu-ì-lum-be-l[í] lú-ur-kù-bí dím é damar-utu mu-gub-am6". Proposed as being in the Akkadian language though earlier than that language is attested, it refers to an unknown lord who was the governor (ENSI) of BAR.KI.BAR who constructed a temple for (possibly) Marduk, suggesting that the city might be Babylon. During the ED III period, sign placement was relatively fluid and so the KI sign could be seen as the determinative, with the name of the city as BAR.BAR, perhaps pronounced Babbar. Paul-Alain Beaulieu proposes that the original name could mean "shining", "glowing", or "white". It would be likely that it was later read as Babbir, and then Babbil by swapping the consonant r with l. The attribution to Marduk and to Babylon is considered doubtful.
The earliest reasonably firm mention of the city of Babylon comes from one of Shar-Kali-Sharri's year names, which reports the founding of temples of Annunitum and Ilaba in KÁ.DINGIRki, thought to be Babylon, indicating that the folk etymology was already widely known in the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2193 BC) period. However, the original form of the name (Babbar/Babbir) was not forgotten, as seen from the phonetic spelling ba-ab-bí-lum in the Ur III period, and the spellings Pambalu and Babalu in the Kassite period.
Another attested spelling for the city of Babylon is TIN.TIR.KI, attested sparsely in the Old Babylonian period, known mostly from later Neo-Babylonian copies, and was in widespread usage in the 1st Millennium BC. The spelling E.KI also appears in the 1st Millennium BC.
In the Hebrew Bible, the name appears as Babel (; , Bāḇel; in Bābil), interpreted in to mean "confusion", from the verb bilbél (, "to confuse"). The modern English verb, to babble ("to speak foolish, excited, or confusing talk"), is popularly thought to derive from this name, but there is no direct connection.
In some instances, ancient records use "Babylon" as a name for other cities, including Borsippa within Babylon's sphere of influence, and Nineveh for a brief period after the Assyrian sack of Babylon.
Archaeology
The site covers an area of about , with about within the several kilometer (mile) long city walls, containing a number of mounds, the most prominent of which are Kasr, Merkes ( above the plain), Homera, Ishin-Aswad, Sahn, Amran, and Babil. It is roughly bisected by the Shatt Al-Hillah, a branch of the Euphrates river, which has shifted slightly since ancient times. The local water table has risen, making excavation of lower levels difficult. Prior to the heavy use of baked bricks in the reign of Neo-Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC), construction at Babylon was primarily of unbaked brick, with the occasional use of baked bricks or bitumen. Da Riva, Rocío, "Urban Religion in First Millennium BCE Babylonia", in Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean, pp. 763–790, 2022 Kasr – also called Palace or Castle, it was the location of the Neo-Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki of Nebuchadnezzar II. It lies in the center of the site and rises to above the plain. Amran Ibn Ali – about high and at the south of the site. It is the site of Esagila, a temple of Marduk that also contained shrines to Ea and Nabu. Homera – a reddish-colored mound on the west side. Most of the Hellenistic remains are here. Most of the remains of the ziggurat Etemenanki were heaped here when it was demolished by Alexander the Great in 331 BC.van de Mieroop, Marc, "Reading Babylon", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 257–75, 2003 Babil – a mound about high at the northern end of the site. Its bricks have been subject to looting since ancient times. It held a palace built by Nebuchadnezzar.
Subsequent excavation, looting, and reconstruction have reduced these original heights found by the German excavators.
Excavations Claudius Rich, working for the British East India Company in Baghdad, excavated Babylon in 1811–12 and again in 1817. Claudius J. Rich, "Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon", 1815 Claudius J. Rich, "Second memoir on Babylon; containing an inquiry into the correspondence between the ancient descriptions of Babylon, and the remains still visible on the site", 1818 Claudius J. Rich, "Narrative of a journey to the site of Babylon in 1811", Posthumous compilation, 1839 Captain Robert Mignan explored the site briefly in 1827. In 1829, he completed a map of Babylon which includes the location of several villages. William Loftus visited there in 1849. Austen Henry Layard made some soundings during a brief visit in 1850 before abandoning the site.A. H. Layard, "Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon", New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853H V. Hilprecht, "Exploration in the Bible Lands During the 19th Century", Philadelphia: A. J. Holman and Company, 1903
Fulgence Fresnel, Julius Oppert and Felix Thomas heavily excavated Babylon from 1852 to 1854.J. Oppert, "Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie exécutée par ordre du gouvernement de 1851 à 1854", Tome I: "Rélation du voyage et résultat de l'expédition", 1863 Tome II: "Déchiffrement des inscriptions cuneiforms", 1859 (also as ) (in French) Much of their work was lost in the Qurnah Disaster, when a transport ship and four rafts sank on the Tigris river in May 1855. They had been carrying over 200 crates of artifacts from various excavation missions, when they were attacked by Tigris river pirates near Al-Qurnah. Recovery efforts, assisted by the Ottoman authorities and British Residence in Baghdad, loaded the equivalent of 80 crates on a ship for Le Havre in May 1856. Few antiquities from the Fresnel mission made it to France. Subsequent efforts to recover the lost antiquities from the Tigris, including a Japanese expedition in 1971–72, have been largely unsuccessful.