Babylon ( BAB-il-on) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about 85 kilometres (53 miles) 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 AD 1, but some scholars question their historical reality, as they are not mentioned in any extant Babylonian text.
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. 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 c. 1770 – c. 1670 BC, and again c. 612 – c. 320 BC. It was perhaps the first city to reach a population above 200,000 in an area of about 900 ha (3.5 sq mi). 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 (Βαβυλών), derived from the native Akkadian: 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠, romanized: Bābilim, lit. 'gate of the god(s)'. The cuneiform spelling is KÁ.DIG̃IR.RAKI, corresponding to the Sumerian phrase Kan dig̃irak.
The sign 𒆍 (KÁ) is the logogram for "gate", 𒀭 (DIG̃IR) means "god", and 𒊏 (RA) represents the coda of the word dig̃ir (-r) followed by the genitive suffix -ak. The final 𒆠 (KI) 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. 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 (Hebrew: בָּבֶל, romanized: Bāḇel; Classical Syriac: ܒܒܠ, romanized: Bāḇēl, Imperial Aramaic: בבל Bāḇel; in Arabic: بَابِل Bābil), interpreted in Genesis 11:9 to mean "confusion", from the verb bilbél (בלבל, "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
From the accounts of modern travellers, I had expected to have found on the site of Babylon more, and less, than I actually did. Less, because I could have formed no conception of the prodigious extent of the whole ruins, or of the size, solidity, and perfect state, of some of the parts of them; and more, because I thought that I should have distinguished some traces, however imperfect, of many of the principal structures of Babylon. I imagined, I should have said: "Here were the walls, and such must have been the extent of the area. There stood the palace, and this most assuredly was the tower of Belus." – I was completely deceived: instead of a few insulated mounds, I found the whole face of the country covered with vestiges of building, in some places consisting of brick walls surprisingly fresh, in others merely of a vast succession of mounds of rubbish of such indeterminate figures, variety and extent, as to involve the person who should have formed any theory in inextricable confusion.
— Claudius J. Rich, Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (1815), pp. 1–2.
The site covers an area of about 1,000 hectares (3+3⁄4 mi2), with about 450 hectares (1+3⁄4 mi2) within the several kilometer (mile) long city walls, containing a number of mounds, the most prominent of which are Kasr, Merkes (13 meters; 43 ft 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.
- 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 19 meters (62 ft) above the plain.
- Amran Ibn Ali – about 22 meters (72 ft) 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.
- Babil – a mound about 25 meters (82 ft) 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. 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.
Fulgence Fresnel, Julius Oppert and Felix Thomas heavily excavated Babylon from 1852 to 1854. 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.
Henry Rawlinson and George Smith worked there briefly in 1854. The next excavation was conducted by Hormuzd Rassam on behalf of the British Museum. Work began in 1879, continuing until 1882, and was prompted by widespread looting of the site. Using industrial scale digging in search of artifacts, Rassam recovered a large quantity of cuneiform tablets and other finds. The zealous excavation methods, common at the time, caused significant damage to the archaeological context. Many tablets had appeared on the market in 1876 before Rassam's excavation began.
A team from the German Oriental Society led by Robert Koldewey conducted the first scientific archaeological excavations at Babylon. The work was conducted daily from 1899 until 1917. A major problem for Koldewey was the large scale mining of baked bricks, which began in the 19th century and which were mainly sourced from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II. At the time, excavations for brick mining, for various building projects, including the Hindiya dam were under way. The primary efforts of the dig involved the temple of Marduk and the processional way leading up to it, as well as the city wall.
Artifacts, including pieces of the Ishtar Gate and hundreds of recovered tablets, were sent back to Germany, where Koldewey's colleague Walter Andrae reconstructed them into displays at the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. The Koldewey expedition recovered artifacts from the Old Babylonian period. These included 967 clay tablets, with 564 tablets from the Middle Babylonian period, stored in private houses, with Sumerian literature and lexical documents. The German archaeologists fled before oncoming British troops in 1917, and again, many objects went missing in the following years.
Further work by the German Archaeological Institute was conducted by Heinrich J. Lenzen in 1956 and Hansjörg Schmid in 1962, working the Hellenistic, Parthian, Sasanian, and Arabic levels of the site. Lenzen's work dealt primarily with the Hellenistic theatre, and Schmid focused on the temple ziggurat Etemenanki.
A topographical survey at the site was conducted in 1974, followed in 1977 by a review of the stratigraphical position of the main monuments and reconsideration of ancient water levels, by the Turin Centre for Archaeological Research and Excavations in the Middle East and Asia, and the Iraqi-Italian Institute of Archaeological Sciences. The focus was on clearing up issues raised by re-examination of the old German data. Additional work in 1987–1989 concentrated on the area surrounding the Ishara and Ninurta temples in the Shu-Anna city-quarter of Babylon.
A number of Iraqi excavations have occurred at Babylon, the earliest in 1938. From 1979 to 1981 excavation and restoration work was conducted at the Ninmah Temple, Istar Temple, and the Southern Palace. Occasional excavations and restorations continued in the 1970s and 1980s.
During the restoration efforts in Babylon, the Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage conducted extensive research, excavation and clearing, but wider publication of these archaeological activities has been limited. Most of the known tablets from all modern excavations remain unpublished.
History
The earliest attested mention of Babylon dates to the late 3rd millennium BC, during the reign of the Akkadian ruler Shar-Kali-Sharri, one of whose year names mentions the construction of two temples there. Babylon was ruled by an ensi (governor) for the empire. Some of the known governors were Abba, Arši-aḫ, Itūr-ilum, Murteli, Unabatal, and Puzur-Tutu. After that, nothing is heard of the city until the time of Sumu-la-El. After around 1950 BC, Amorite kingdoms appeared in Uruk and Larsa in the south.
Old Babylonian period
According to a Babylonian king list, Amorite rule in Babylon began (c. 19th or 18th century BC) with a chieftain named Sumu-abum, who declared independence from the neighboring city-state of Kazallu. Sumu-la-El, whose dates may be concurrent with those of Sumu-abum, is usually given as the progenitor of the First Babylonian dynasty. Both are credited with building the walls of Babylon. In any case, the records describe Sumu-la-El's military successes establishing a regional sphere of influence for Babylon.