Babylon: Hammurabi, the Hanging Gardens, and the End of an Era
Babylon was the most famous city of the ancient world. For almost two thousand years — from the first dynasty of Babylon in the nineteenth century BCE to the Persian conquest in 539 BCE — the city dominated southern Mesopotamia, ruled over the largest empires of the region, and gave its name to a state of grandeur, excess, and corruption that is still invoked whenever modern commentators want to describe a fallen superpower. The Babylonians invented the 60-minute hour, mapped the constellations of the zodiac, calculated the motions of the planets, and wrote the world’s most famous law code. Their city was the setting for the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the famous (and possibly fictional) Hanging Gardens, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people.
This cluster page tells the story of Babylon from the first dynasty of the Amorite king Sumu-abum to the city’s destruction by the Persians. It links out to the Code of Hammurabi, the Ziggurat of Ur, the Ancient Mesopotamia pillar, and the Gilgamesh long-tail.
The Geography of Babylon
Babylon lay on the Euphrates River, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of modern Baghdad in what is now Iraq. The city was founded in the third millennium BCE and grew to be one of the largest cities in the ancient world. The site is a low, broad mound (called Babil in Arabic) and was already famous in antiquity as one of the wonders of the world.
The city’s most distinctive features were its massive double walls, the famous Processional Way, the Ishtar Gate, the Etemenanki ziggurat (which may have been the original of the Tower of Babel), and the palaces and temples of the successive Babylonian dynasties.
The First Dynasty of Babylon (1894–1595 BCE)
The first dynasty of Babylon was founded by the Amorite king Sumu-abum around 1894 BCE. The Amorites were a Semitic-speaking people who had migrated into Mesopotamia from the west, and they ruled the city for about three centuries. The dynasty was unimportant at first, but the sixth king, Hammurabi, transformed the city into the capital of the largest empire Mesopotamia had ever seen.
Hammurabi ruled from 1792 to 1750 BCE. He was an unusually capable king: a conqueror, a lawgiver, a builder, and a propagandist. He defeated the Elamites, the Assyrians, and the other Mesopotamian city-states, and united all of southern Mesopotamia under his rule. He built temples, canals, and palaces in Babylon, and he issued the famous Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on a black stone stele that is now in the Louvre in Paris.
Hammurabi’s dynasty lasted for another century after his death, but the empire he built did not survive. The Hittites sacked Babylon in 1595 BCE, and the city passed through a long succession of foreign rulers: the Kassites, the Isin II dynasty, and the Second Dynasty of Isin.
The Assyrian Period
The Babylonians were conquered by the Middle Assyrian Empire in the thirteenth century BCE, and they remained under Assyrian rule (with brief periods of independence) for the next four hundred years. The Assyrian kings treated Babylon with a mixture of brutality and respect, and the Babylonians periodically revolted.
In 689 BCE, the Assyrian king Sennacherib sacked Babylon in response to a revolt and partly destroyed the city. Sennacherib’s successor, Esarhaddon, rebuilt the city and made it a second capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Babylonian god Marduk was given a prominent place in the Assyrian pantheon, and his son Ashurbanipal was educated in Babylon.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BCE)
The Neo-Babylonian (or Chaldean) Empire was founded by Nabopolassar, a Chaldean who revolted against Assyrian rule in 626 BCE and, with the help of the Medes, destroyed the Assyrian Empire. His son Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled 605–562 BCE) was the most powerful king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and he is the Nebuchadnezzar of the Book of Daniel.
Nebuchadnezzar is remembered for his great building projects in Babylon. He rebuilt the city’s walls, the Ishtar Gate, the Etemenanki ziggurat, and the famous Hanging Gardens. He also conquered Jerusalem in 586 BCE and destroyed the Temple, beginning the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire lasted only about ninety years. The last king, Nabonidus, was a devotee of the moon god Sin and was out of touch with the Babylonian priesthood. In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon without a fight, and the city became a province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
The Hanging Gardens
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. According to the tradition, they were built by Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife Amytis, who missed the green hills of her native Media. The gardens were supposedly a series of terraced gardens, supported by stone pillars and watered by a system of pumps.
Modern scholarship is divided on whether the Hanging Gardens ever existed. The Babylonian texts do not mention them, and the description comes mostly from later Greek writers (Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Philo of Byzantium). Some scholars have suggested that the Hanging Gardens were actually at Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and were later mislocated to Babylon. Others have argued that the Greek accounts were based on a real Babylonian monument that has since been destroyed.
The Ishtar Gate
The Ishtar Gate was the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon, and it was the most elaborate of the city’s monumental entrances. It was built by Nebuchadnezzar II and dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. The gate was decorated with glazed brick reliefs of bulls (the symbol of the storm god Adad) and dragons (mušḫuššu, the symbol of Marduk). The gate was excavated by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey in the early twentieth century, and a reconstruction is now displayed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
The Ziggurat of Babylon
The Etemenanki, the “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth,” was the great ziggurat of Babylon. It was built on the site of an earlier ziggurat and rebuilt many times. The Etemenanki is the most likely candidate for the original of the Tower of Babel, the tower that the descendants of Noah tried to build in the Book of Genesis to reach heaven.
The Babylonian Legacy
Babylon’s legacy is enormous. The Babylonians invented the zodiac, the 60-minute hour, the 12-month calendar, and the astronomical records that would later be used by Greek and Islamic astronomers. The Jewish Captivity in Babylon had a profound effect on the development of Judaism: the Babylonian Talmud, the synagogue as a place of worship, and the editing of many books of the Hebrew Bible all date from this period. The Book of Daniel, the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah, and the Book of Ezekiel are all deeply concerned with Babylon. The word Babylon has come to mean a great but wicked city, and it is used in this sense in the Book of Revelation and in many other Christian and Islamic texts.
The site of Babylon was excavated by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917, and many of the most famous finds — the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the throne room of Nebuchadnezzar — are now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The modern site of Babylon, in Hillah, Iraq, has been extensively damaged by modern military activity and by the Saddam Hussein regime, which built a palace and other structures on the site.