Babylon is known for Hammurabi's laws and its hanging gardens.
Ancient Babylon was an influential city that served as a center of Mesopotamian civilization for nearly two millennia, from roughly 2000 B.C. to 540 B.C. It was located near the Euphrates River, about 60 miles south of Baghdad in what is now Iraq.
"Babylon, in all its manifestations, is at once remote to us and all around us. Like no other city, its history has become bound up with legend..." researchers Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour wrote in the book"Babylon: City of Wonders " . Leick noted that in 1894 B.C. after the Ur-based empire had collapsed, Babylon was conquered by a man named Samu-abum . He was an Amorite, a member of a Semitic-speaking people from the area around modern-day Syria. He turned Babylon into a petty kingdom made up of the city and a small amount of nearby territory. Babylon remained this way until, six kings later, a man named Hammurabi ascended the throne.
While archaeological remains in Babylon dating to this period are scarce, textual remains reveal more information. Leick noted that Hammurabi was so well respected that he became regarded as a deity. She wrote that parents gave their children names that meant"Hammurabi is my help" or"Hammurabi is my god.
However, the code did have rules that protected women. For instance, if a man divorced his wife he had to give her back her dowry and give her some of his land. Other rules stipulated that a widowed woman should receive an inheritance and that an unmarried woman should receive financial support from her brothers after the death of her father so that she could live alone.
Following the conquest, the Kassites appear to have made an effort to win over the people of Babylon."They brought back the statue of the major deity, Marduk, which had been stolen by the Hittites, and restored his cult in Babylon," Paulus wrote."The Kassite kings restored the temples of the Babylonian gods, while their own pantheon had little influence."
While Babylon was not hit directly by the Sea People they faced wars with other powers. A war with Assyria resulted in a Babylonian king being led to Ashur in chains, while a conflict with Elam led to the statue of Marduk being stolen yet again. A new Babylonian ruler named Nebuchadnezzar I defeated Elam and brought the statue back once more. Leick noted that his success added greater importance to the Babylonians' New Year festival.
Nebuchadnezzar II's BabylonThrough military conquests, Nebuchadnezzar II came to rule an empire that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the borders of Egypt. He captured Jerusalem twice, in 597 B.C. and 587 B.C. — events that led to the destruction of the First Temple, the deportation of many Jewish inhabitants to Babylonia and the capture of the Ark of the Covenant.
PalacesNebuchadnezzar II's city boasted three major palaces. The southern palace measured 1,065 by 720 feet . It included a throne room with a glazed brick panel showing palmettes, floral reliefs and lions. The tiles were glazed in blue and yellow — a common feature among the most important structures in Nebuchadnezzar II's Babylon, George wrote.
The"amazing Ishtar Gate, composed of an ante-gate in the outer wall and the main gate in the larger inner wall of the city, with a 48-meter-long [157 feet] passage, was decorated with no fewer than 575 depictions of animals ," Joachim Marzahn, a retired curator at the Vorderasiatisches Museum, wrote in another chapter of the book"Babylon.
The Tower of Babel?Although largely destroyed today, in ancient times the ziggurat of Etemenanki towered over the city, and was located just to the north of the Esangil shrine. Like the shrine, the ziggurat was dedicated to the god Marduk. Rebuilding the structure would have been an impressive feat, and it's been speculated that this structure may have inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The story of the tower"may have taken its inspiration from the well-publicized repairs of Assyrian kings in the seventh century," Dalley wrote, noting that the story of the tower also could have come from a Babylonian religious text known as the"Epic of Creation.
A later account was recorded by Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C. He wrote that the Hanging Gardens were built"by a later Syrian king to please one of his concubines; for she, they say, being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains, asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia."
Leick noted that on Oct. 29, 539 B.C. the city of Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great, the legendary Persian ruler. Nabonidus was taken to what is now Iran to spend the rest of his life in exile. In an ancient inscription called the"Cyrus Cylinder," now housed in the British Museum in London, Cyrus claimed that his troops faced no resistance when he took Babylon."I went as harbinger of peace into Babylon," he said.
Babylon was abandoned in the centuries thereafter."According to the testimony of classical writers, the site of Babylon had become deserted by the second century A.D.," Paul-Alain Beaulieu, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book"A History of Babylon: 2200 B.C.- A.D. 75 " ."The memory of Babylon was preserved mostly in the Bible and the work of Berossus [a third century B.C.