Babylon – Ancient Mesopotamia

Gwendolyn Leick has been successful in bringing together a group of international scholars each with the liberty of focusing on the topic and specialty of their choice and her survey portrays a great deal about the people of Babylon, their culture and the reality that lies behind the popular myth of Babylon. Some 1800 years ago, the history of the Babylonians right from the time of Hammurabi, who was famous for his Law Code till the time when Alexander and his heirs ruled the Near East, Gwendolyn’s archaeological discoveries as well as the cuneiform tablets which was discovered in the city of Babylon provides us some insight of the people of Babylon and their society, together with their intellectual and spiritual information.

Interesting insight with regards to the lives of kings, merchants, women and slaves together with their social, historical, geographical as well as cultural context which flourished for many centuries have come to light, providing scholars and students a glimpse of this amazing world. Being the builders of a towering monumental urban city and the layers of the foundation of modern science and mathematics, the people of Babylon were an insistent lot of the ancient world at that time. From the discoveries of the cuneiform tablets, epigraphic research together with the latest archaeological advances, Leick’s findings relates reference resources as well as introductory text for university students.

The main areas, like ecology, urbanism, plurality and complexity, power relations; all these offer variety of insight reflecting their academic approach and focus and the Babylonian World portrays a kaleidoscopic view with patterns and fragments of the lost world in the most amazing way with information on the various aspects of Babylon details on the complexity and the richness of this country. The ruins of the most famous city from ancient Mesopotamian lie in modern day Iraq, around 59 miles southwest of Baghdad which according to Akkadian language at that time meant `Gate of God or Gate of the Gods’, Babylon was founded at some time before the reign of Sargon of Akkad or Sargon the Great who reigned from 2334 – 2279 BC claiming to have built many temples in Babylon.

The history of Babylon came to be known with the famous king Hammurabi who reigned between 1795 -1750 who ascended the throne on the death of his father, King Sin-Muballit and transformed the city into a powerful and influential country of Mesopotamia. His law codes have been very popular though they are only an example of the policies which he implemented to maintain peace and prosperity. He was also responsible in enlarging and heightening the walls of the city, engagement in great public works including temples, making diplomats an integral part of his administration. He was so successful in war and diplomacy that he managed to unite all of Mesopotamia under the rule of Babylon in 1763 BC, which at that time was one of the major cities of the world and named it Babylonia.

After the death of Hammurabi, his empire got disintegrated and Babylonia reduced in size and was taken over by Hittites in 1595 BC and later by the Kassites. Thereafter the Assyrians dominated the region and the Assyrian ruler, Sennacherib had the city razed, sacked with the ruins scattered and Babylon revolted against him. He was soon assassinated by his sons and succeeded by Esrhaddon who rebuilt Babylon returning it to its original glory. The city once again revolted against Ashurbanipal of Nineveh who had taken control though did not damage it but had made efforts to purify Babylon of the evil spirits prowling around that had been the cause of all the prevailing troubles.

Thereafter the Assyrian Empire fell and a Chaldean, Nabopolassar took charge of the throne of Babylon and created the Neo Babylonian Empire and his son Nebuchadnezzar in 604 -561, renovated the city covering an area of 900 hectares of land with some of the most impressive and beautiful structures in the whole of Mesopotamia where every ancient writer had made a mention of the city of Babylon with reverence and awe. The Neo Babylonian Empire prolonged after the death of Nebuchadnezzar II where Babylon continued to play an important role under the reign of Nabonidus together with his successor, Belshazzar. Towards 539 BC, the empire fell into the hands of the Persian under Cyrus the Great during the Battle of Opis.

 Since the walls of Babylon were impregnable, the Persians devised a plan and diverted the course of the Euphrates River that fell to a manageable depth and while the people of the city were engaged in their great religious feast, the army waded through the river and marched under the walls of Babylon unnoticed. It is believed that the city was taken over without a fight though the documents at that time indicate that the repairs had to be done to the walls as well as some areas of the city and hence the invasion was not much of an effort.

Geographically, Babylonia can be defined as the southern half of Mesopotamia where the rivers, Tigris and Euphrates meet each other forming a strip of land. Towards the south lies the marshes, beyond which lies the waters of the Persian Gulf and the northern half of Mesopotamia was known as Assyria. Though most of the Assyrian cities were situated along the Tigris, those of Babylonia located along the Euphrates were a major trade route or the intermediary canals.

The Arabian desert to the west and the Zagros Mountains to the east formed its natural border with its climate being hotter and drier in the southern Mesopotamia. Agriculture was possible only through irrigation while the landscape was marked by a dense network of canals and dams. Babylon city was considered as the seat of kingship which was lavishly endowed with temples and palaces which were so unique that it attracted the cupidity of far away ruler from distant place namely the Hittite king Mursili who came down to Euphrates to attack and plunder its riches.

The Old Babylonian language was replaced with the previously spoken Sumerian and only the learned scholars were familiar with that language. Another group of immigrants this time from the east known as Kassites took political control of the Babylonian culture, their kings bearing outlandish Kassite names while the later one adopted `good Babylonia’ titles and names.

History Mystery: Babylon the city of Nebuchadnezzar -3

The Babylonians’ religious beliefs were rooted in a tradition which dated back over 2,500 years to the origins of Sumerian civilization. Every Sumerian city was ruled by a monarch – the representative of his city’s god who, surrounded by his court, was also masters of a specific art of the world. The god assured the prosperity of the city by keeping in balance the cosmic forces upon which the fertility of the earth and its occupants depended. Quite how this balance was maintained in the Babylonian scheme of this is not known. But some scholars conclude that, in Babylonian belief, the god shared his power with a mother goddess whom he wed afresh each year. It was at these ceremonies that the king and the high priestess acted out the role of the divine couple.

The mythical son to whom they gave birth personified the new year’s growth of crops. Months later, harvest time heralded to god’s death. Although he was mourned, it was recognized that his death formed an essential part of the natural cycle. The gods were organized into a pantheon, whose purpose was to maintain order throughout the world. Anu, god of the sky, Enlil, god of the wind and atmosphere, and Ea, god of the water, were the supreme gods. Then came Sin, the Moon; Shamash, the Sun; and Ishtar, the planet Venus. Marduk was one of the yound warrior gods.  When Babylon became the centre of the Middle Eastern world, Hammurabi declared that Marduk – as the city’s patron – occupied too modest a position in the pantheon.

 To put this right, he proclaimed that the top three gods had made Marduk their leader. His theologians were expected to justify the proclamation, so they set to work gathering together the oldest traditions about the creation of the world. A long poem was composed which recounted battles between the elemental beings – Tiamat, salt sea, and Apsu, fresh water – and the gods to whome they had given birth. Tiamat, that said, had created an army of monsters to kill the gods and to hurl the world back into primordial chaos. Terrified, the gods refused to give battle until the young Marduk stepped forward as their champion and agreed to defend them on one condition: that they grant him supreme power. After an heroic struggle, Marduk became first among the gods. The other gods survived, but as personifications of Marduk’s many powers. And they were gardeners.

Although no contemporary Babylonian text describing the ‘hanging gardens’ exists, historians such as Diodorus of Sicily rated them one of the wonders of the world. Elaborate gardens with artificial hills, for which water was brought in by aqueduct and raised using bronze Archimedes’ Screw devices, were built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib at Nineveh. Some archaeologists believe that these ‘Hanging Gardens’ of Nineveh were mistakenly attributed to Babylon. Others accept that Babylon also had magnificent gardens, but have not established their location. Traces of a garden have been attributed to a building behind the servants’ quarters. Its rows of vaulted corridors could have once supported plant – filled terraces. But corridors such as these were commonly used in the East for strong barrel- shaped jars. The building more probably contained the palace storerooms. A corner bastion of the palace on the edge of the Euphrates may also have been a retaining wall for a garden. Whatever their location, they were a credit to Nebuchadnezzar’s brilliant reign.

But the brightness of his capital was soon to dim. In 559 BC Nabonidus, the son of a priestess of Sin, mounted the throne as Nebuchadnezzar’s successors. He very soon exasperated Marduk’s clergy by giving preferential treatment to the temples of Sin in Ur and in Harran, in northern Syria. And life under Belshazzar, last of his line, was no easier. He held in contempt the Jews whom Nebuchadnezzar had brought in captivity to Babylon after the sacking of Jerusalem in 587 BC. There were many in Babylon who welcomed Cyrus, the king of the Medes and Persians, as a liberator. In 539 BC Cyrus and hgis army entered Babylon while Belshazzar was enjoying a great festival. The city was so vast that according to the fanciful account of Herodotus, the outskirts were captured without the people in the centre knowing anything about it. At the same time, according to the Jewish prophet Daniel, there ‘came forth fingers of a man’s palace… and this is the writing that was written… Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin… Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.’ Cyrus declared himself a worshipper of the god Marduk; and one of his first acts was to free the captive Jews in the city. But while the Persians did not destroy Babylon, it had lost its independence for ever. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great established his empire throughout the Middle East, and planned to restore the city to its former brilliance. After his death, however, the idea was forgotten, and the inhabitants of Babylon soon abandoned their home to the plunder and neglect of the next 2,000 years.

History Mystery: Babylon the city of Nebuchadnezzar -2

Then, in 625 BC, its governor, Nabopolassar, proclaimed Babylon independent and himself king. By making an alliance with the Medes (from Iran) Nabopolassar defeated Assyria in 612 BC and destroyed its capital, Nineveh. When Nabopolassar’s son Nebuchadnezzar mounted the throne in 605 BC, the entire area known as the Fertile Crescent – from Jerusalem to the Persian Gulf – was his. All he had to do was to eradicate the last pockets of Assyrian resistance and to restore Babylon as a capital worthy of his ambitions. Under Nebuchadnezzar, the city re-emerged as the queen of the civilized world, built along both banks of the Euphrates, with the main buildings on the east bank. A double exterior wall, 18 km (11 miles) long, enclosed an area that was barely inhabited and may have served as a refuge for villagers and their herds in time of war. This outer line of defense was reinforced to the north by the fortress of Babil, which still stands 22m (72 ft) high; it once contained the summer palace of the king. An inner wall, the shape of a quadrangle and surrounded by a canal, protected the main part of the town. This brick rampart consisted of a front wall 6.5m (21 ft) wide, and a second wall more than 3m (10 ft) wide, between which was built a third wall. Each of the city’s eight gateways was under the protection of a different god. The main palace and the main gate – dedicated to Ishtar, the goddess of lo9ve and battle – were also protected by a fortress.

A sacred processional way skirted the fortress and passed through the Ishtar Gate before entering the city. Here, it ran alongside a double wall which defended the royal palace, making it an impregnable citadel right in the heart of Babylon. The construction of the palace was begun by Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar’s father. His living quarters consisted of two large halls and three private rooms, opening onto a courtyard. Nebuchadnezzar kept the palace but enlarged it. To do this he merely added to it four identical ‘palace units’. These complexes stood side by side and were connected by passages. In one of the enormous hall: the throne room. Outside the palace, the processional way continued as for as the Temple of Marduk, patron god of Babylon.

The temple was a square fortress with a central courtyard. In line with its entrance, a door opened into the sanctuary of Marduk. His golden statue was small and light enough to be carried during processions such as the one held at the New Year. Another room in the temple was reserved for Marduk’s throne; another housed the bed intended for the symbolic weddings of the gods; and some rooms were dedicated to lesser gods - for, like any earthly king, Marduk had his court. Alongside the temple, and isolated within a high well, was an immense tower, or ziggurat. It had been built hundreds of years before the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, but had fallen into disrepair. The king ordered in to be rebuilt so that its top ‘might rival heaven’. Nebuchadnezzar’s tower of sun-dried brick rested on a square base and rose like a pyramid some 90m (295 ft) above the city. Its seven stories were crowned with a temple. According to the historian Diodorus of Sicily, in the 1st century BC the tower was an observatory for Chaldaean astrologers from southern Mesopotamia. Herodotus thought it was used for sacred fertility rites. He reported that there was a bed and gold table on the top storey of the tower, but no statue of a god. ‘Only a woman chosen by the god would spend the night alone there,’ he wrote, adding that ‘sometimes the god came into the temple and slept in the bed.’ The French archaeologist Andre Parrot linked the name of Babylon – literally ‘gateway of the god’ – with Jacob’s vision in the Book of Genesis. As Jacob dreamed, he saw a ladder with reached from the earth up to heaven’s gate. Parrot suggested that the Babylonians, too, saw the tower, with its monumental staircase, as a ‘gateway of the heavens’ and as a resting-place between the heavenly home of the god and his earthly residence in the temple.

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History Mystery: Babylon the city of Nebuchadnezzar -1

An immense mud-brick stump in present-day Iraq is all that is left of Babylon’s most infamous building, the Tower of Babel. But the tower was once a wonder of the ancient world, in a great city that surpassed in splendour all others of its time. THE GREEKS DESCRIBED BABYLON’S ‘HANGING GARDENS’ as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Book of Genesis referred to its tower, which soared more than 90m (29 ft) above the surrounding countryside, as the Tower of Babel. For the Old Testament writers this attempt to reach heaven represented the ultimate in human vanity. But there was once good reason for this vanity: the city of Babylon was the pounding heart of an empire which stretched all the way from Egypt in the west to the old kingdom of Elam (south-west Iran) in the east.

 All that remains today of what was once the largest city in the world is dun-coloured field of dried mud ruins. And, until the 20th century, all that was known about Babylon came from the writings of the Greek kistorian Herodotus (c. 484 – 425 BC) and from Biblical denunciations. ‘Babylon the Great’, thunders a New Testament writer, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.’ Herodotus’s view differed. Around 450 BC the much-travelled historian made the journey from Greece across the mountains and deserts of Syria and down the river Euphrates. What he saw impressed him. He described a vast capital straddling the Euphrates protected by a gigantic rampart so wide that there was enough space for a four-horse chariot to run. He told of walls more than 86 km (53 miles) round, and studded with 100 bronze gateways. Babylon, he wrote, ‘surpasses in splendour any city of the known world’. He also recounted some of the customs of the city’s inhabitants: how, for example, every woman was obliged, once in her life, ‘to reside in the sanctuary of Aphrodite and unite with a stranger’; how auctions of women were held every year, when the most beautiful were acquired by the rich, and the plainer-looking fell to the lot of the poor. But he knew little about the history of Babylon and had not even heard the name of Nebuchadnezzar II, its emperor from 605 to 562 BC. It was not until the start of the 20th century that historians could begin to disentangle fact form fantasy. In 1899, German archaeologists under the architect Robert Koldewey undertook the first intensive exploration Babylon.

 Their excavations continued until 1917. It was delicate work, for the temples, palaces and housed in Mesopotamia – the fertile valley bounded by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates – were built of sun-dried brick, extremely crumbly and difficult to distinguish from the surrounding soil. Nonetheless, Babylon’s high walls, some of them coated with glazed bricks, were finally unearthed. The ghost of a ruined city rose from the dead, and a picture of its history gradually took shape before the archaeologists’ eyes. As the excavation work continued, students of Assyrian history deciphered the thousands of texts that were uncovered. From these they learnt that Babylon was a relatively young city – at least measured against the history of Mesopotamia. The Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk and Nippur, for example, had been founded hundreds of years earlier. In about 2000 BC the Amorites, a nomadic people from the Syrian desert, overran much of Mesopotamia and sounded a series of kingdoms in Ashur an Mari and father south, gained control of the old Sumerian cities, including Babylon. Here, at the start of the 19th century BC, they founded their first royal dynasty. Hammurabi was this first Babylonian dynasty’s fifth king, and his reign from 1792 to 1750 BC was undoubtedly glorious.


One by one he crushed all his enemies, most of whom were Amorites like himself, until he had set up an empire which embraced all of southern Mesopotamia – north into Assyria, westward towards the Mediterranean and southwards to the Persian Gulf. His genius for unification was reflected in his legal code, a concisely written body of common law. No treasures from Hammurabi’s time remain in Babylon itself, partly because its valuables were scattered during the maelstrom that followed. For 1,000 years after Babylon’s founding, the warring peoples who populate the pages of the Old Testament disputed Mesopotamia. The Kassites – from the Zagros Mountains in western Iran – took and held Babylon for four and a half centuries. After that, invading Elamites carried off many of the city’s riches to their own capital, Susa. These included the stele that shows Hammurabi receiving the contents of his laws from Shamash, god of justice. In the 13th century BC Babylonia fell victim, for the first time, to the Assyrians, and from the 9th century onwards it was a vassal state of Assyria. Babylon found its subjugation intolerable. There were several revolutions, and during the course of the 7th century BC the Assyrians destroyed the city twice.

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