Babylon

Background

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. The town became part of a small independent city-state in the early second millennium BC. The First Dynasty of Babylon was founded by the Amorite king Sumu-abum (c. 1894 BC). Its most famous ruler, Hammurabi, was the sixth king of this dynasty and greatly expanded the empire in the 18th century BC, transforming Babylon into a major city and a regional capital.

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 a small village known as Babel.

Did You Know?

• Both the Hanging Gardens and Walls of Babylon were ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
• The Hanging 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.
• 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 200,000.
• The spelling Babylon is the Latin representation of Koine Greek Babylṓn, derived from the native Bāb-ilim.

Excavations

Claudius Rich excavated Babylon in 1811–12 and again in 1817 while working for the British East India Company in Baghdad. Captain Robert Mignan explored the site briefly in 1827 and completed a map of Babylon in 1829 showing several villages. William Loftus visited in 1849, and Austen Henry Layard made soundings during a brief visit in 1850 before abandoning the site. Fulgence Fresnel, Julius Oppert, and Felix Thomas conducted extensive excavations from 1852 to 1854, but much of their work was lost in the Qurnah Disaster of May 1855, when a transport ship and four rafts carrying over 200 crates of artifacts were attacked by Tigris river pirates near Al-Qurnah.

Recovery efforts in 1856 loaded the equivalent of 80 crates for Le Havre, but few antiquities reached France. Henry Rawlinson and George Smith worked briefly in 1854. Hormuzd Rassam excavated for the British Museum from 1879 to 1882, prompted by widespread looting; his industrial-scale digging recovered many cuneiform tablets but damaged the archaeological context. The German Oriental Society, led by Robert Koldewey, conducted the first scientific excavations from 1899 to 1917, focusing on the temple of Marduk, the processional way, and the city wall.

Artifacts including pieces of the Ishtar Gate were sent to Berlin, where Walter Andrae reconstructed them. The expedition recovered 967 clay tablets from the Old Babylonian period and 564 from the Middle Babylonian period. The German archaeologists fled in 1917 before British troops, and many objects later went missing.