Two famous kings, a thousand years apart
Babylon had two great moments. The first came under Hammurabi, who ruled from about 1792 to 1750 BCE and made the city the centre of a kingdom in southern Mesopotamia. His law code, carved on a stone stele, was later carried off as war booty to Susa in Iran, where French excavators found it in 1901; it is now in the Louvre.
The second, and the one whose remains you see, came more than a thousand years later under Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled from about 604 to 562 BCE. He rebuilt much of the city on a huge scale, with new walls, palaces and temples. Very little survives above ground from Hammurabi’s Babylon, because the later city rose on top of it.
The city Nebuchadnezzar built
Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon was a city of baked and glazed brick, which is the key to how it looked. Mesopotamia has little stone, so builders used mud brick for walls and fired brick, sometimes glazed in colour, for the parts meant to be seen. That tradition runs through all of Mesopotamian art.
Three monuments stood out. The Ishtar Gate, covered in blue glazed bricks with dragons and bulls, opened onto the Processional Way, a ceremonial street. Its walls were lined with striding lions, which survive today as the lion panels in several museums. Gate and street formed a single route into the heart of the city.
Inside the city rose the great ziggurat, the stepped temple tower called Etemenanki, which many link to the story of the Tower of Babel.
How Babylon faded
Babylon was never destroyed in a single day. In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus took it, and according to a Babylonian chronicle his army entered the city without a battle, after defeating the Babylonian army at Opis. Life in the temples went on. Two centuries later Alexander the Great planned to make Babylon an imperial capital, and he died there, in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, in 323 BCE.
The slow end came after him. His successor Seleucus founded a new city, Seleucia on the Tigris, and Babylon lost people and importance to it. By the first century CE much of the old city was largely abandoned, a field of brick mounds.
Digging Babylon
Modern excavation began in 1899, when the German Oriental Society sent the architect Robert Koldewey to Babylon. He worked there until 1917, mapping walls, palaces and streets and recovering thousands of fragments of glazed brick. Many were shipped to Berlin, where the Ishtar Gate and part of the Processional Way were rebuilt and put on show in 1930.
The excavators also found that the gate had been rebuilt several times. The street level was raised more than once, and the earlier, lower phases, with bulls and dragons in moulded brick left unglazed, ended up buried under the later ones.
What you see today: ancient and rebuilt
In the 1980s the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein rebuilt parts of Babylon with modern bricks stamped with his name, laid directly on top of the ancient walls, and built a large palace on the site. Archaeologists criticised the work, but it is now part of the site’s history: when UNESCO added Babylon to the World Heritage List in 2019, the plan was to explain these interventions in their context rather than remove them.
The damage did not stop there. After 2003 a military base was set up at Babylon, first American and then Polish, and a 2009 UNESCO report described heavy vehicles driven over ancient paths and hilltops levelled. Salt water rising through the soil also eats away at the ancient brick. So the answer to “how much is original?” changes from one part of the site to the next: foundations and mounds are ancient, many standing walls are modern.
Where to see it
The site of Babylon is near Hillah, in the Babil province of Iraq. Its most famous art is elsewhere: the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way are in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, whose wing with the gate is closed for renovation until about 2037, and the Stele of Hammurabi is in the Louvre in Paris.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Babylon” (inscribed 2019), and decision document; NPR, “UNESCO adds ruins of ancient Babylon to its list of World Heritage sites” (5 July 2019).
- Nabonidus Chronicle (ABC 7), translation on Livius.org.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Babylon” and “Ishtar Gate”.
- Louvre, “Law Code of Hammurabi”; Universität Münster, Altorientalistik, “Kodex Hammurapi”.
- NBC News, “Iraq: Can ancient Babylon be rescued?” (2008).
