Where Was Babylon, and How Did It Fall?

Published Sep 4, 2023, 9:00 AM

Over 2000 years ago, Babylon was the largest, wealthiest city in the world -- but it didn't last. Learn about its past, present, and myths in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/babylon.htm

Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. At the height of its glory in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the ancient city of Babylon was the largest and wealthiest in the world. Under the ruthless and ambitious king Nebuchonezer the Second, the sprawling settlement in what's now Iraq grew into a major city as large as Chicago, boasting towering temples, ornately tiled palaces, and imposing city walls thick enough that on the pathway on top of them, two chariots drawn by four horses apiece could pass each other side by side. According to legend, it may have also been home to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a one of the seven Wonders of the ancient world, and a hubristic skyscraping temple that some historians believe inspired the biblical Tower of Babel. But the glory days of Babylon were short lived. As foretold by Old Testament prophets, the grand ancient city fell to the Persian Empire in five hundred and thirty nine BCE and slowly crumbled over centuries of foreign invasions and occupations. Although Babylon was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in twenty nineteen, there isn't much left to see of this once unstoppable empire that dazzled Greek historians and enslaved its rivals, most famously the biblical Kingdom of Judah. If you took a trip to Babylon today, located about fifty five miles or eighty five kilometers south of Baghdad, you'd see a Taki recreation built by Saddam Hussein in the nineteen seventies that's been partially destroyed by decades of war. It's a sad ending to such a fabled city. Nebukanezer was the most famous of Babylon's rulers, but he wasn't the first, as several empires rose and fell and rose again over the millennia on that same coveted soil between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The earliest king to unite warring factions into a single powerful city state in southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria at now northern Iraq was the remarkable Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE. Not only did he successfully conquer or forge alliances with Babylon's fiercest enemies. During his forty three year reign, he also built Babylon into a showplace for innovations in engineering and justice. Hammurabi ordered the construction of intricate canals to provide babylon citizens with fresh water, and fortified the city's walls against invaders. He concerned himself with food distribution and public safety in a city that represented something entirely new, the intermingling of many people from wildly different cultures. In order to keep the peace among people without ties of blood or religion, Hammurabi created his famous League Code, essentially a detailed list of some three hundred crimes and their associated punishments, all in an if then format. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out, and so on. The code didn't just cover bodily damage, though different stipulations covered marriage, children, inheritance, debt, interest, and collateral. Punishments tended to be harsh and even harsher on lower class perpetrators than upper class ones. A copy of the code was unearthed back in nineteen oh one by a French archaeologist. It's inscribed on a stone pillar over seven feet or two meters tall. A. Scholars still debate how the ancient Babylonians would have interpreted and followed the code. Because the code is so specific in the issues it addresses. A, scholars think that it was a list of amendments to an existing set of laws that have been lost to history. But however, the code worked. Rabi's singular genius as a military and domestic leader wasn't passed on to his successor. Just days after Hamarabi's death, Babylon's old enemies declared their independence and readied their armies for invasion. The Babylonian kingdom fell to pieces, and the city wouldn't return to glory for more than a thousand years. It was the Great and Terrible Nebuconezzer the Second who rebuilt Babylon as a magnificent tribute to the creator God Marduke. Ruling from six oh five to five sixty two BCE, Nebuconezer extended the Babylonian empire across Egypt, Syria, and the Kingdom of Judah, where he seized Jerusalem in five ninety seven BCE, capturing tens of thousands of Israelites and dragging them off to Babylon as forced laborers, where the Bible tells us they wept in exile by its rivers. Because of Nebukonezzer's imperialist cruelty and pension for golden shrines to many gods, Babylon appears as shorthand for everything ungodly in some Judaeo Christian writings. In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the whore of Babylon makes an appearance quote adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. According to historians, Nibuconezzer relocated conquered people around the empire to keep them from organizing rebellions against him. Under his leadership, Babylon became the biggest and most modern city in the ancient world. In addition to Babylon's colossal city walls, he was responsible for the stunning Processional Way, a wide thoroughfare lined with ornately tiled walls depicting lions and dragons in bright blues and yellows. The Processional Way led to the Ishtar Gate the city's grand northern entrance. One of Nibukinezzer's best known construction projects was the Temple of Marduk, which sat atop a three hundred foot that's ninety meters zigarette, accessible by a ramp that curved around its exterior. The Greek historian Hirototus, writing centuries after Babylon's heyday, described eight towers stacked on top of one another. It's not hard to believe that Old Testament authors may have modeled their Tower of Babel after the Marduke Temple. Meanwhile, the location of the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon is a matter of some debate. Some historians think they may have actually been built about three hundred miles that's five hundred kilometers away in Nineveh by an Assyrian king. Others think the gardens never existed, as no archaeological evidence of them has ever been found, nor were they mentioned in contemporary Babylonian texts. The first mention of the gardens was in two hundred and ninety BCE, long after Nebuconesser had died. Speaking of let's talk about how Babylon fell. Just a few short decades after Nibakdezzar's death, Babylon was taken by the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Second, who reduced the city to just another outpost in his vast empire based in modern day Iran. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great planned to make Babylon the jewel of his Asian Empire, but ended up dying in the city in three twenty three BCE. After a solid sacking by the Parthians in the second century CE, Babylon never made a comeback. A two millennia of looting and warfare reduced Babylon to the barest of ruins. In the early twentieth century, German archaeologists recovered remnants of the processional way and reconstructed its blue glazed tile murals at a museum in Berlin. It was Saddam Hussein who took up Nibakonezzer's mantle and tried to reconstruct some of Babylon's former glory, but ended up with what art historians decried as disney for a despot, much to consternation of archaeologists. Hussain raised city walls of thirty eight feet that's eleven and a half meters, had built a Roman style arena on the ruins of old Babylon. He even stamped his own name on the bricks, just as Nemakonezer had done. Although some of the recreations were damaged during the prolonged occupations of the Iraq War from twenty three to twenty eleven, many of the gaudily painted buildings remain and are open to the public, including his Babylonian Palace. So what else can you see in Babylon today? There are remnants of brick and clay structures spread across about four square miles or ten square kilometers, with notable features like the Lion of Babylon statue and portions of the original ishtar gate. And while Babylon itself is mainly a ruin, it's located just a few miles from the modern city of Alpilla, which has a population of about five hundred thousand people. Today's episode is based on the article where was Babylon and Does it Still Exist? On how stuffworks dot Com? Written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. But four more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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