Where Was Babylon, and How Did It Fall?

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:26):
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

(00:47):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:33):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:16):
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,

(02:38):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:25):
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

(03:47):
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

(04:10):
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

(04:31):
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

(04:56):
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

(05:22):
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

(05:44):
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,

(06:05):
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

(06:27):
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.

(06:49):
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.

(07:12):
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

(07:33):
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

(07:56):
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

(08:18):
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

(08:42):
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

(09:03):
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,
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