Babylon

Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, and the damage done since

Babylon stood on the lower Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Hillah, about 85 km south of Baghdad. The earliest known mention of it, as a small town, is on a clay tablet from the reign of the Akkadian king Shar-Kali-Sharri in the 23rd century BC. The Amorite king Hammurabi built it into a major city in the 18th century BC, and southern Mesopotamia became known as Babylonia. It was perhaps the first city to pass 200,000 people, and it may have been the largest in the world twice, around 1770 to 1670 BC and again from about 612 to 320 BC. The name is the Greek form of the Akkadian Bābilim, gate of the gods, though that reading is increasingly seen as a folk etymology for an older name of unknown meaning.

Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 562 BC, built in baked brick on a new scale, raising the ziggurat Etemenanki and the Ishtar Gate, the most prominent of eight gates around the city. The walls and the Hanging Gardens, said to have been built for his homesick wife Amytis, were both ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, though no surviving Babylonian text mentions the gardens and some scholars doubt they existed. In 539 BC the city fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia, and in 331 BC Alexander the Great had the ziggurat demolished. The last known habitation, in the 11th century AD, was the small village of Babel.

Robert Koldewey's German team excavated daily from 1899 to 1917, and pieces of the Ishtar Gate went to Berlin, where a reconstruction stands in the Pergamon Museum. From 1978 Saddam Hussein rebuilt the Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar on top of the mud-brick ruins, some of the bricks inscribed to glorify him. After the 2003 invasion US forces built Camp Alpha, with a helipad, on the site; their vehicles crushed ancient pavements, and sandbags were filled with material that included archaeological fragments.

UNESCO listed Babylon in 2019. It reopened to visitors in 2009, and the local tourist board's best recent year was 2017, when more than 35,000 Iraqis came. A Baghdad company called Bil Weekend runs weekend bus tours with picnics and a musician, and its groups walk the reconstructed halls, picnic beside the Euphrates and have their names inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets. A visitor who had seen the original gate in Berlin told NPR it made him sad to travel abroad to see his own history.