Who ruled Babylon?

Babylon stood on the lower Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, within what is now Hillah in Iraq, about 85 kilometres south of Baghdad. For much of antiquity it was the political and religious heart of Babylonia, the capital of two great empires and later a seat of Persian government. By some estimates it was twice the largest city in the world, and its name has lived on in the Bible and in Western imagination long after the city itself disappeared.

Babylon is first reliably mentioned in the late third millennium BCE, in a year name of the Akkadian king Shar-Kali-Sharri recording the building of two temples there. At that time it was a minor town under an imperial governor, and it remained so under the Third Dynasty of Ur. Later Greek writers placed its founding in the twenty-third century BCE, but no cuneiform record supports their dates.

Amorite chieftains made Babylon an independent city-state in the nineteenth or eighteenth century BCE. The most famous of them, Hammurabi, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 BCE, conquered the cities of southern Mesopotamia one by one and ruled them all from Babylon, issuing his famous code of laws. From then on the south was called Babylonia, and Babylon replaced Nippur as its holy city, with Marduk as its god. Estimates suggest it was the largest city on earth for about a century from around 1770 BCE.

Hammurabi's realm shrank under his successors. Around 1595 BCE the Hittite king Mursili I raided and sacked Babylon, and a Kassite dynasty then ruled the city for some 435 years, until about 1160 BCE. In the following centuries Babylon was usually weak, squeezed between Assyria and Elam and infiltrated by Aramean and Chaldean settlers.

Under the Neo-Assyrian Empire Babylonia rebelled again and again. In 689 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib destroyed the city, razing its walls, temples and palaces. His son Esarhaddon rebuilt it, but in 652 BCE Shamash-shum-ukin, the Assyrian prince who governed Babylon, rose against his brother Ashurbanipal, and the city was besieged and starved into surrender.

Nabopolassar threw off Assyrian rule from 626 BCE and, allied with the Medes, helped to destroy the Assyrian Empire. Babylon became the capital of the Neo-Babylonian, or Chaldean, Empire. His son Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt the city on a grand scale, including the Etemenanki ziggurat and the Ishtar Gate, whose reconstruction now stands in Berlin. Tradition credits him with the Hanging Gardens, but whether they existed is disputed, and one scholar, Stephanie Dalley, has argued that they were really at Nineveh. According to the Hebrew Bible, Nebuchadnezzar also destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and carried the Jews into exile in Babylon, a defeat also recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles. The biblical tale of the Tower of Babel is set in the same city, but belongs to legend rather than history.

In 539 BCE Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon, an event known as the Fall of Babylon; Herodotus later told how the Persians lowered the Euphrates to enter the city. Under the Achaemenid kings it was a major administrative capital and a centre of astronomy, despite several short-lived revolts. Alexander the Great entered Babylon in 331 BCE and died there, in Nebuchadnezzar's palace, in 323 BCE. Under the Seleucids the city declined but remained active.

The Parthian and Sasanian empires then held the region for centuries, interrupted only by the Roman emperor Trajan's brief conquest in 116 CE. Aramaic-speaking communities, including Jews and Christians, continued to live there, and the Church of the East kept a bishop in the town. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century Babylon shrank to a village; the last known habitation dates from the eleventh century.

Claudius Rich examined the ruins in 1811 and 1817, and a German team led by Robert Koldewey excavated systematically from 1899 to 1917. From 1978 Saddam Hussein's government rebuilt parts of the city on top of the ruins, stamping his own name on new bricks. After the 2003 invasion, US and later Polish troops used the site as a military base; a British Museum report described serious damage, including to the Ishtar Gate. The site was returned to Iraqi control in 2005, reopened to visitors in 2009 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.