What was babylon

The Code of Hammurabi, however, is also one of the earliest examples of the idea of an accused being considered innocent until proven guilty. Justice was issued according to the three classes of Babylonian society — those with property, freed men and slaves. For example, if a doctor killed a rich patient, he would have his hands cut off as punishment but if his victim were a slave, only financial restitution was required.

He was followed by a series of Kassite Kings, originating from the Zagros Mountains in the northeast of Babylonia, who ruled peacefully for around years. During this time, the Babylonian language became widely used across the Middle East, and the power of the empire was stabilised. A successful military man, Nebuchadrezzar used the wealth he garnered from other lands to rebuild and glorify Babylon.

Beautification projects were on the agenda as well. The grand Processional Way was paved with limestone, temples were renovated and rebuilt, and the glorious Ishtar Gate was erected. Babylonian citizens saw their city as a paradise—the center of the world and symbol of cosmic harmony that had come into existence when its supreme divinity, the god Marduk, defeated the forces of chaos. No ancient city was so desired and feared, so admired and denigrated. But in the Hebrew tradition, Nebuchadrezzar was a tyrant, and Babylon a torment.

The king had conquered Jerusalem in the early sixth century B. The Bible says that he also stole sacred objects from the Jewish temple and took them back to Babylon to place in the temple of Marduk. In the story, Belshazzar, the successor to the throne, holds a feast served on the sacred vessels looted from Jerusalem. During the festivities a ghostly hand appears, and strange writing appears on the wall, forming the mysterious words: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. The exile Daniel is brought in by the terrified king to interpret the writing on the wall.

The city would be conquered two centuries later by Alexander the Great in Although Alexander had planned to make Babylon the capital of his empire, he died before that came to pass. The great city would eventually be abandoned by his successors, and the splendors of Babylon would pass into the realm of legend. One of the most famous stories about Babylon is that of the Tower of Babel, a story that some biblical scholars believe may be based on a mistranslation, or ingenious pun.

The Book of Genesis tells how the survivors of the Great Flood wanted to build a tower that would reach the heavens, but God smites the builders for their arrogance and disperses them over the Earth, where they are forced to speak many different languages. Ironically, this interpretation was itself a confusing of languages. Archaeologists believe that the tower referenced in the Bible story may be the Etemenanki, a giant ziggurat in Babylon dedicated to Marduk.

When it was surveyed in , the Etemenanki revealed that the tower that supposedly reached right up to the heavens would have been, in reality, nearer feet in height. Another colorful story to come out of the ancient city is that of the fabulous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. There are many theories surrounding the gardens, from their exact location to the identities of their builders. Some suggest the gardens formed a part of the royal palace in Babylon itself, while others believe they were built in another city altogether.

One origin story claims that Nebuchadrezzar had them built for his wife, Amytis. It was made of 14 long rooms with vaulted ceilings laid out in two rows. A complex of wells and channels were found at the site. Was this the infrastructure that supplied the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon? People passing by it in antiquity would see glazed blue and yellow bricks with alternating images of dragons and bulls carved in relief.

A reconstruction of it that incorporates surviving materials is currently in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Vorderasiatisches Museum in Germany. Joachim Marzahn writes in a chapter of "Babylon" that the "amazing Ishtar Gate, composed of an ante-gate in the outer wall and the main gate in the larger inner wall of the city, with a 48 meter-long feet passage, was decorated with no fewer than depictions of animals according to calculations made by excavators ," noting that these "pictures, of bulls and dragons, representing the holy animals of the weather god Adad and the imperial god Marduk, were placed in alternating rows.

In addition, Marzahn writes that a processional way ran through the Ishtar Gate, and for about feet m had images of lions carved in relief. The mouths of the lions are open, baring their teeth, and the manes of the creatures are finely detailed. Every spring the king, his courtiers, priests and statues of the gods traveled along the processional way, traveling to the Akitu Temple to celebrate the New Year festival. Although largely destroyed today, in ancient times the ziggurat of Etemenanki whose name means roughly the "Temple Foundation of Heaven and Earth" would have towered over the city, located just to the north of the Esagil shrine.

Like the shrine, it was dedicated to the god Marduk. The Greek writer Herodotus , who lived in the fifth century B. He says that "in the last tower there is a great shrine; and in it stands a great and well-covered couch, and a golden table nearby.

But no image has been set up in the shrine, nor does any human creature lie there for the night, except one native woman, chosen from all women by the god, as the Chaldaeans say, who are priests of this god. D Godley, through Perseus Digital Library.

Herodotus may have exaggerated its size somewhat with modern-day scholars believing that it rises up seven rather than eight levels. Also Herodotus believed it was dedicated to the god Bel rather than Marduk.

Still, rebuilding the structure would have been an impressive feat and, as some scholars believe, may have inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The story reads in Genesis:. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Genesis , NIV. In , an ancient stele with an image of Nebuchadnezzar II was formally published. In it the king is shown standing beside the ziggurat. The artifact has been given the name "The Tower of Babel Stele. Scholars do not know where the Hanging Gardens were in Babylon, or even if they really existed, but ancient writers described them in detail. The gardens are considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Herodotus ends the anecdote with a characteristically high-spirited punchline. The story of Babylon is the ebb and flow of slaughter and mercy, war and peace, a microcosm of human history. It is a tale of greed, hubris, empire and religious persecution; also of human civilisation, prodigious wealth, architectural glory and religious tolerance. The birth of human civilisation belongs to us all. I visited the site in November , just as Polish troops were preparing to hand it over to the Iraqi authorities.

The late Donny George, then head of the Iraq Museum, had warned me in Baghdad about the terrible damage done to the site by the Polish military.

He was aghast at reports of soldiers filling sandbags with earth containing archaeological fragments; of armoured vehicles crushing sixth-century BC bricks on the Processional Way; of looters gouging out pieces of dragons from the Ishtar Gate; of digging, levelling, compacting and gravelling in this ancient city. Guided by a Polish civilian with a doctorate in the archaeology of death, I walked through the Ishtar Gate in the sandalled footsteps of both Cyrus the Great and Alexander, who took Babylon in BC and BC respectively — Alexander ordered the famous ziggurat to be levelled and died before it could be reconstructed.

The gaudy gate is a replica of the original, carted off by German archaeologists in , together with most of the lions in relief that once decorated the walls of the Processional Way and now stand in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. A colony of pigeons landed among the high-walled ruins to rest in the sun and shit all over history. It was easy to be despondent. While wars routinely shape history, dispose of old powers and bring new ones to the fore, in Babylon war seemed not to have shaped history so much as to have erased it altogether.