Babylon
The great city of Mesopotamia whose kings gave the world written law, and whose priests charted the sky in clay.
c. 1894 BCE – 539 BCE
Southern Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in modern Iraq
Economy
The Babylonian economy rested on intensive irrigation agriculture in the alluvial plain, producing barley, dates, wool, and sesame oil managed by palace and temple institutions. Silver by weight, measured in shekels and minas, served as money, and cuneiform contracts recorded loans, interest, leases, and partnerships in remarkable detail. Great temple estates and, in the Neo-Babylonian period, entrepreneurial firms like the Egibi and Murašû families financed trade and tax-farming across the empire.
Law
Babylon's enduring gift to legal history is the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE), inscribed on a basalt stele and containing some 282 case-based rulings on property, family, commerce, and injury. Its famous principle of lex talionis—'an eye for an eye'—applied graded penalties by social class of free man, commoner, and slave, and set fixed fees and liabilities for professions. Justice was administered by royal officials and city assemblies, with oaths before the gods and river ordeals used to resolve doubtful cases.
Education
Scribal training took place in the school called the edubba, the 'tablet house', where students copied sign lists, proverbs, and literary classics onto clay tablets to master the intricate cuneiform script. The curriculum embraced Sumerian and Akkadian, mathematics on a sexagesimal (base-60) system, and the copying of works like the Epic of Gilgamesh, preserving a millennia-old literary heritage. Educated scribes became administrators, accountants, priests, and astronomers, and great libraries such as Ashurbanipal's at Nineveh gathered thousands of tablets.
Army
Old Babylonian armies under Hammurabi combined conscripted infantry with spearmen, archers, and siege methods to unify Mesopotamia through campaign and diplomacy. Warfare shifted over the centuries with the coming of the horse and chariot and, later, iron weapons popularised by the Assyrians whom Babylon eventually overthrew. Under Nebuchadnezzar II the Neo-Babylonian army fielded cavalry, chariots, and engineers who reduced fortified cities, most famously capturing Jerusalem in 587 BCE and deporting its population.
Religion
Babylonian religion was polytheistic, centred on the city-god Marduk, whose supremacy is proclaimed in the creation epic Enuma Elish, alongside Ishtar, Shamash, Sin, and the underworld gods. Worship centred on temples staffed by priestly hierarchies who performed daily offerings, festivals like the New Year Akitu, and divination through omens, liver-reading, and the stars. The cosmos was seen as governed by divine will discernible through signs, making the boundary between religion, astrology, and astronomy porous.
Architecture
Lacking stone, Mesopotamian builders worked in sun-dried and kiln-fired mud brick, raising the stepped temple-towers called ziggurats such as the Etemenanki dedicated to Marduk, the likely inspiration for the Tower of Babel. Under Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon was rebuilt on a monumental scale with the glazed blue Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way lined with lions, and the legendary Hanging Gardens counted among the wonders of the ancient world. Cities were walled, laid out around temple and palace precincts, and their monuments proclaimed royal piety and power.
Trade
Situated on the Euphrates at the crossroads of routes linking the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and the Iranian plateau, Babylon was a natural entrepôt for long-distance trade. Merchants imported timber, metals, and stone that the alluvium lacked—copper from Oman, cedar from Lebanon, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan—in exchange for grain, textiles, and dates. Commerce was documented on clay tablets and increasingly financed by silver credit and private banking houses, especially under the prosperous Neo-Babylonian kings.
Technology
Babylon's most celebrated achievements lay in mathematics and astronomy: a sexagesimal place-value system, tables of squares and reciprocals, and methods that anticipated the Pythagorean relation on the tablet Plimpton 322. Astronomer-priests kept centuries of dated observations, discovered the cycles of eclipses and planets, and developed mathematical astronomy capable of predicting celestial events. Practical technology included the arch, sophisticated canal and levee irrigation, the potter's wheel, and metallurgy in bronze and later iron.