Babylon Beyond the Myth: Sennacherib's Flood, Qurna Pirates and Camp Alpha

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Babylon, about 85 kilometers south of modern Baghdad, began in the late 2200s BC as a minor provincial town of the Akkadian Empire. Its famous name, Bab-ilim or Gate of the Gods, is now seen as a folk etymology laid over an older name that may have meant shining or white. In the 18th century BC Hammurabi conquered Larsa, Mari and other rivals, raised the minor god Marduk to supreme status and made southern Mesopotamia into Babylonia. Then came the cycle of ruin and rebirth: a Hittite sack in 1595 BC, four centuries of Kassite rule, and in 689 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib leveling the city and throwing its rubble into the Euphrates. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it on a vast scale with kiln-baked bricks set in bitumen, raising the Ishtar Gate and the Etemenanki ziggurat often linked to the Tower of Babel.

Later turns pile myth on top of mud brick. Herodotus gave the story of Cyrus the Great draining the Euphrates in 539 BC so Persian troops could wade under the walls during a festival, along with claims of 100 bronze gates and burials in honey. Alexander the Great planned to make Babylon his capital and died in Nebuchadnezzar's palace. Medieval builders quarried its bricks, and in 1855 a French shipment of antiquities was sunk by river pirates near Al-Qurna. Robert Koldewey's German excavations from 1899 recovered the Ishtar Gate, now in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, before Saddam Hussein rebuilt palaces on the ruins and a 2003 military base inflicted damage documented by the British Museum.

• Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley argues the Hanging Gardens were real but stood in Nineveh, not Babylon.
• The Babylonian base-60 system still divides hours into minutes and circles into 360 degrees.
• Of the hundreds of crates lost at Al-Qurna in 1855, only about 80 reached France, and a 1970s Japanese diving expedition failed to find the rest.
• Saddam Hussein's 1978 restoration stamped his own name on new bricks beside Nebuchadnezzar's and displaced the village of Kweiresh.
• At Camp Alpha, ground was leveled for a helicopter pad and more than 12 trenches were cut into unexcavated deposits before UNESCO listed the site in 2019.