Babylon

Babylon lies on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, a vast field of mounds that was once the greatest city of Mesopotamia. It rose under Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE and reached its height under Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth, when it was rebuilt with palaces, temples, a great ziggurat and walls of glazed brick. UNESCO inscribed Babylon in 2019.

In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus the Great entered the city, ending the Neo-Babylonian kingdom. A clay cylinder found at Babylon, now known as the Cyrus Cylinder and kept in the British Museum, records his account of the conquest, presenting him as a restorer of the city's gods and temples who allowed deported peoples to return home. Babylon remained a major city of the Achaemenid empire, and in 323 BCE Alexander of Macedon died there.

What visitors see today is partly ancient and partly modern. The Ishtar Gate, faced with blue glazed brick and figures of bulls and dragons, was excavated by German archaeologists and reconstructed in Berlin; at the site stands a replica. In the lower courses of the gate's foundations, unglazed brick reliefs of bulls and dragons can still be seen in place. In the 1980s parts of Nebuchadnezzar's palace were rebuilt on the old foundations, a reconstruction that archaeologists have criticised.