Babylon

Babylon was the city the ancient world measured itself against. Founded around 1894 BCE on the Euphrates, it became the heart of Mesopotamia twice over: first under Hammurabi, whose law code fixed Babylon as the seat of order in the eighteenth century BCE, and again a thousand years later under Nebuchadnezzar II, who rebuilt it as the largest and most splendid city on earth — blue-glazed walls, a ziggurat the Hebrews remembered as Babel, processional avenues, and gardens later counted among the Seven Wonders. To its neighbours, Babylon was less a place than the definition of a city.

Its fall was almost an anticlimax. In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia diverted the Euphrates and entered Babylon with barely a fight; the greatest city in the world changed owners in a night and never ruled itself again. It lived on for centuries as a Persian, then Greek, then Parthian provincial town, shrinking as Seleucia and other new capitals drew off its people. The cuneiform that had recorded four thousand years of Mesopotamian life was last written around 35 BCE; the city was empty mounds within a few centuries more. What outlived the place was the idea of it — Babel, the Whore of Babylon, the gardens no one can find — a metaphor for greatness and corruption that has comfortably outlasted every brick.