Babylon

Sumer never really came to an end. The Mesopotamian people passed down the culture and land of Sumeria to their descendants, but the political landscape changed at the end of the third millennium B.C. A man from Akkad, known to history as Sargon the Great, usurped the throne and embarked on a military conquest that would quickly bring most of the major cities of this region under his control. This empire did not outlast him however, and the region returned to a familiar chaos after his death.

A few centuries later, the relatively new city of Babylon became prominent among the urban settlements of Mesopotamia. The empire which grew from this city should not be confused with the biblical empire which conquered Jerusalem and whose emperors persecuted prophets such as Daniel. That later Mesopotamian power is called the Neo-Babylonian Empire in order to distinguish it from this earlier Babylonian kingdom.

This Babylon does bear some relation to sacred Scripture. The man known as Abraham in the book of Genesis was likely a subject of this Empire. The laws and customs which he passed down to his descendants may have been strongly influenced by the laws of Hammurabi, a ruler of Babylon who published a set of laws which bear some resemblance to those codified by Moses a few centuries later when the Hebrews emerged from Egypt.

The gods of Babylon were very similar to those worshipped by the Sumerians. Name changes were more drastic in some cases than others, but the bailiwick of each god generally stayed the same. Marduk was the head of the pantheon in Babylonian beliefs. In the book of the prophet Daniel, he is known by the name Bel. Ishtar, known as Astarte and Inanna in different realms, was the fickle goddess of love, fertility and battle.

The dominion and influence of Babylon remained throughout the centuries from Hammurabi’s reign until Alexander. The latter took the city in the 4^th century before Christ. It continued as an important city of the East but never regained its place as capital of a kingdom or Empire. The Persians has already humbled it into position as merely a city of prominence in the 6^th century B.C. By the time the Muslims arrived in the scene six centuries after Christ, Babylon was a seat of a Christian bishop. In the period of Islamification which followed, Babylon slowly declined and disappeared until its rediscovery by archaeologists in the 19^th century.