Babylon began as an Amorite city-state in 1894 BC
Long after Sumer and Akkad, an Amorite dynasty planted itself at Babylon around 1894 BC. Officials still wrote Akkadian, priests kept Sumerian sacred, and under Hammurabi the town became the cultural capital of southern Mesopotamia—even when later kings spoke other tongues.
Mesopotamia already ran deep: Sumerian civilization from about 5400 BC, Akkadian speakers from the mid-fourth to third millennium, then bilingual fusion until Akkadian largely replaced spoken Sumerian near the third-to-second millennium turn. After Elamites toppled Ur III in 2002 BC, Northwest Semitic Amorites migrated from the Levant and founded small kingdoms across the south. Babylon emerged among them about 1894 BC as an Akkadian-speaking but Amorite-ruled state. Like Assyria, it kept Akkadian for administration even under Amorite founders and later Kassite successors who spoke a language isolate, while Sumerian lingered in cult long after it ceased to be anyone's mother tongue.
Old Assyrian kings briefly projected south—Ilu-shuma (c. 2008–1975 BC) boasted freeing Akkadians from the marshes to Ashur—before Sargon I of Assyria (1920–1881 BC) pulled back toward Anatolian colonies among Hurrians and Hattians. The First Babylonian Dynasty (1894–1595 BC) is the Amorite line that made the city famous. Hammurabi's reign and aftermath turned Babylon into the region's cultural and political magnet, exporting law, literature, and religious prestige far beyond its walls and outlasting the dynasty that first raised it.
What endured was not a single ethnicity but a script-and-temple package. Successive rulers of different speech kept the city's name and Akkadian high culture as the price of ruling the south. Babylonia thus became less a people than a place where Mesopotamian civilization concentrated—and where later empires still needed to be crowned if they wished to claim the land of Akkad.
Source: Babylonia
