Hammurabi turned a Euphrates town into Babylonia’s name
Babylon sat on the lower Euphrates near modern Hillah, Iraq, about eighty-five kilometres south of Baghdad. First named on a tablet under Shar-Kali-Sharri (2217–2193 BCE) as a modest Akkadian-era town, it exploded when Amorite king Hammurabi built the Old Babylonian Empire in the eighteenth century BCE.
Southern Mesopotamia took the name Babylonia from Hammurabi’s capital. Estimates suggest Babylon was the world’s largest city from about 1770 to 1670 BC and again from roughly 612 to 320 BC, perhaps the first anywhere to pass 200,000 inhabitants, across about 900 hectares. Our picture of it draws on excavation, cuneiform texts from elsewhere in Mesopotamia, the Bible, Herodotus and other classical writers, and second-hand summaries of Ctesias and Berossus, sources that remain patchy and sometimes contradictory even for its sixth-century peak.
Classical lists counted its walls and Hanging Gardens among the Seven Wonders, although Babylonian texts give no clear evidence for the gardens and they may never have existed as described. UNESCO added the site to the World Heritage List in 2019. Thousands visit each year, nearly all of them Iraqis, while spreading local construction threatens to creep onto the ruins.
Babylon is the Latin form of Greek Babylṓn, from Akkadian Bābilim, usually translated gate of the gods. The cuneiform spelling combines signs for gate and god with a marker showing that the word names a place, matching a Sumerian phrase, Kan dig̃irak.
That translation may itself be a folk etymology. Archibald Sayce argued in the 1870s that the Semitic name translated an original Sumerian one, but I. J. Gelb proposed in 1955 that the first name was Babilla, of unknown meaning, noting similar place names in Sumer and no other case of Sumerian names being swapped for Akkadian translations. In his view Babilla became Bāb-ili, and the Sumerian phrase was a later rendering of that popular reading, probably coined under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
Source: Babylon
