Babylonia

Babylonia was the Mesopotamian civilisation of the city of Babylon, enduring as a state and an idea from about 1900 to 539 BC. Amorite chiefs seized a small Euphrates town and made it a capital; under Hammurabi it swallowed Sumer and Akkad into one short-lived empire, and his basalt pillar of laws, an eye for an eye set in stone for all to read, made Babylon the moral centre of the ancient world. The empire fell apart at his death, and for a thousand years Babylon was the prize everyone sacked and nobody could do without: Kassite kings ruled it for four centuries, Assyrians burned and rebuilt it, and the language of its scribes stayed the diplomatic tongue of the whole Near East. The city rose a second time under the Chaldeans: Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt its walls, its hanging gardens and its great ziggurat, and carried the Jews into the captivity that shaped their scriptures. In 539 BC Cyrus the Persian walked through the gates, and native Babylonia ended; but its astronomy, its sixty-minute hour and its stories of the flood outlived every king who claimed its throne.