Babylon developed on the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, with settlement attested by the third millennium BCE and political prominence in the early second millennium. King Hammurabi made it the capital of an empire in the eighteenth century BCE and became famous for a law collection carved on a stele found far from the city. Babylon endured conquest and revival under different dynasties. Its temples, scribal traditions, administration, mathematics, astronomy, and literary reputation made the city influential long before its best-known monumental phase.

The Neo-Babylonian kings, especially Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, rebuilt Babylon as an imperial capital between 626 and 539 BCE. Double walls, palaces, temples, processional routes, and the Ishtar Gate organized a vast urban landscape. The ziggurat Etemenanki and temple of Marduk helped inspire later traditions about the Tower of Babel. Classical writers associated Babylon with Hanging Gardens, but their precise existence and location remain disputed. The excavated evidence supports a magnificent city without resolving every famous literary description.

Cyrus the Great captured Babylon in 539 BCE and incorporated it into the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great entered the city in 331 BCE and died there in 323. Political focus later shifted, buildings decayed, and communities moved within or around the former capital. Mudbrick architecture eroded rapidly when unmaintained, leaving low mounds rather than intact palaces. Medieval and modern villages, farming, canals, brick robbing, and changing river courses became part of the landscape that preserved and damaged ancient levels.

Robert Koldewey led major German excavations from 1899 to 1917, exposing the Ishtar Gate, Processional Way, palaces, and temples. Many glazed bricks and other finds went to Berlin, where museum displays reconstruct selected facades. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s government built high conjectural walls and palaces over ancient foundations, often using modern bricks stamped with his name. A coalition military base at the site after 2003 caused further disturbance. These interventions complicate authenticity and must not be mistaken for Neo-Babylonian fabric.

UNESCO inscribed Babylon in 2019 while emphasizing both its extraordinary importance and critical conservation needs. Approximately eighty-five percent of the property remains unexcavated, making protection of buried archaeology as important as display of exposed monuments. Visitors encounter original mudbrick foundations, ancient surfaces, archaeological trenches, modern reconstructions, and later political architecture in close proximity. Babylon is authentic as a site, plan, and repository of evidence, but many above-ground forms are modern. Responsible interpretation clearly identifies conjecture and preserves unresolved areas for future research.