Babylon
An unremarkable town becomes the name for Mesopotamian civilisation itself.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 299 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Babylon is a minor place until an Amorite dynasty takes power there around 1894 BCE and Hammurabi makes it the capital of southern Mesopotamia. It remains culturally central for over a thousand years afterwards, through Kassite, Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rule, as a religious and scholarly capital whose scribes copy and preserve the older Sumerian and Akkadian tradition. Its name becomes a byword in two directions — for learning, and for corruption.