Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon
Babylon becomes the largest city in the world, walled in glazed blue brick.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 87 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Nebuchadnezzar II rules from 605 BCE and rebuilds Babylon on a monumental scale — the Ishtar Gate faced in glazed blue brick with moulded dragons and bulls, the Processional Way, a ziggurat rebuilt to seven stages, and walls so thick that Herodotus claimed chariots could pass on top. The Hanging Gardens are attributed to him by later Greek writers but appear in no Babylonian source and may have been at Nineveh instead.