A lion striding across a panel of blue and yellow glazed bricks from Babylon
Panel with striding lion, ca. 604–562 BCE
Marked Babylon

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon

Under Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon was rebuilt as the greatest city of its day, with the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate and the temple tower Etemenanki. Its astronomers kept records of the sky for centuries.

Place
Babylon · BorsippaThe Middle East
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe Ishtar Gate
  2. IIThe tower of Babylon
  3. IIIThe Hanging Gardens: real or not?
  4. IVWatching the sky
  5. VCyrus takes the city

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Nebuchadnezzar II
  • Nabonidus
  • Robert Koldewey

Objects

  • The Ishtar Gate
  • Astronomical diaries
  • The Cyrus Cylinder

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

626 BC to 539 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?