Neo-Babylonian

Babylon's last great age begins in 626 BCE, when an Aramean general named Nabopolassar takes the throne and declares independence from a weakening Assyria. Within fifteen years he and his allies will have destroyed the Assyrian empire entirely. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigns from 605 to 562 BCE, presides over what later tradition will remember as the most splendid version of Babylon ever to exist.

Nebuchadnezzar rebuilds the city on a colossal scale. The Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed brilliant-blue bricks and adorned with lions, dragons, and bulls in relief, opens onto the Processional Way leading to the temple of Marduk. The temple itself — Esagila — and its ziggurat — Etemenanki, "the house, foundation of heaven and earth" — are rebuilt to their greatest extent. The hanging gardens, if they ever existed in Babylon at all (some scholars place them at Nineveh under Sennacherib instead), belong to this image of imperial grandeur.

The empire's politics are vast. Nebuchadnezzar campaigns repeatedly in the west, putting down rebellions among the small kingdoms of the Levant. In 597 and 587 BCE he besieges and takes Jerusalem; he destroys the First Temple of Solomon and deports the Judean elite to Babylon. The Hebrew Bible records this as the great trauma of Jewish history; Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions barely mention it among many other campaigns. Both accounts are true; they are not the same story.

Babylonian intellectual life in this period reaches a kind of zenith in astronomy. Babylonian astronomers, working in cuneiform on clay, accumulate centuries of observational records of planetary positions. They develop methods for predicting eclipses, lunar phases, and planetary motion that will not be surpassed in mathematical sophistication until Hellenistic times. The diaries that record these observations continue, with brief gaps, for over five hundred years.

After Nebuchadnezzar, the dynasty stutters. A series of short reigns ends with Nabonidus (556–539 BCE), an eccentric king who spends a decade campaigning in the Arabian oasis of Tayma, neglects the cult of Marduk at Babylon, and elevates the moon-god Sin to unprecedented prominence. The Babylonian priesthood and the merchant class turn against him.

In 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great enters Babylon, the gates opened for him by the city itself. He proclaims himself the chosen of Marduk, restores the cults, and frees the deported peoples — including the Judeans, who will return to rebuild their temple. The Cyrus Cylinder, in which Cyrus tells this story in Akkadian on clay, becomes one of the most famous Mesopotamian tablets ever found.

Babylon as a centre of culture continues, under Persian rule, for centuries more. But Babylon as an independent kingdom ends here. The tablets of this period are the last great civic record of native Mesopotamian rule.