Babylonia

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Babylonia is the ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia, named for its chief city, Babylon, on the Euphrates in what is now central Iraq. It rose to prominence in the early second millennium BCE — the reign of Hammurabi, who unified the region under his law code, is conventionally dated to the eighteenth century BCE — and the name came to stand for the whole settled culture of the lower Tigris-Euphrates plain, heir to the older Sumerian world and writing in Akkadian on clay in cuneiform script.

Its political history is a long sequence of rise, conquest, and revival. The Old Babylonian state of Hammurabi gave way to centuries of foreign rule and fragmentation; a Neo-Babylonian empire flowered briefly in the sixth century BCE under Nebuchadnezzar II, who rebuilt the city on a monumental scale and, in the biblical account, carried Judah into exile. In 539 BCE Babylon fell to Cyrus of Persia, passing into the Achaemenid empire and later to Alexander’s successors; the city declined slowly through the Hellenistic centuries, though its temple scholars kept working almost to the end.

What the wider world inherited from Babylonia was, above all, the science of the sky. Its scribes compiled systematic records of celestial events over centuries, developing mathematical methods to predict the movements of the moon and planets that were genuinely sophisticated, and from the same records grew the practice of reading those movements as signs — omens bearing on the king and the land. Out of this came, in the later first millennium BCE, the personal horoscope: the claim that the configuration of the heavens at a birth shapes a life. The Greeks who encountered this learning called its practitioners Chaldeans, after the people who had ruled the late Babylonian state, and the word became a byword for astrologer and, eventually, for occult wisdom in general.

That reputation traveled far beyond anything the Babylonian scribes would have recognized. By late antiquity “Chaldean” named a whole imagined tradition of ancient Eastern knowledge; the second-century Chaldean Oracles, a Greek theurgic text, borrowed the prestige of the name without much Babylonian content, and later esotericism — from the Hellenistic astrologers to the Renaissance recovery of “ancient theology” — kept invoking Babylon as a wellspring of secret learning. Scholarship distinguishes carefully between the two: the real and considerable achievement of Mesopotamian celestial science, recoverable from the tablets, and the legend of Chaldean magic that grew up around its memory. The city itself became a symbol long before it became a ruin — the Bible’s Babylon of pride and confusion, set against the Babylon whose astronomers were the most patient observers of their age.

→ In the library: Cory — Ancient Fragments (1832; incl. Berossus and the Chaldean Oracles)

→ Related: Mesopotamia · Achaemenid Empire · Divination · Neoplatonism