Where is Babylon today?

The ruins on the Euphrates

Babylon stood on the Euphrates, in the flat land between the two great rivers of Mesopotamia. Its exiles remembered the water.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

Today the site spreads over a field of mounds beside Hillah, in Iraq’s Babil province. The northernmost mound is still called Babil, keeping the city’s name. The Babylonians said Bab-ili, “gate of the god”; the Hebrew form is Babel, which is why the tower story of Genesis 11 belongs here. Its likely model was Etemenanki, the city’s stepped ziggurat of mud brick, about 90 meters square at the base. Little of it survives above ground.

Daniel’s road and Nebuchadnezzar’s city

Daniel was taken there as a youth, in the years after 605 BC. The captives did not cross the desert. They went around it, along the Fertile Crescent: north past Damascus, up to the Euphrates, then down the river, more than 1,300 kilometers in all. When Ezra later made the journey the other way, it took him four months (Ezra 7:9).

The city Daniel saw was the work of Nebuchadnezzar II, king from 605 to 562 BC: double walls, palaces, and the Ishtar Gate, glazed blue and paraded with dragons and bulls. The book of Daniel gives him the boast of his life, just before his fall: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for the royal dwelling place by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30). Many bricks from his buildings still carry his stamped name.

How a capital became a mound

Babylon fell to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC, the night the book of Daniel ties to the writing on the wall. It stayed a great city for two more centuries. Alexander the Great made it his capital, ordered its crumbling tower pulled down for rebuilding, and died in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in 323 BC. After him, new capitals rose elsewhere and Babylon slowly emptied. By the 10th century AD, Arab geographers described Babil as a small village, and its baked bricks had long been carted off to build houses nearby.

Digging, rebuilding and protecting

German archaeologists led by Robert Koldewey dug at Babylon from 1899 to 1917. Pieces of the Ishtar Gate went to Berlin, where the gate was rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum. In 1978 Saddam Hussein began rebuilding Nebuchadnezzar’s palace on top of the ruins, with new bricks stamped with his own name. After the 2003 invasion, coalition forces set up a military base on the site, and their vehicles and trenches damaged ancient pavements. In July 2019 UNESCO listed Babylon as a World Heritage Site. Most of its visitors are Iraqis.

The other Babylon

Some readers are looking for a different Babylon. In the New Testament the name is often a code. A letter in Peter’s name sends greetings from “she who is in Babylon” (1 Peter 5:13), and the “Babylon the great” of Revelation sits on seven mountains (Revelation 17:9). After Rome destroyed the Second Temple in AD 70, Jewish and Christian writers called Rome Babylon, after the empire that destroyed the first. That Babylon is in Italy; see how Peter died.