Babyloniens

Babyloniens is a term used to describe the inhabitants and the cultural-political entities centered on the city of Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Emerging from Akkadian-speaking populations in the early second millennium BCE, Babylonia became prominent under Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750 BCE), whose legal code and administrative reforms helped consolidate an Old Babylonian state.

The term also covers later periods, most notably the Neo-Babylonian Empire (7th–6th centuries BCE) under rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar II, who expanded the city and sponsored major building projects. Babylonian society was urban and bureaucratic, organized around temple institutions, royal administration, and irrigation-based agriculture that supported trade and craft production.

Babylonian culture is noted for achievements in law, mathematics, astronomy and literature. The Code of Hammurabi is an early and influential legal text; Babylonian scribes used cuneiform to record economic transactions, myths and epics, including versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They developed a sexagesimal (base-60) number system that underpins modern measures of time and angles.

Religion centered on a Mesopotamian pantheon with Marduk as Babylon’s chief deity; monumental architecture included ziggurats and grand gates. Babylon fell to the Persian Achaemenid Empire in 539 BCE and later passed through Hellenistic and subsequent periods. Archaeological remains and textual records have made Babylonian civilization a key source for the study of ancient Near Eastern history and science.