The Rise & Fall of Babylon
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What made Babylon the world’s first true megacity?
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According to the weeping prophet Jeremiah, this is a catastrophe, divine punishment sent by God for the sins of the Judeans. From this trauma, biblical writers forged an enduring myth Babylon, home of Nebuchadnezzar, as the ultimate city of sin, a cursed place, a caricature of human arrogance. decades. Decadence. Decay. But beneath that mist. lies a far grander reality. The tale of history's first true megacity. It's got a bad press. Babylon was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis of dazzling blue-glazed brick, of mighty canals carved through the desert, soaring temples that rivaled the engineering feats of empires that came many centuries after it. This is Babylon. The ancient blueprint. For the modern world.
Joining us today is Lloyd Clewellin-Jones, professor in ancient history at Cardiff University. He's author of Babylon, the Mother of All Cities. And he's gonna help me strip away centuries of myth and tell us about this real, gritty, vibrant, important story of Babylon and its rulers. Enjoy. Lloyd, thank you very much for coming on.
You're very welcome. It's good to be here.
Uh first I think geography do we need to get geography sorted out first? Where
is this place? Babylon. Right in the centre of modern day Iraq. So it's about fifty miles north of Baghdad, essentially.
And is is that Mesopotam uh uh what are what are some of the terms that we'll have heard? Yeah,
so you will have heard of Mesopotamia, a Greek term meaning between the rivers. Right. So the rivers of course are the Euphrates and the Tigris. Huge rivers. Enormous with this huge floodplain in between. And Babylon is actually built on the edge of the Euphrates. In fact, the Euphrates ran through the city centre. So there's kind of like an island of Babylon as well. Yeah. And the whole landscape was um littered with canals. So it's like a kind of spaghetti junction of ancient world. The other thing you'll hear is Fertile Crescent. That's another thing as well. So that talks about this huge swathe of land which went from the coast of Syria and the Levant right the way down through Iraq to the Persian Gulf, which was made fertile because of these great two rivers.
And so wonderful soil, benign climate.
Yeah, harsh harsh desert climate. But as long as you're close to the water, it's manageable.
Yeah.
The rivers are a bit of a nightmare, they move around
at
They do tame snakes. Absolutely, they really do. And that's why I think the the Babylonians try to kind of tame the rivers by seeing them as deities. If you think of like the way the Ganges is for many Hindus today. So the Babylonians thought the same thing about the Tigris and Euphrates. So they offered to it, they personalized it, they prayed that it will do its job and not harm them, is one of the things you get. But the other thing that the Tigris and Euphrates Gave to Babylonia is mud. And mud was essential for everything. The whole of Babylon was built on mud bricks essentially. And of course, even the writing tablets in which they wrote their cuneiform documents was mud as well. So I think you know, the kind of the gift if we think about the gift of the Nile was supposed to be grain, the gift of the Euphrates was definitely mud, and the uh and the Babylonians utilized it.
One of the best things I could do.
And really nice. So the mud's all the the river floods a bit l mud, the minute you put it in the sun it bakes hard as rock.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What made Babylon the world’s first true megacity?
0:00–9:06
2
How did the Euphrates and Tigris shape Babylon’s geography and economy?
9:06–18:50
3
Why were mud bricks and cuneiform tablets so crucial to Babylonian daily life?
18:50–29:03
4
How did early Mesopotamian city‑states evolve into the rise of Babylon?
29:03–45:46
5
What was Hammurabi’s law code and why is it still significant today?
45:46–51:07