Babylon

The endonym for the city, in the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian that was the language of its scribes. The name is written almost always with the Sumerian logogram KÁ.DINGIR.RA(KI), “gate of god,” which Akkadian read in its own words as Bābilu, Bāb-ilim, “gate of the god.” Whether that reading preserves the city’s original sense or is an Akkadian folk-etymology overlaid on an older, pre-Babylonian name is debated, and no certain earlier form survives. The city is named in Akkadian texts from the Sargonic period, when it was still a small town, through the Old Babylonian rise under Hammurabi, the Kassite centuries, and the Neo-Babylonian empire, down to the latest cuneiform tablets of the Hellenistic age.

Bābilu is the headwater of nearly every other name on this page, and it carries a small philological irony at its source: the Babylonians wrote their city’s name in Sumerian signs meaning “gate of god,” then read those signs in their own Semitic language as a phrase of the same meaning, so that writing and speech agree on a sense the name may never originally have had. From this one city-name the word radiated outward into Hebrew Bābel, Aramaic and Arabic Bābel and Bābil, Old Persian Bābiruš, and the Greek Babylṓn that carried the city to the western world, where it became, in its territorial form Babylōnía, the name of the whole land as well.

The Sumerian name for the city, KÁ.DINGIR.RA(KI), “gate of god,” written with the signs ká (gate), dingir (god), and the genitive -ra, closed by the place-determinative ki. It is the writing from which the Akkadian Bābilu takes both its shape and its sense: one logogram, read by Sumerian scribes as Kadingirra and by Akkadian scribes as Bāb-ilim, two languages pronouncing the same signs in their own words for the same idea. Babylon appears under this writing in Sumerian administrative and royal texts from the late third millennium and the Ur III period, when it was still a minor town long before its rise under the Amorite kings.

The Sumerian form makes visible what the Akkadian only implies, that the city’s written name was from the start a logographic compound any literate Mesopotamian could read aloud in their own language. Kadingirra is the same name as Bābilu and not the same word: the original behind the translation that the rest of this page descends from.

The Hebrew name for the city, Bābel, the reflex of Akkadian Bābilu in the language of the Hebrew Bible. It is at once a place and a parable: the city of the Tower in Genesis 11, the imperial capital that destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah into exile in Kings and Jeremiah, and the river of mourning in Psalm 137. The narrative of the Tower derives the name not from the Akkadian “gate of god” but from the Hebrew verb bālal, “to confound,” explaining Bābel as the place where the LORD confused the speech of all the earth, a folk-etymology that inverts the city’s own proud sense into a byword for confusion.

This is the entry where the city’s name does the most narrative work. The same consonants that the Babylonians glossed as “gate of god” the Hebrew writers heard as “confusion,” so that the etymology itself becomes a polemic, the conqueror’s exalted self-naming turned, by a pun, into the monument of human overreach. No other form on this page carries so much freight: Bābel is both a dot on the Euphrates and the archetype of the proud city that God brings low.

The Aramaic name for the city, written bbl in the unvocalized consonantal script and pronounced Bābel. Aramaic was the administrative lingua franca of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires that ruled from and over Babylon, and the city is named in the Aramaic of the book of Daniel, set in Nebuchadnezzar’s court, and in the documentary Aramaic of the period. The form is the same word as the Hebrew Bābel, carried in the related Northwest Semitic idiom that served as the working language of the chancellery.

Aramaic is the hinge of the western transmission of the name. Standing between the Akkadian original and the later Syriac and Arabic forms, it is the channel through which Bābel passed from the cuneiform world into the alphabetic one, the administrative tongue in which the city’s name was written, day to day, by the empires that the city anchored.

The Elamite name for the city, Babili, the Achaemenid chancellery’s rendering in the third of the empire’s three official languages. Where Old Persian shifted the Semitic l to r, Elamite kept the original Babili, close to the Akkadian Bābilu from which it was taken; it appears in the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription and in the administrative tablets of the Persepolis archive. Elamite scribes, working in adapted Mesopotamian cuneiform, transmitted the Mesopotamian name with little change.

The Elamite form is the conservative member of the trilingual set: beside the Persianized Bābiruš, Babili preserves the city’s name almost as the Babylonians themselves said it. It is a reminder that the Achaemenid chancellery named one place three times, and that the three names were not equally far from the source.

The Old Persian name for the city, Bābiruš, with the characteristic Iranian shift of the Semitic l to r. It names both the city and the satrapy that Darius governed from it, and it appears in the Behistun inscription’s roll of the lands and in the king’s account of putting down the Babylonian rebels Nidintu-Bēl and Arakha, who each claimed the throne as “Nebuchadnezzar.” The form belongs to the Achaemenid trilingual chancellery, where the same place is named in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian in parallel.

Bābiruš shows the city’s name passing into an Indo-European mouth, where the Semitic liquid l has hardened to r, a substitution typical of Old Persian renderings of foreign names. Among the trilingual satrapy-names of the empire, this is the one that captures a great Mesopotamian city in Persian sounds, the conqueror naming, in his own phonology, the capital he had taken.

The Greek name for the city, Babylṓn, a third-declension noun (genitive Babylṓnos) adapted from the Semitic Bābel or its Aramaic intermediary. Herodotus gives the fullest classical description of the place under this name, its great square plan, its walls wide enough for a chariot, its temple of Bēl, whether from autopsy or report; Strabo and the later geographers follow him. By the time these authors wrote, the city was already in decline, and the Greek Babylṓn preserved in literature a grandeur the streets no longer matched.

From this city-name Greek built the territorial Babylōnía, “the land of Babylon,” and the pair is the structural hinge of this page: the city kept the bare name Babylṓn, while the country took the derived form, and it is the country-form, through Latin, that English inherited for the kingdom even as Babylon stayed the name of the city. One Greek word thus founded two English names, splitting along the seam between a place and the land around it.

The Latin name for the city, Babylōn (genitive Babylōnis), taken directly from the Greek Babylṓn and keeping its third-declension shape. Pliny places it in his survey of Mesopotamia; Jerome’s Vulgate carries it through the Tower narrative of Genesis, the Babylonian captivity, and the apocalyptic “Babylon the great” of Revelation, by which the city’s name became, in the Latin West, a cipher for Rome and for every worldly empire. Through this Latin form the city entered the languages of medieval and modern Europe.

Latin took the city-name Babylōn and the land-name Babylōnia as a matched pair from Greek, and passed both westward; English keeps the distinction to this day, Babylon for the city and Babylonia for the kingdom. The Latin entry is the bridge by which a Mesopotamian city-name, already filtered through Greek, reached the modern world with both of its faces intact.

The Syriac name for the city, Bābel, the Aramaic Bbl continued in the dialect of the Syriac churches and written in their alphabet. It renders the city throughout the Peshitta, in the Tower narrative, the Babylonian exile, and the Psalms, and it remained a living name in Syriac Christianity, whose heartland in Mesopotamia lay near the old city. As a dialect of Aramaic, Syriac inherited the form by direct descent rather than fresh borrowing.

Syriac is the eastern Christian continuation of the Aramaic Bābel, and the immediate source from which Arabic took its Bābil. It marks the point where the city’s name, having crossed from cuneiform into the Aramaic alphabet centuries before, settled into the liturgical language of the communities that still lived in the city’s shadow.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Bavel, the form that runs through the Talmud, where it names both the city and the land around it; the spelling continues the ancient Bābel unchanged, the soft v of the Aramaic pronunciation the only difference from the older form. It is the name of the place where the Talmud itself was compiled.

Bavel is the most self-referential name in this language, for the Talmud made in this city is called, after it, the Bavli, “the Babylonian.” No other entry in the atlas is named in the very tongue of its own great book. The rabbis’ relation to Bavel was layered, the land of exile that was also home, the rival of the Land of Israel whose academies they nonetheless held to be its equal in learning; the city of the tower and the captivity had become, for them, the second center of the Jewish world.

The Middle Persian name for the city, Bābel, written in the Manichaean script in the religious texts of Mani and his church. Mani was born in the land of Babylon in the third century CE and described himself as coming “from the land of Bābel,” and the Manichaean Middle Persian writings preserve the Semitic Bābel unchanged rather than the Persianized Bābiruš of the older Achaemenid chancellery. The form names the city and the alluvial country around it where the Manichaean community first took root.

This is the later Iranian name, and it departs from its Achaemenid predecessor: where Old Persian had remade the city as Bābiruš, Manichaean Middle Persian simply kept Bābel, the Semitic form current in the Mesopotamia where the religion was born. Between the two Iranian entries on this page lies most of a millennium, and the city’s name had, in the interval, shed its Persian disguise.

The Parthian name for the city, Bābel, attested in the Manichaean texts that the church produced in Parthian alongside Middle Persian. Like its Middle Persian counterpart it keeps the Semitic Bābel of the Mesopotamian homeland rather than any older Iranian remodelling, and the two forms are written identically in the shared Manichaean script. It names the city and its region in the literature of a religion that arose on Babylonian soil.

The Parthian entry is the twin of the Middle Persian, the same Semitic name carried in the second of the two Iranian languages of the Manichaean mission. Together they show the late Iranian world receiving the city’s name not through its own imperial past but through the living speech of Mesopotamia, where the city, though fallen, had given its name to the land that grew the faith.

The Geʿez name for the city, Bābilon, carried in the Ethiopic Old Testament through the Tower narrative and the Psalms of exile. Unlike the Semitic cousins to its north, which kept the bare Bābel or Bābil, the Ethiopic form ends in -on, taken over from the Greek Babylṓn of the Septuagint that the Ethiopic scriptures were translated from. The name belongs to the same biblical episodes as the Hebrew and Syriac forms but reached Ethiopia along a Greek road.

The Geʿez Bābilon is the southern outlier of the family, a Semitic language that received a Semitic city-name in its Greek dress. It shows how a single place could be named twice over within one language community, the underlying word inherited from the Semitic stock but the actual shape on the page borrowed, through translation, from the Greeks.

The Arabic name for the city, Bābil, continuing the Aramaic and Syriac Bābel. By the time it is well attested, the city itself was long gone: the Qurʾān names Bābil as the place where the angels Hārūt and Mārūt taught sorcery, and the geographer Yāqūt, writing in the thirteenth century, describes Bābil as a district of ruined mounds south of Baghdad, the wreckage of a famous ancient city. The name had outlived the place it named by more than a thousand years.

Bābil is the last form in the western chain that runs Akkadian, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and the only one to denote, from the start, a ruin rather than a living city. Where the Greek and Latin preserved Babylon’s grandeur in literature, the Arabic preserved its grave: a name now fixed to a field of broken brick, still carrying, in its three syllables, the gate of god.