Babylonia

The Sumerian name for Babylon, KÁ.DINGIR.RA(KI), literally “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 form and its meaning: the same cuneiform signs were read by Sumerian scribes as Kadingirra and by Akkadian scribes as Bāb-ilim, two languages pronouncing one logogram in their own words for the same idea. Babylon appears in Sumerian-language administrative and royal texts from the late third millennium and the Ur III period onward, when it was still a minor town long before its rise under the Amorite dynasty.

Kadingirra sits at the very head of the family, the form in which the name was first committed to writing, and it frames the question every later form inherits. Because Sumerian and Akkadian agree so exactly on “gate of god,” it is genuinely unclear which way the translation ran, or whether both are learned reinterpretations of a still older name that meant nothing of the kind. What is certain is that the logogram itself, KÁ.DINGIR.RA, was the stable thing: pronounced one way in Sumerian and another in Akkadian, copied for two millennia by scribes who read into three wedge-signs a theology of the city as the place where the divine met the earthly. Every Bābel and Babylṓn downstream is a vocalization of this one written phrase.

The endonym for Babylonia in the language of its own scribes, the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, taken from the city of Babylon that the kingdom grew around. The city’s name is written almost always with the Sumerian logogram KÁ.DINGIR.RA, “gate of god,” which Akkadian read as Bābilu, Bāb-ilim, “gate of the god”; whether that reading is the original sense or an Akkadian folk-etymology of an older, pre-Babylonian name is debated. For the land as a political whole the Babylonians more often wrote māt Akkadî, “the land of Akkad,” claiming the name of the older Sargonic empire, and their kings styled themselves “king of Sumer and Akkad”; in the Kassite centuries the kingdom was known instead as Karduniaš. The name runs continuously through Babylonian royal inscriptions, law, and literature from the Old Babylonian period of Hammurabi to the Neo-Babylonian empire that fell to Cyrus in 539 BCE.

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 capital’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 the writing and the speech agree on a sense the name may never originally have had. From this single city-name the word radiates outward unchanged in meaning if not in shape, into Hebrew Bābel, Aramaic and Arabic Bābel and Bābil, Old Persian Bābiruš, and the Greek Babylṓn that made the city, and then the land, known to the western world. The land that called itself “Akkad” after a vanished empire gave the world, through its great city, the name by which that world would remember the whole of southern Mesopotamia.

The Biblical Hebrew name for Babylon and Babylonia, Bābel, the Northwest Semitic reflex of Akkadian Bābilu. It first appears in the Table of Nations and the city-list of Genesis 10, where Babel is the beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom in the land of Shinar, and again in Genesis 11, the story of the tower whose builders are scattered. There the narrator gives the name a Hebrew etymology, linking Bābel to the verb bālal, “to confuse,” because the LORD confused the language of all the earth; this is a deliberate wordplay, not the historical derivation, which is the Akkadian “gate of god.” In the historical and prophetic books Bābel is the imperial power of the exile, the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar that burned the Temple and carried Judah away, and the Babylon over whose fall the prophets exult.

Bābel is the form in which the name carried its heaviest symbolic freight into the western tradition. The Genesis pun fused the city’s name to the idea of confusion so durably that “babel” became a common noun for a confusion of voices in English and other European languages, an afterlife no other entry on this page can claim. The same Hebrew Bābel also passed through the Greek of the Septuagint and the Latin of the Vulgate into Christian scripture, so that alongside the geographers’ Babylṓn there ran a second, scriptural channel for the name, freighted with exile and judgment. The Babylonians’ serene “gate of god” became, in the mouths of their captives, the very word for the breakdown of understanding.

The Imperial Aramaic name for Babylon and Babylonia, Bbl, vocalized Bābel, the cognate of Hebrew Bābel and Akkadian Bābilu. As the chancellery language of the Neo-Babylonian and then the Achaemenid empires, Aramaic was the working speech in which Babylon was administered and discussed across the Near East; Bbl appears throughout the documentary record, in the Achaemenid administrative corpus and in the Aramaic chapters of the Book of Daniel, whose court tales are set in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. The Hebrew-script spelling here reflects modern scholarly convention; the original was written in the Aramaic alphabet, the ancestor of the later Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic scripts.

Aramaic Bbl is the quiet hinge of the eastern half of the family, the everyday form through which the name passed from the cuneiform world into the alphabetic one. Babylon was the seat from which the Persians governed their wealthiest province, and the Aramaic in which that governance was conducted carried the city’s name onward into the Syriac of Late Antiquity and the Arabic of the Islamic conquest, both of which keep the same two-syllable Bābel and Bābil. Where the Greeks reshaped the name with a territorial ending and the Persians fitted it to a tongue without l, Aramaic simply kept it, and by keeping it became the channel along which the oldest spoken form of Babylon’s name reached the medieval Near East intact.

The Elamite name for Babylon, Babili, the form that stands in the Elamite columns of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions where Old Persian has Bābiruš. Written in the Mesopotamian cuneiform that Elamite scribes used, it keeps the l of the Semitic original that Old Persian could not, so that the Elamite version preserves the city’s name closer to the way its own inhabitants said it than the Persian version does. It names the Babylonian satrapy in the trilingual lists of lands at Behistun and the other monuments, and the working language of the Achaemenid heartland bureaucracy carried it through the administrative record as well.

Babili completes the trilingual Achaemenid coverage of Babylonia, the same satrapy named in all three chancellery languages, Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, exactly as this atlas’s entries for Egypt, Greece, Persia, and Assyria record. Here the three versions split along a single consonant: Old Persian Bābiruš with its forced r, against the Elamite and Babylonian Babili and Bābilu that keep the l. The Behistun monument thus preserves, in adjacent columns, both the Semitic name of Babylon and the Iranian reshaping of it, the empire recording in one place the city as its own people named it and as its conquerors had to.

The Old Persian name for Babylon and its satrapy, Bābiruš, the Semitic Bābil fitted to a language that lacked the consonant l and rendered it as r. It appears in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions among the lands the king holds, in the catalogues of provinces at Behistun, Persepolis, and Naqsh-e Rustam, where Babylonia was one of the central and wealthiest holdings of the empire. Babylon had been the seat of Persian power in Mesopotamia since Cyrus took the city in 539 BCE, and Darius’s own usurpation narrative at Behistun turns in part on suppressing revolts by pretenders who claimed the Babylonian throne under the name of Nebuchadnezzar.

Bābiruš shows the same sound-substitution that this atlas’s Persia entries record for the heartland name Pārsa: Old Persian had no l, and so the Bābil of its Semitic neighbors became Bābir- in the king’s own mouth. The form sits in the trilingual lists beside the Elamite and Babylonian versions of the same name, one entry in the Achaemenid roll of provinces alongside Egypt, Assyria, and the Ionians. Where the Greeks would keep the l and add a territorial ending, the Persian chancellery kept the territory and changed the consonant, naming the richest land of its empire by a word its own phonology had quietly reshaped.

The Greek name for the land of Babylonia, Babylōnía, built on Babylṓn, the Greek form of the city-name Bābilu / Bābel, with the territorial suffix -ía that Greek used to turn a city into the country around it. The Greeks knew Babylon as one of the wonders of the world: Herodotus devotes a long and famous excursus to its walls, its hanging cultivation, the temple of Bel, and the customs of its people, drawing the city and its land into Greek geography as the heart of the East. Babylōnía names the whole alluvial south, often extending in Greek usage to Mesopotamia at large, just as the satrapy did under the Persians whom the Greeks had fought.

Greek Babylōnía is the form that fixed the modern Western name for the land. Where the city itself entered Europe as Babylṓn, Latin Babylon, English Babylon, the Greek habit of deriving a country-name in -ía gave the territory its own word, and “Babylonia” passes through Latin Babylōnia into the modern European languages as the standard name for the civilization. The pattern is the same one that produced “Persia” from Pársa and “Assyria” from Aššur: a Greek territorial ending laid over a Near Eastern name, so that the land is known to the modern world not by what its own people called it, but by the shape the Greeks gave the name of its greatest city.

The Latin name for Babylonia, taken over from Greek Babylōnía with the city Babylōn alongside it, naturalized into Latin with no significant change. The form is standard across Latin geographical and historical writing, where Babylonia names the Mesopotamian land and Babylon its fabled city, by the Roman period long past its imperial height and shrinking under the Seleucids and Parthians who had inherited it. Pliny describes Babylon as the former head of the Chaldean nations, still standing but much diminished; the Vulgate carries the name through scripture, including the Babylon of Daniel and the symbolic Babylon of Revelation.

Latin Babylonia is the form that delivered the name to the modern European languages, the Greek-via-Latin route this atlas traces for so many ancient lands. English Babylonia, French Babylonie, Italian and Spanish Babilonia, and German Babylonien all rest on the Latin, just as Aegyptus, Persia, and Assyria carried those names west. The scriptural afterlife runs alongside the geographical one: through the Vulgate, “Babylon” became in Christian Latin a standing image of worldly pride and corruption, the great city of Revelation, so that the same Latin word names at once a real Mesopotamian kingdom and a moral idea that long outlived it.

The Syriac name for Babylon and Babylonia, Bābel, the direct continuation of the Aramaic Bbl into the Aramaic dialect of Edessa that became the language of Near Eastern Christianity. Syriac being a late form of Aramaic, the word is inherited rather than borrowed, carried unbroken from the older chancellery speech into the Peshitta and the vast Syriac biblical and historical literature. It names the city of the exile and of Daniel, and the land of lower Mesopotamia in which much of the Syriac-speaking church in fact lived, under Parthian and then Sasanian rule.

Bābel is the form in which Babylon’s name stayed in continuous local use through Late Antiquity, in the very region the name belonged to. While Greek and Latin carried Babylōn westward as the name of a half-legendary eastern city, the Aramaic-speaking Christians of Mesopotamia went on calling their own country’s great ruin by the name it had always had, and handed it, unchanged in its consonants, to the Arabic Bābil that would succeed it. On this page Syriac is the bridge between the ancient Aramaic Bbl and the medieval Arabic Bābil, the Late Antique link in the chain by which the oldest spoken name of Babylon outlived every empire that had ruled from it.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the land, Bavel, the same word the Talmud uses for the city, extended to the whole region of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita along the lower Euphrates. The Bavli speaks of Bavel as a country with its own customs, its own boundaries of pure lineage, and its own claim to be the heartland of the diaspora.

Bavel as a land is the homeland of this very language. The rabbis held that the genealogies of Babylonian Jewry were the purest in the world, so that “all lands are dough compared to the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel is dough compared to Babylonia,” and that the Torah’s center had shifted east to the rivers of Bavel. The name the Hebrew Bible gives to the place of exile is, in the Aramaic of the academies, the name of home.

The Middle Persian name for Babylon, Bābel, written bʾbyl and preserved chiefly in the Manichaean literature of the Sasanian period. It keeps the Semitic form intact, the l and all, because Middle Persian took it not from the old Achaemenid chancellery, which had reshaped it to Bābiruš, but from the living Aramaic and scriptural usage of Mesopotamia in late antiquity. The form carries particular weight in Manichaean texts because the prophet Mani was a native of Babylonia: in his own words, preserved in Middle Persian, he is the one who “came from the land of Bābel” to carry his message into the world.

Bābel names the city and its immediate land, and it stands in deliberate contrast with the other Middle Persian name for the same region, Āsōristān, the Sasanian administrative province that this atlas records under Assyria, where the old northern name had drifted south to cover Babylonia. The Sasanian world thus held two names for one country: the chancellery’s Āsōristān, “land of the Assyrians,” for the province, and the older, scriptural Bābel for the city at its heart and the homeland of Mani. The Manichaean Bābel is the religious and historical name where Āsōristān is the bureaucratic one, the city of the prophet’s birth set against the province of the tax-rolls.

The Parthian name for Babylon, Bābel, written bʾbyl in the Manichaean script as in Middle Persian, and like it preserved in the Manichaean literature of the third and fourth centuries. Parthian was the second great church language of Manichaeism, the medium of much of its hymnody, and it names Babylon in the same scriptural and devotional register, the land of Mani’s origin and a fixed point in the geography of his mission. The form is identical to the Middle Persian, the two sister Iranian languages of the Manichaean canon writing the city’s Semitic name the same way.

Parthian Bābel makes the same point as its Middle Persian twin, and sharpens it by repetition: where the Achaemenid Old Persian of seven centuries earlier had to bend Babylon’s name into Bābiruš for want of an l, the Manichaean Iranian languages simply wrote Bābel, having taken the name fresh from the Aramaic of their own day rather than from the old royal inscriptions. The same land that the Sasanian state filed under Āsōristān is, in the Parthian hymns, Bābel, the homeland from which the prophet came. Two Iranian languages, two scripts, one unaltered Semitic name, all pointing back to the single Mesopotamian city whose name had by then been written and spoken for three thousand years.

The Geʿez name for Babylon, Bābilon, taken through the Greek Babylṓn into the Ethiopic Bible. Unlike the Semitic Bābel of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, which keep the two-syllable shape of the Akkadian original, the Geʿez form carries the Greek nasal ending -ōn, betraying its route: the Ethiopic Old Testament was rendered from the Septuagint, and so Babylon reached Ethiopia in its Greek dress rather than its Semitic one. It is the Babylon of the exile, fəlsata Bābilon, “the captivity of Babylon,” and of the Psalm sung by the rivers of a foreign land, words that the Ethiopian church took deeply into its own liturgy and self-understanding.

Bābilon shows the family dividing by route rather than by sound. Geʿez is a Semitic language and might have been expected to keep the Semitic Bābel its cousins use; instead it took the Greek-mediated Babylṓn, because its scriptures came through Greek, and so a Semitic tongue names the great Mesopotamian city in the shape a Greek would recognize. On this page Geʿez and Syriac sit on either side of that divide: two Late Antique Christian languages of the Semitic family, one preserving the ancient Bābel through unbroken Aramaic descent, the other receiving Bābilon secondhand from the Greek Bible. The same city reaches the southern edge of the Christian world twice over, by two different roads, and the roads are legible in the ending of the word.

The Classical Arabic name for Babylon and the surrounding district of lower Mesopotamia, Bābil, continuing the Aramaic and Syriac Bābel with the unbroken local transmission of the Semitic name. It is best known from the Qurʾān, where Bābil is the place at which the two angels Hārūt and Mārūt taught sorcery, the one explicit toponym of ancient Mesopotamia named in the text; from there it runs through the historical and geographical literature, and Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s Muʿjam al-Buldān gives Bābil its entry as the ancient district between Baghdad and Kufa, already in his thirteenth-century day a field of ruins and mounds.

Bābil is the form in which the name survived the end of the ancient world in the land that bore it. By the Islamic period Babylon had long ceased to be a living city, but its name persisted in Arabic as the regional designation and as a byword for sorcery and ancient grandeur, exactly as the Greek and Latin Babylon persisted in the west as a byword for splendor and corruption. The two afterlives meet in modern Iraq, where Bābil is today the name of a governorate covering the site of the ancient city: the oldest spoken name of Babylon, carried through Aramaic and Syriac into Arabic, still marks the same ground on the map four thousand years after it was first written “gate of god.”