Babylon- Mesopotamian LocationLocation · Landmark"Gate of the Gods"

Gate of the Gods

The name proclaimed the city's purpose. Bāb-ilim: Gate of God. The point where the divine entered the human world.

The Enūma Eliš tells how it was built. After Marduk killed Tiamat in single combat, he split her corpse "like a dried fish." One half he raised to form the sky. The other he laid as the foundation of the earth. From her eyes flowed the Tigris and Euphrates. Her tail he fixed as a bar to hold the heavens in place. Then he announced his intention: "I will establish a place of luxuriance; its name shall be Babylon."

The Anunnaki volunteered to build it. For two years they made bricks, raising the Esagila ("House Whose Top Is High") and Etemenanki ("Foundation of Heaven and Earth"). Marduk fashioned the first humans from the blood of the defeated rebel god Qingu, so mortals might take up the labor of the gods. The gods held a feast in the Esagila and proclaimed Marduk's fifty names.

For most of the third millennium, the city had been an unremarkable settlement on the Euphrates. Hammurabi changed that around 1792 BCE. He united Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule and raised Marduk from a local patron to head of the pantheon.

Etemenanki

The ziggurat rose in seven stages from a square base roughly ninety meters on each side. It dominated the flat Mesopotamian plain for miles. Nebuchadnezzar II recorded his work completing the tower his father Nabopolassar had begun restoring: "To raise the top of Etemenanki so that it might rival heaven, I set my hand."

The summit shrine, reached by staircases winding around the tower's massive brick terraces, held a golden couch and table where Marduk descended from heaven. No image of the god stood there. Only the furnishings prepared for his arrival. Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BCE, described the tower with wonder.

Massive double walls enclosed the city. The inner wall, Imgur-Enlil ("Enlil Has Favored"), and the outer wall, Nemetti-Enlil ("Bulwark of Enlil"), bore names invoking divine protection even in their foundations.

The Akitu

Each spring, Babylon renewed the world. The Akitu festival lasted eleven days. On the fourth, the Enūma Eliš was recited in full before Marduk's statue in the Esagila.

The king appeared before Marduk's high priest, who stripped him of his crown and scepter, slapped his face, and pulled his ears. The king knelt and swore he had not neglected Babylon, had not insulted its citizens, had not failed in the care of the Esagila. The priest assured him Marduk would hear his prayer. Then the insignia were restored.

Statues of gods from cities across Babylonia were carried in procession through the Ishtar Gate, its walls covered in glazed-brick reliefs of mušḫuššu dragons and aurochsen against lapis-blue backgrounds. The divine council assembled in Marduk's presence at the Esagila. Nabu, Marduk's son and divine scribe, recorded the fates decreed for the coming year. Beneath the limestone paving slabs of the Processional Way, invisible to any eye but a god's, Nebuchadnezzar had inscribed that he laid this road for Marduk's procession.

The Erra Epic

The Erra Epic tells what happened when Marduk left. The plague god Erra persuaded Marduk to vacate his temple for repairs, promising to maintain order. The moment Marduk departed, chaos swallowed the city. Erra unleashed civil war and famine: "Brother has no pity on brother; they kill one another." Warriors fell. Cattle died in the fields. Temples were defiled.

Ishum, Erra's vizier, talked him down. He praised Erra's valor and steered him toward restraint. Erra relented. The survivors rebuilt. The poem's colophon declares that the text, inscribed on tablets and placed in homes, would ward off the very disasters it described.

The Fall

Cyrus the Persian took Babylon in 539 BCE without a siege. The Cyrus Cylinder records his care for Marduk's temple. But Babylon's political supremacy was over. Under Persian and Seleucid rule the city declined, though the Akitu festival continued into the Hellenistic period and the astronomical school at the Esagila maintained observations into the first century BCE.

In Genesis, the Tower of Babel transformed Etemenanki from a sacred stairway into a monument to hubris. In Mesopotamian tradition, the city remained what its name proclaimed: the gate through which the gods entered the world.