Page 17 - Bible Geography and Near East Studies

Babylon

Connect…

Do you like studying HISTORY? When I was in school, I did not like studying history. It was probably
because the teachers always made it so dry. It just was not interesting, and I saw no need to study all
those dates and names of people I don’t know and who are dead and gone. Can you relate? However, I
have learned a lot about history since those days. What happened back then is our roots. And what
they did influences us today. God has been totally involved in the history of mankind. History is really
HIS STORY. It has a beginning, and it will have a conclusion. So we had better find out what God has
been doing throughout the ages, so we can better understand His plans for us today. Today, we are
going to study the first recorded (written) history of man.

The Lesson …

The Land of Babylon

Much of the ruins of ancient Babylon are buried underneath the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq,
but archaeologists have uncovered some of the more recent ruins, dating to the time of the kings of
Judah and Israel. Their findings tell us much about the 4,000-year history
of this storied city that passed through many hands and empires during its long existence.
From what historians can piece together, Babylon began as a small administrative center during the
reign of Sargon the Great. Babylon’s history truly begins with Hammurabi, an Amorite prince, who began
his reign over the city in 1792 B.C. Through war and diplomacy, Hammurabi subdued all of Mesopotamia
under Babylonian rule by 1755 B.C. His empire stretched from Syria to the Persian Gulf. Hammurabi
called his empire Babylonia.

The capital of Babylonia was Babylon. It has been estimated that Babylon was the largest city in the
world from around 1770 BC to 1670 BC, and then again between 612 BC and 320 BC. It was perhaps the
first city to reach a population above 200,000.

The Babylonian civilization achieved much during
the time of its supremacy. They developed the
first-ever positional number system in which the
value of a digit depends on both the digit and its
position. The positional system greatly simplified
arithmetic and helped the Babylonians to
make great advances in mathematics. It has now
been established that Greek and Hellenistic
mathematicians borrowed heavily from the
Babylonians.

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