page_title: Babylonia
section_title: Persian Babylonia
hierarchical_section_title: Babylonia / History / Persian Babylonia
caption_attribution_description: English: Xerxes I tomb Babylonian soldier circa 470 BCE
context_page_description: Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BC, which contained the minor administrative town of Babylon. It was merely a small provincial town during the Akkadian Empire but greatly expanded during the reign of Hammurabi in the first half of the 18th century BC and became a major capital city. During the reign of Hammurabi and afterwards, Babylonia was called "the country of Akkad", a deliberate archaism in reference to the previous glory of the Akkadian Empire.
  It was often involved in rivalry with the older state of Assyria to the north and Elam to the east in Ancient Iran. Babylonia briefly became the major power in the region after Hammurabi created a short-lived empire, succeeding the earlier Akkadian Empire, Third Dynasty of Ur, and Old Assyrian Empire. The Babylonian Empire, however, rapidly fell apart after the death of Hammurabi and reverted to a small kingdom.
context_section_description: Babylonia was absorbed into the Achaemenid Empire in 539 BC.
  A year before Cyrus' death, in 529 BC, he elevated his son Cambyses II in the government, making him king of Babylon, while he reserved for himself the fuller title of "king of the (other) provinces" of the empire. It was only when Darius I acquired the Persian throne and ruled it as a representative of the Zoroastrian religion, that the old tradition was broken and the claim of Babylon to confer legitimacy on the rulers of western Asia ceased to be acknowledged.
  Immediately after Darius seized Persia, Babylonia briefly recovered its independence under a native ruler, Nidinta-Bel, who took the name of Nebuchadnezzar III, and reigned from October 522 BC to August 520 BC, when Darius took the city by storm, during this period Assyria to the north also rebelled. A few years later, probably 514 BC, Babylon again revolted under the Armenian king Nebuchadnezzar IV; on this occasion, after its capture by the Persians, the walls were partly destroyed. The Esagila, the great temple of Bel, however, still continued to be kept in repair and to be a center of Babylonian religious feelings.
  Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 333 BC for the Greeks, and died there in 323 BC. Babylonia and Assyria then became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire.
  It has long been maintained that the foundation of Seleucia diverted the population to the new capital of southern Mesopotamia, and that the ruins of the old city became a quarry for the builders of the new seat of government, but the recent publication of the Babylonian Chronicles has shown that urban life was still very much the same well into the Parthian Empire (150 BC to 226 AD). The Parthian king Mithridates conquered the region into the Parthian Empire in 150 BC, and the region became something of a battleground between Greeks and Parthians.
  There was a brief interlude of Roman conquest (the provinces of Assyria and Mesopotamia; 116–118 AD) under Trajan, after which the Parthians reasserted control.
  The satrapy of Babylonia was absorbed into Asōristān (meaning The land of the Assyrians in Persian) in the Sasanian Empire, which began in 226 AD, and by this time East Syriac Rite Syriac Christianity (which emerged in Assyria and Upper Mesopotamia the first century AD) had become the dominant religion among the native Assyrian-Babylonian populace, who had never adopted the Zoroastrianism or Hellenic religions and languages of their rulers.
  Apart from the small 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD independent Neo-Assyrian states of Adiabene, Osroene, Assur, Beth Garmai, Beth Nuhadra and Hatra in the north, Mesopotamia remained under largely Persian control until the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century AD. Asōristān was dissolved as a geopolitical entity in 637 AD, and the native Eastern Aramaic-speaking and largely Christian populace of southern and central Mesopotamia (with the exception of the Mandeans) gradually underwent Arabization and Islamization in contrast to northern Mesopotamia where an Assyrian continuity endures to the present day.
caption: Babylonian soldier of the Achaemenid army, circa 480 BC. Relief of the tomb of Xerxes I.
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