Babylon: Between the Historical City and the Modern Myth
By Alejandro Serna
Babylon has occupied, since Antiquity, a unique place in the historical and cultural imagination of the West. It was a real city, the capital of one of the great empires of Mesopotamia, but over the centuries it also became a symbol charged with religious, political, and aesthetic meanings. Between archaeological Babylon and imagined Babylon, a tension has emerged that still shapes the way we represent it today.
Historical Babylon was located on the alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now central-southern Iraq. Its development was closely linked to a fertile environment sustained by irrigation canals and the seasonal flooding of the rivers. The scarcity of stone in the region led to the use of mudbrick and fired brick as the principal building materials, while imported materials acquired a special value, not only practical but also symbolic. In this context, Babylonian architecture reflects both the geographical conditions of Mesopotamia and the political and technical capacity of a city that became a major center of power.
Babylon reached its greatest splendor during the Neo-Babylonian period, between the seventh and sixth centuries BC, under the reigns of Nabopolassar and, especially, Nebuchadnezzar II. It was then that the city attained an exceptional level of monumentality. Its walls, constructed in several defensive lines of mudbrick and fired brick and reinforced by a water-filled moat, projected an image of power and security. The famous Ishtar Gate, built around 575 BC, faced with blue glazed bricks and decorated with figures of bulls and dragons, remains one of the most recognizable examples of Babylonian art. Alongside it, the South Palace served as the political and administrative center, containing ceremonial spaces such as the great throne room.
The question of the Hanging Gardens, one of the wonders traditionally attributed to Babylon, is more complex. Their fame derives primarily from later Greek sources, yet no contemporary archaeological evidence exists to confirm with certainty that they stood within the city. This case clearly illustrates the difficulty of separating documented Babylon from legendary Babylon: a city whose historical reality became intertwined, from a very early stage, with stories, exaggerations, and symbolic projections.
From the nineteenth century onward, the modern image of Babylon became deeply shaped by Orientalism. From a Western perspective, Mesopotamia was often interpreted as an exotic, magnificent, and decadent land, serving more as a source of cultural fantasy than as an object of accurate historical understanding. The relative scarcity of visible remains, compared with those of other ancient monuments, also allowed considerable freedom in imagining and depicting the city.
Cinema became one of the most influential media in establishing this monumental and fantastical vision of Babylon. D. W. Griffith’s film Intolerance (1916) remains one of the most influential recreations. Its colossal sets, inspired more by nineteenth-century paintings and Orientalist visions than by the archaeological knowledge available at the time, established a spectacular image of Babylon: immense, theatrical, excessive, and far removed from the known historical reality.
In contemporary theatre, by contrast, some works have adopted a more symbolic and abstract approach. Adaptations or evocations of Mesopotamian narratives, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, do not necessarily seek to reconstruct Babylon archaeologically but rather to explore its mythical power. The city thus becomes a mental landscape, a space of memory, power, human fragility, and the search for meaning.
Opera has also contributed to this imaginative construction. Nabucco, by Giuseppe Verdi, presents a Babylon filtered through the biblical tradition and the Romantic sensibility of the nineteenth century. Here, the city functions less as a historical reality than as a moral and political setting: a place associated with exile, oppression, nostalgia, and liberation. Once again, Babylon is reinterpreted through the cultural concerns of the West rather than through its own Mesopotamian materiality.
Ultimately, historical Babylon offers a recognizable urban, architectural, and political framework, reconstructed from archaeological evidence and ancient sources. Modern Babylon, however, reveals something different: the way in which the West has projected onto Mesopotamia its own narratives, fears, desires, and aesthetic imaginaries. Between the real city and the imagined city lies much of the fascination that Babylon continues to exert today. Its enduring power resides not only in what it once was, but also in everything that, over the centuries, we have chosen to see in it.