Bab'yloil (Heb. and Chald. Babel', ^22, Gr. B«/3u\ai)'), the name of more than one city in the Scrip- tures and other ancient writings. See also Babel.
1. Originally the capital of the country called in Genesis Shinar ("Cri"). and in the later Scriptures Chaldcea, or the land of the Chaldeans (r^bS). See those articles severally.
1. The Xante. — The word Babel seems to be con- nected in its first occurrence with the Hebrew root .-32, balal' , "to confound" (as if by contraction from the reduplicated form 22?2, Balbel'), " because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth" (Gen. xi, 9) ; but the native etymology (see the Koran, ii, 66) is Bab-il, " the gate of the god //," or perhaps more simply "the gate of God;" and this no doubt was the original intention of the appellation as given by Nimrod, though the other sense came to be attach- ed to it after the confusion of tongues (see Eichhom, Biblioth. d. bibl. Lit. iii, 1001). Another derivation de- duces the word from b2 2X2, "the court or city of Belus" (see Abulfeda in Rosenmuller, Aliherth. ii, 60), or ^2"-l2 (= *P3), Bel's Hill (Furst, lib. Ilandu: s. v.). A still different etymology is proposed by Tuch {Gen. p. 270), from ^2 PH3, "the house of Bel." Whichever of these etymologies may be regarded as the preferable one, the name was doubtless understood or accommodated by the sacred writer in Genesis so as to lie expressive of the disaster that soon befell the founders of the place. In the Bible at a later date the place is appropriately termed " Babylon the Great" (rnrnn b22, Jer. li,_58; Xr>2^ ^22, Dan. iv, 27), and by Josephus also (Ant. viii, 6, 1, i) j.nya\i) Bafiv- \tbv). The name Babylon is likewise that by which it is constantly denominated in the. Sept. and later ver- sions, as well as by the Apocrypha CI Mace, vi, 4;
Susann. i, 5) and New Test. (Acts vii, 43), and final- ly by the ancient Greek and Roman writers (see Smith, Diet, of Class. Geogr. s. v.). On the outland- ish name Shesh ik (TltijttJ), applied to it in Jer. xxv, 26 ; li, 41, see the various conjectures in Rosenmuller, Altherth. I, ii, 50 sq. The Jews believe it is a cabalis- tic mode of writing by the method known as "Ath- bash" (q. v.). See Shishak.
The word "Babel," besides its original application to the tower (Gen. xi, 9), and its usual one (in the original) to the city of Babylon, is also occasionally applied to the whole district of Chaldaja, coincident with the plain of Shinar (Isa. xiv. 2), as well as to Babylonia, the province of the Assyrian empire of which it was the metropolis (2 Chron. xxxii, 31; xxxiii, 11), and eventually to Persia itself (Ezra v, 13; Neh. xiii, 6). See Nineveh.
2. Origin and Growth of the City. — This famous city was the metropolis of the province of Babylon and of the Babylonio-Chaldsean empire. It was situated in a wide plain on the Euphrates, which divided it into two nearly equal parts. According to the book of Genesis, its foundations were laid at the same time with those of the Tower of Babel. In the revolutions of centuries it underwent man}' changes, and received successive reparations and additions. The ancients were not agreed as to the authors or times of these, and any attempt to determine them now with strict accuracy must be fruitless. Semiramis and Nebu- chadnezzar are those to wdiom the city was indebted for its greatest augmentations and its chief splendor. Probably a temple was the first building raised by the primitive nomades, and in the gate of this temple justice would be administered in early times (comp. 2 Sam. xix, 8), after which houses would grow up about the gate, and in this way the name would readily pass from the actual portal of the temple to the settlement. According to the traditions which the Greeks derived from the Babylonians in Alexander's age, the city was originally built about the year B.C. 2230. The archi- tectural remains discovered in southern Babylonia, taken in conjunction with the monumental records, seem to .indicate that it was not at first the capital, nor, indeed, a town of very <;reat importance. It prob- ably owed its position at the head of Nimrod's cities (Gen. x, 10) to the power and pre-eminence to which it afterward attained rather than to any original su- periority that it could boast over the places coupled with it. Erech, Ur, and Ellasar appear to have been all more ancient than Babylon, and were capital cities when Babil was a provincial village. The first rise of the Chaldasan power was in the region close upon the Persian Gulf, as Berosus indicated b}r his fish-god Oannes, who brought the Babylonians civilization and the arts out of the sea (ap. Syncell. p. 28, B). Thence the nation spread northward up the course of the riv- ers, and the seat of government moved in the same direction, being finally fixed at Babylon, perhaps not earlier than B.C. 1700. — Kitto; Smith. See Assyria.
3. Its Fall and subsequent Condition. — Under Nabon- nadus, the last king, B.C. 538, Babylon was taken by Cyrus, after a siege of two years, in the dead of the night. Having first, by means of its canals, turned the river into the great dry lake west of Babylon, and then marched through the emptied channel, he made his way to the outer walls of the fortified palace on its banks, when, finding the brazen gates incautiously left open by the royal guards while engaged in carous- als, he entered with all his train ; "the Lord of Hosts was his leader," and Babylon, as an empire, was no more. An insurrection, under Darius Hystaspis (B.C. 5011), the object of which was to gain emancipation from Persian bondage, led that prince to punish the Babylonians by throwing down the walls and gates which had been left by Cyrus, and by expelling them from their homes. Xerxes plundered and destroyed the temple of Belus, which Alexander the Great would