Babylon

A surrender without a fight

After Alexander the Great crushed Darius III at Gaugamela on 1 October 331 BC, the road to Babylon lay open.

The city was the wealthiest in the Persian Empire, the cultural capital of Mesopotamia, and held the treasury Alexander needed to pay his Macedonian troops. Its garrison commander Mazaeus, who had escaped from Gaugamela, chose not to defend the walls. Three weeks after the battle, Mazaeus and the Babylonian priests of Marduk rode out of the Ishtar Gate to meet Alexander on the road and formally hand over the keys.

Alexander, then twenty-five, entered the city through a gauntlet of priests scattering myrrh and spices on his path.

Through the Ishtar Gate

The gate Alexander rode through had been built by Nebuchadnezzar II about 270 years earlier.

It was a double-towered ceremonial entrance some 14 metres high, faced entirely in glazed brick of brilliant cobalt blue, decorated with alternating bas-relief rows of yellow-and-white bulls (representing the storm god Adad) and ochre dragons (mušḫuššu, the snake-dragon of Marduk). The most visually striking gate in the ancient world; the Babylonians considered it their finest monument. The Processional Way running through the gate was lined with walls bearing 120 striding lions in white and yellow on blue glaze.

Almost the entire structure was excavated in the 1900s by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey and reconstructed inside the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

The Tower of Babel

Looming behind the city was Etemenanki — "House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth" — a seven-tier ziggurat reaching 91 metres tall. The structure the Hebrew Bible remembered as the Tower of Babel.

By 331 BC it was already crumbling, having been damaged in earlier warfare. Alexander ordered it rebuilt. He set 10 000 workmen to remove the existing rubble before reconstruction could begin; the clearing alone took two months. He died before any new building started, and his immediate successors lost interest.

By the second century BC the ziggurat had been completely quarried for brick.

How Alexander died here

Alexander returned to Babylon eight years later, in 323 BC, planning to make it the capital of his world empire.

On 29 May 323 BC, after a long evening's drinking with his admiral Nearchus, he developed a fever. Over the next twelve days the fever worsened, accompanied by severe abdominal pain and progressive paralysis. He died in the royal palace of Nebuchadnezzar on 10 June, aged thirty-two.

The cause has been debated for two thousand years — malaria, typhoid, poisoning, West Nile virus have all been proposed. The Macedonian generals dragged out his embalmed body in a gold-leafed catafalque pulled by sixty-four mules for a journey toward Macedonia that was hijacked mid-route by Ptolemy and rerouted to Egypt.

His tomb has never been found.