The heart of Babylon as Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt it and Herodotus described it: the double wall and moat, the Ishtar Gate of glazed brick, the Processional Way past the palace to the temple tower Etemenanki and the temple of Marduk, and courtyard houses on straight streets running to the river.
Herodotus, who wrote about a century after Nebuchadnezzar, describes Babylon as a square city walled with baked brick laid in hot bitumen, the Euphrates running through its middle, its streets straight and crossing at right angles, those that met the river each ending at a little bronze gate. In its sacred precinct stood a tower of eight stages with a temple at the top. The king’s own inscriptions tell how he rebuilt the gates in glazed brick, raised the Processional Way and finished the tower; the Esagila Tablet gives the tower’s measurements; and Robert Koldewey’s excavations of 1899–1917 found most of it.
This plan shows the northern half of the inner city on the east bank. Entering by the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way runs south between the Southern Palace (five great courts in a row, the throne room on the south side of the central one) and the temple of Ninmakh; passes the walled temenos of Etemenanki, some 91 m square at the base; and turns west between the tower and Esagila, the house of Marduk, to cross the river by a bridge on piers. East of the road lies Merkes, a quarter of courtyard houses, blank to the street, their main rooms on the south side of the court facing north.
The upper stages of the tower, the roofs of the palace and the layout of the houses block by block are restored; Herodotus’s houses of three and four storeys are shown as the one and two storeys the excavations suggest. Click a building for its rule and its source.