Babylon is the ancient city most people can name and fewest can date. This is the whole account, from a phrase used to number a year in the records of a king who ruled somewhere else, through Hammurabi and the Kassite centuries and the long argument with Assyria, to the astronomical diaries that were still being written six hundred years later, after the city had stopped mattering to anyone but the men keeping them.

It runs a little over an hour and forty minutes, at an even pace, and it is meant to work as well for background listening as for watching.

Chapters

0:00 The City They Thought They Knew — three hundred ration tablets on a floor, and the German expedition that found them
8:05 A Town on the Euphrates — a thousand hectares of ruin field, and the earliest mention of the name
16:41 Hammurabi — the pillar of dark stone that was not found at Babylon, and the reign it records
29:03 The Long Middle — the raid that ended a dynasty, the Kassite centuries, and the boundary stones
40:10 Babylon and Assyria — a canal on the southern edge, and what it cost Assyria to hold the south
51:01 The Empire of Nebuchadnezzar — the moulded brick, the gate, the street, and a century of empire
1:05:37 The City in the Tablets — the vaulted basement, the archive above it, and the city as its own records describe it
1:19:51 The Fall, and After — Nabonidus, the foundation deposits, and what came after the Persians
1:33:34 What the Tablets Kept — the astronomical diaries, kept for six hundred years, and what survived because of them

Sources

The script is built on published primary sources and standard reference accounts, and the claims are checked line by line before recording. Where specialists are divided, the narration says so rather than picking a side. Where a reading rests on inference rather than a statement in a text, it is labelled as an inference.

Dates in this episode carry two different precisions, and the narration says so. For the second millennium the conventional reckoning is used and the century is the working unit — the reign of Hammurabi moves by about sixty years between the middle and short chronologies. For the Neo-Babylonian period the astronomical diaries anchor the record, and years can be given directly.

Images

167 items appear on screen, including 5 maps drawn for this episode from Natural Earth data, which is in the public domain. 131 of the 167 are public domain or CC0. The remaining 36 are Creative Commons Attribution, and every one of them is credited in full in the credit roll at the end.

There is no film in this episode. Everything on screen is a still photograph, a printed plate, a museum object, or a map made for this account.

The narration is synthetic speech. It is not a human reader.