Babylon Postal code

About Babylon

Babylon was an ancient metropolis that was governed by some of the world's most powerful civilizations. It was the capital of the Babylonian Empire and was regarded as a centre of trade, art, and scholarship. It is believed to have been the world's biggest early metropolis, perhaps the first to achieve a population of more than 200,000.
Currently, it is an archaeological site with just a few thousand people and a few communities inside its bounds, however building has expanded significantly in recent years, with some structures encroaching on the remains. The archaeological site is located roughly 85 kilometres (53 miles) south of modern-day Baghdad in Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, and its borders have been established in accordance with the perimeter of the old outer city walls, which cover an area of approximately 1054.3 hectares. Babylon is a UNESCO World Heritage site that attracts thousands of tourists each year, mostly entirely Iraqis.
Babylon is a Latinized form of the Greek Babylon (v), which is derived from the indigenous (Babylonian) Bbilim, which means "portal of the god(s)." (KA2.DIGIR.RAKI) was the cuneiform transcription. This translates as kan digirak in Sumerian. The sign (KA2) is a logogram for "gate," (DIGIR) is a phonetic value for "god," and (RA) is a phonetic value for the coda of the word digir (-r), followed by the genitive suffix -ak. The final (KI) is a determinative, indicating that the preceding signs should be interpreted as a location name.

In the 1870s, Archibald Sayce hypothesised that the Semitic name was a loan translation of the original Sumerian name. However, the "gate of god" theory is increasingly being seen as a Semitic folk etymology to account for an unknown non-Semitic placename. I. J. Gelb suggested in 1955 that the original name was Babil or Babilla, of unknown meaning and provenance, since there were other similarly called locations in Sumer and there are no other instances of Sumerian place names being supplanted by Akkadian translations. He argued that it eventually became Akkadian Bb-ili(m) and that the Sumerian term Kan-digirak was a loan translation of the Semitic folk etymology, not the original. The Semitic name would have been re-translated into Sumerian during the Third Dynasty of Ur's "Neo-Sumerian" period (Bab-Il).

Babel (Hebrew: Bavel, Tib. Bel; Classical Syriac: Bwl, Aramaic: Bel; in Arabic: Bbil) occurs in the Hebrew Bible, where it is translated as "confusion" from the verb bilbél (, "to confuse"). Although the contemporary English verb babble ("to speak stupid, enthusiastic, or confused discourse") is often believed to originate from this term, there is no clear relationship.

In certain instances, ancient sources refer to "Babylon" as a name for other towns, notably Borsippa within Babylon's area of influence and Nineveh for a brief time after Babylon's Assyrian sack.