Babylon

Babylon was an ancient Mesopotamian city on the lower Euphrates river, its ruins lying near Hillah in Iraq's Babil Governorate, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad. The Shatt al-Hillah, a distributary branch of the Euphrates, still bisects the site today. The urban core covered roughly 1,000 hectares along the floodplain, with an inner walled city of about 450 hectares; occupation began by around 2200 BC and continued, with long interruptions, until the site was finally abandoned around 1000 AD. Located near 32.5 degrees north, 44.4 degrees east, Babylon sat at the heart of the broad, flat alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, a landscape shaped by centuries of river shifting and irrigation canals that have also buried and re-exposed parts of the ancient city under silt.