Most people know exactly two things about Babylon: it's the villain in the Book of Revelation, and it's the title of a personal-finance parable that isn't actually about it. The real empire is stranger, better documented, and far more consequential than either.
Babylon reconstructs the real history behind the legend, using the actual archaeological and textual record rather than secondhand myth. That includes the Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest surviving written legal codes, the true, disputed story of the Hanging Gardens (no trace of them has ever been found in Babylon itself, and the leading scholarly theory places them somewhere else entirely), the Babylonian conquest of Judah under Nebuchadnezzar II and the exile it caused, and the glazed-brick Ishtar Gate, whose original panels sit in a Berlin museum today while the actual gateway in Iraq stands empty.
What you'll come away understanding: