Babylon: The Civilization Before Rome
The Impressive Monuments and Engineerings
Rome, scorned by its contemporaries as evil and unholy, but glorified and considered the master engineers of the past by future admirers, was not the first civilization to share these paradoxes. Babylon is commonly regarded as a civilization of splendour and monuments, with the first laws and earliest instances of mathematics and literature being under its belt. As a result, the Romans had often been regarded as the “Western Babylon” by Medieval scholars, but the context of this term is not as straightforward as it seems. Due to one event echoed twice in history, the Sacks of Jerusalem, the comparisons between Rome and Babylon began.
Greatest Civilization
Babylon was a pillar of the world prior to the rise of Greece, for its contribution to early maths, astrology and literacy. However, the greatest example of their immense developments was the city itself. Filled with monuments such as the Etemenaki (Tower of Babel) and the Lion of Babylon.
“The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a hundred and twenty furlongs in length each way, so that the entire circuit is four hundred and eighty furlongs. While such is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches to it. It is surrounded, in the…
