The ancient Near Eastern city of Babylon exercised a hold on ancient and modern imaginations that goes beyond its actual historical importance, although its importance was genuine: it was at various times the capital of the Babylonian, Kassite, and Neo-Babylonian empires, and Alexander the Great died there.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC) represented the peak of Babylonian power and cultural achievement. The reconstruction of Babylon as a monumental capital — the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the ziggurat that may be the historical basis for the Tower of Babel narrative, the palace complex — created a city of exceptional grandeur. The Ishtar Gate, reconstructed at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, gives some sense of its original impact.

Babylonian astronomy deserves special recognition: Babylonian astronomers over centuries developed highly accurate mathematical models for predicting astronomical phenomena — the positions of planets, lunar eclipses, solstices — without developing a geometric model of the solar system. The Babylonian achievement was essentially empirical: identifying arithmetical patterns in astronomical observations and using them for prediction. This tradition influenced Greek astronomy through cultural contact in the Hellenistic period.

The Jewish exile in Babylon (586–539 BC) was a transformative event in Israelite religious history. The encounter with Babylonian religious ideas, the absence of the Temple, and the necessity of maintaining religious identity in a foreign land all contributed to developments in Jewish theology — the emergence of more sophisticated monotheism, the codification of Torah, the development of synagogue worship — that shaped the subsequent history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.