the ancient city of babylon

babylon during nebuchadnezzar ii (604-562 bc) was a great city. it had been a large city since old babylonian times, but nebuchadnezzar‟s expansion of the city and large-scale rebuilding of important buildings with good baked brick instead of the traditional unbaked mudbrick created something exceptional. babylon now was larger than nineveh had been and larger than any of the cities in the known world. the political and economic base for this development was of course that it was the centre of the neo-babylonian empire created by nebuchadnezzar‟s father nabopolassar (625–605 bc) and succeeding the neo assyrian empire as the main political entity in the middle east. an attempt for the first time to bring together the main results of the german excavations in babylon with the main results from the iraqi excavations there and thereby make use of the available cuneiform documentation and a selected use of the best of the classical tradition. with the help of a gis software (qgis) and a bim program (archicad) the use of satellite images and aerial photos combined with inspection on the site, the historical development of the site has been studied and a digital research model of babylon for different periods of the city‟s history has been created