Politically, Babylon was no longer and would never again be the power it once was. Economically, it suffered from a system of heavy taxation and its recent merger — as the ninth satrapy — with a very impoverished Assyria. However, its advantageous location in the heart of a warm and fertile region, enclosed between the Euphrates and the Tigris, guaranteed it a prosperous agriculture, notoriously linked to the intensive cultivation of date palms, the raw material of many craft activities. In fact, it is above all religiously that the Babylonians had to feel the most serious attacks, which an encyclopedia describes as: « A number of priests were executed. Esagila, the main temple, was badly damaged. Many objects from the temple’s treasury (…) were carried off to Persepolis (…). The gold statue of the god Marduk was also removed, so that nobody could now claim to be the rightful king, since, by Babylonian tradition, a new ruler was obliged to receive his authority from the hands of Marduk in the Esagila temple during the festival of the new year » ⁷. If the situation seemed ‘catastrophic’ to the Babylonians, the worst was yet to come!

While Alexander the Great intended to make Babylon the eastern capital of his empire, after his death one of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, resolved to build a rival city about sixty kilometres further north. Baptized Seleucia-on-the-Tiger — Babylon sitting on the Euphrates River — its construction was barely under way when Seleucus decided in 301 BCE, following the battle of Ipsus, to establish his new royal residence in Antioch, in northern Levantine Syria. However, this did not prevent him from encouraging the development of Seleucia… from the many Babylonian buildings in a state of disrepair! Perhaps it was to limit the degradation of the local heritage that a priest from Bel-Marduk named Berossus — Bel-re’ushunu in Babylonian — began to write in Greek a monumental history of the Mesopotamian civilization entitled Babyloniaka, that he dedicated to the son and successor of Seleucus, Antiochus I Soter, at his advent in 281 BCE. The goal sought does not seem to have been achieved, since his work had only a limited diffusion, fragments having only reached us through other authors such as Flavius Josephus. As for his beloved city, « a tablet dated 275 BCE states that on the 12th of Nisan the inhabitants of Babylon were transported to the new town (…). With this event the history of Babylon comes practically to an end, though more than a century later we find sacrifices performed in its old sanctuary » ⁸. Because the Seleucid rulers had « spared Babylon’s wall and the sanctuary of Bel, allowing the ‘Chaldeans’ to live around it » to perpetuate their « religious and cultural traditions », which explains the « statements by some Greek authors that Babylon had become inhabited mainly by priests » ⁹. « The greatest pride of the Babylonian people » — as Isaiah called it — was still in place!

In order to promote the Greek culture in Mesopotamia, Antiochus IV undertook a policy of colonization of Babylon, which he endowed for this purpose with a gymnasium and a remarkable theatre which, strangely, was a third larger than that of Seleucia, which was, however, a capital. This building was, it is said, ransacked in 127 BCE by the Parthian governor, a certain Himeros who, abusing his authority in the absence of the kings Phraates II and Artabanus II, too busy defending their empire on the front at the cost of their lives, would have oppressed the cities of Babylonia — including Seleucia and Ctephon — pillaging them and killing their inhabitants. After constantly harassing the residents of Babylon itself, he also burned down, in addition to the theatre, the temple of Bel and destroyed large parts of the city. « Despite these events, the chronicles tell us that political activities continued to take place in Babylon (…), as attested by [a] text (…) dated between 6 January and 4 February 124 BCE (…) [who] informs us above all about the political organization of the Greek community which was not governed by the same authority as the Babylonian population and which formed a separate community in the city. (…) However, this does not prevent members of both communities from working and trading together, as many contracts attest. The study of these texts also shows us that on this date, the city of Babylon does not seem deserted or burned, but that on the contrary, all daily activities still have their place there. The abuses of the tyrant Himeros, who ceased to exist around 127 BCE, must not have been so great as the sources lead us to believe » ¹⁰, especially since these sources are exclusively Western. On the Babylonian side, the chronicles indicate only the raids committed in Babylonia by Hyspaosines of Characene, before and after the takeover of the old Mesopotamian capital by the Parthian general Timarchus. Nevertheless, this troubled period marked the spirits enough that Babylon was only described as a city in ruins and depopulated. Curiously, it was around this time that the following words of a prophecy attributed to Isaiah were written in the Hebrew language on a large scroll: « Babylon, the most glorious of kingdoms, the flower of Chaldean pride, will be devastated like Sodom and Gomorrah when God destroyed them » (NLT), « it will never be inhabited again, and no one will live in it for generations » (GW). Do we not find here proof of a prophecy written after the events it describes?