The ancient city of Babylon, capital of several kingdoms for more than a thousand years, was occasionally conquered and sacked, but its civic institutions – the municipal bodies of self-governance and the temples – survived the vicissitudes of history. The elite citizens of ancient Babylon developed a self-assured idea about Babylon’s place in the world. For them, the city was the physical and metaphorical navel of the world, the umbilical cord where heaven and earth connected. Along with two other ancient Babylonian cities, it claimed a special status that effectively curtailed the sovereign rights of the ruler. In the late 8th century BC, Babylon became for the first time subject to an empire. The localised Babylonian concept of governance over the city was confronted with the imperial idea. What followed was a long struggle over how Babylon could and should be ruled. The three consecutive empires around the middle of the first millennium — the Neo-Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian, and the Persian (late 8th – 4th c. BC) — probed various strategies, until eventually the imperial concept prevailed.
Babylon was excavated by a German archaeological mission between 1899 and 1917. They found thousands of clay tablets from private and public archives that have never been published and studied. These documents have the potential to provide new insights into the development of elite families and the civic institutions from the late 8th to the 4th century BC. The first aim of GoviB is to produce a scholarly edition and thorough study of this treasure trove. In the second phase, we will use these new documents to investigate how the city was governed, how the physical shape of the city, its civic institutions and its elite families changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to the regime changes, how they occurred and what they meant for the local elite shortly thereafter, and one or two generations later. Regime changes are pivotal moments in history. How governance is perceived, regulated and implemented often determines the success or failure of states. GoviB aims to contribute a historical case study to this broader question of what makes states stable or unstable, and how regime change fails or succeeds.
