The Habsburg Dynasty: Life Without the Modern Concept of Nation-State

In the early years of the twenty-first century, some have called for an end to the nation-state, and an end to its role as the primary structuring element of the political world. Setting aside polemics - for or against this demand - the questions remain: How would the world appear without the nation-state? How would the world be organized? If the nation-state did not shape the geopolitical system, what would?

History gives us a clue. The nation-state is the union of ‘nation’ (i.e., an ethnic or cultural group) and ‘state’ (i.e., a geographically-defined territory with a government). The alternative to a nation-state, as A.J.P. Taylor writes, is a dynasty:

The Habsburg lands were not bound together either by geography or by nationality. They have sometimes been described as the lands of the valley of the Danube. How could this include the Netherlands, the Breisgau, and northern Italy? Or in the nineteenth century, Galicia, Bosnia, the Bukovina, and even Bohemia? The Habsburgs themselves were in origin a German dynasty. They added a first a Spanish and later an Italian element, without becoming anchored to a single region or people; they were the last possessors of the shadowy universal monarchy of the Middle Ages and inherited from it a cosmopolitan character. The inhabitants of Vienna, their capital city, were Germans; this was their nearest approach to a national appearance. In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people; in the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of the dynasty. The Habsburg lands acquired in time a common culture and, to some extent, a common economic character: theses were the creation, not the creators, of the dynasty. No other family has endured so long or left so deep a mark upon Europe: The Habsburgs were the greatest dynasty of modern history, and the history of central Europe revolves round them, not they round it.

The Habsburg Dynasty, although it survived well into the modern era, was in many ways the direct antithesis of the modern nation-state. The Habsburgs were supranational and supracultural. The citizens or residents of the Habsburg realm had only this one thing in common: they were the subjects of the dynasty.

Geographically, the dynasty could change its shape without changing its character, because its essence was not derived from the lands which it governed, nor from the cultures of the peoples of those lands.

The Habsburgs developed their own institutional culture, originating in and from the administrative needs of the monarchy, and imposed that pattern onto its varied holdings. To that extent, a Habsburg culture could be said to exist. But the regional influences - Bohemians and Magyars, Bavarians and Galicians and Slovakians - existed within monarchy.

Such local cultures were permitted, so long as they did not interfere with the management of the royal and imperial business. (In the matter of which languages would be used for official matters, cultural matters did threaten to interfere with dynastic administration. In those cases, heated debates and diplomatic maneuvering reached intense levels.)

For those who live in the early twenty-first century and who long for the end of the nation-state and its role in shaping the geopolitics of the planet, a look at nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary, i.e., a look at the workings of the Habsburg monarchy, offers a vision of how a world without nation-states might function.

When Liberty Nearly Triumphed: The Unimplemented Petition of Right

History offers a catalogue of freedom’s victories over the centuries and millennia: Hammurabi, Moses, Greco-Roman political thought, the Magna Carta, the Tübinger Vertrag, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the United States Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the United States Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation, to name only a few.

But freedom has also had some big defeats.

In 1628, the British Parliament was frustrated by King Charles I, who, like James I before him, claimed absolute authority for himself as monarch. Charles did violence to the concept of political liberty, which had been around since even before the Magna Carta of 1215.

Parliament wanted to defend the people’s freedom against an overly ambitious king. To do this, Sir Edward Coke, a leader in Parliament and a long-time supporter of limits on royal power, suggested that Parliament draft a document defining the rights of the people and defining curbs on the king’s power.

Coke, whose surname rhymes with ‘cook’ despite its spelling, supervised the assembly of a truly brilliant document, as historian John Barry writes:

Commons adopted Coke’s suggestion, and he was central in drafting the petition. It incorporated the earlier resolutions prohibiting forced loans, benevolences, or “any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent, in parliament.” It prohibited billeting soldiers in homes and the exercise of martial law in peace. It required honoring writs of habeas corpus. And it reaffirmed Magna Carta and associated statutes, reaffirmed the principle older than Magna Carta that “no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties … or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land … [and] that no man, of what estate or condition that he be, should be put out of his land or tenements, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law … no offender of what kind so ever is exempted from the proceedings to be used.”

England was on the verge of a major breakthrough: another increase in legal rights for citizens, another round of limitations on the royal government.

Both houses of Parliament approved the text. It was sent to Charles II for approval. Why would a monarch accept boundaries on his power? Charles needed Parliament to approve a budget to fund some of his military adventures on the continent. So there was a reason for him to agree, and a chance that he would.

But Charles at first refused to agree to the Petition of Right. After discussions, he begrudgingly agreed to it, but then almost immediately reneged.

The Petition of Right didn’t manage to achieve a significant increase of freedom for English citizens in 1628. It served a purpose, however, inasmuch as it cast a bright light on the king’s unwillingness to honor the people’s liberty.

The king’s refusal to embrace the Petition of Right was one of several causes which ultimately led to the English Civil War (1642 to 1651), and led to the king’s beheading.

Both the English Civil War and the abdication of James II (1688) laid the groundwork for the eventual adoption of the English Bill of Rights (1689). The ideas in the Bill of Rights were similar to the ideas in the Petition of Rights.

After these ideas were first proposed, it took an additional 61 years before the rights and liberties of the English people were finally codified.

Free Enterprise Fuels Human Dignity: ‘Natural’ Does Not Mean ‘Good’

Human nature tends toward favoritism and chauvinism. People are naturally partial toward those who are somehow similar to them: in terms of age, race, gender, income level, etc.

In short, human nature is not fair.

Our sense of justice — our idea that people should receive equal opportunities, have the right to express political opinions, and be able to bargain freely in economic situations — are in direct contradiction to human nature.

Justice is a learned behavior, as historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The idea that we should presume strangers are not only inherently trustworthy but also have innate dignity and rights does not come naturally to us. We have to be taught that — carefully taught. The free market is even more unnatural, because it doesn’t just encourage us to see strangers to be tolerated; it encourages us to see strangers as Customers.

Human nature, left unchecked, can and often does, veer into bigotry and racism.

But the free enterprise system nudges people away from bigotry and racism. The manager of a shoe store wants to sell shoes, and doesn’t care about the race, gender, income level, or age of the customers. The manager will also want to engender goodwill, and thereby repeat customers, for the shoe store, and will therefore will want to make sure that the customers are treated politely and have an enjoyable shopping experience.

The free market is antithetical to racism.

The invention of money was one of the greatest advances in human liberation in all of recorded history because it lowers the barriers to beneficial human interaction. It reduces the natural tendency to acquire things from strangers through violence by offering the opportunity for commerce. A grocer may be bigoted toward Catholics, Jews, blacks, whites, gays, or some other group. But his self-interest encourages him to overlook such things. Likewise, the customer may not like the grocer, but the customer’s self-interest encourages her to put such feelings aside if she wants to buy dinner. In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction.

The salutary forces of natural rights and limited government are confusingly called “liberalism” — more accurately, “classical liberalism,” which differs from left liberalism, social liberalism, neoliberalism, and modern liberalism.

Confusing terminology aside, limited government gives rise to free markets, and natural rights give rise to equal opportunity.

A strong and powerful government becomes the instrument of the sinister aspects of human nature: tribalism, sectarianism, ethnocentrism. A centralized and controlling government will divide people into categories, and assign priorities to those categories.

Natural rights speak to a person’s humanity — regardless of demographic variables — inasmuch as all humans desire to be free, regardless of gender, income level, race, or age. The desire for liberty is one of the few truly universal human values.

Cicero, Obama, and Romney: Campaigning for Office with Dirty Tricks

In March 2012, voters in the United States were worried about “smears and dirt” which the Obama campaign was preparing to use against whomever might be nominated to contest Obama’s incumbency. Mitt Romney was seen as the likely challenger.

Philip Freeman, a professor of classics, wrote at the time, giving historical perspective on the election:

It was a bitter and volatile campaign, with accusations of inconsistency, incompetence and scandal filling the air. Candidates competed to portray themselves as the true conservative choice, while voters fretted about the economy and war threatened in the Middle East. The year was 64 B.C., and Marcus Tullius Cicero was running for Roman consul.

Professor Freeman outlines advice given by Quintus, the brother of the famous Cicero. Quintus wrote, giving advice to his brother about how to run a successful campaign. Quintus was not shy, in the words of Freeman, giving advice that “would make Machiavelli blush.”

The advice given to candidate Cicero are relayed by Freeman in the form of five main points, wording them in ways which would be familiar to a twenty-first century U.S. voter:

1. Promise everything to everyone. Quintus says that the best way to win voters is to tell them what they want to hear: “Remember Cotta, that master of campaigning, who said he would promise anything, unless some clear obligation prevented him, but only lived up to those promises that benefited him.” As Quintus says, people will be much angrier with a candidate who refuses to make promises than with one who, once elected, breaks them.

2. Call in all favors. If you have helped friends or associates in the past, let them know that it’s payback time: “Make it clear to each one under obligation to you exactly what you expect from him. Remind them all that you have never asked anything of them before, but now is the time to make good on what they owe you.” If someone isn’t in your debt, remind him that if elected, you can reward him later, but only if he backs you now.

3. Know your opponent’s weaknesses — and exploit them. Quintus practically invented opposition research: “Consider Antonius, who once had his property confiscated for debt … then after he was elected as praetor, he disgraced himself by going down to the market and buying a girl to be his sex slave.” A winning candidate calmly assesses his opponent and then focuses relentlessly on his weaknesses, all the while trying to distract voters from his strengths.

4. Flatter voters shamelessly. Quintus warns his brother: “You can be rather stiff at times. You desperately need to learn the art of flattery — a disgraceful thing in normal life but essential when you are running for office.” A candidate must make voters believe that he thinks they’re important. Shake their hands, look them in the eye, listen to their problems.

5. Give people hope. Even the most cynical voter wants to believe in someone: “The most important part of your campaign is to bring hope to people and a feeling of goodwill toward you.” Voters who are persuaded that you can make their world better will be your most devoted followers — at least until after the election, when you will inevitably let them down.

It is not clear to which extent Cicero followed his brother’s advice, but Cicero did win the election decisively.

Cicero became known as the man who defended the Roman Republic against those who wanted to turn it into an empire — into a dictatorship. Cicero brilliantly articulated the virtues of a government consisting of freely-elected representative.

His political enemies were also willing to use “smear” political tactics against him: they accused Cicero of giving or receiving bribes. Historical evidence is not conclusive.

Cicero was popular: he received the title “father of his country” after the election. But his popularity could not save him from the dirtiest political trick of them all: assassination.

How sincerely Cicero spoke — whether he personally embraced republican ideals, or whether he merely voiced them in response to their popularity — remains debatable. But even if he spoke cynically, his formulations of freedom as the product of government by freely-elected representatives remain powerful and influential.

Happily, the U.S. election of 2012 did not result in assassination. Sadly, neither Obama nor Romney understood, liked, or trusted the concept of government by freely-elected representatives to the extent that Cicero did.

Babylon’s Ishtar Gate: Tangible History

Archeology is an enjoyable companion to History. In addition to reading accounts of what happened in the past, the student can see physical objects which were part of those events. This makes History palpable.

Many texts tell of the Babylonian Exile, during which time many Israelites were taken prisoner, and transported from the area around Jerusalem to Babylon, where they became slaves. This happened roughly between 609 B.C., when the first groups of captives left the Jerusalem area, and 538 B.C., when the captives started leaving Babylon to return to their homeland.

Today, students can see the gates which were part of the wall which surrounded the city of Babylon at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. They are located in a museum in Berlin, as historians Joachim Marzahn and Klaudia Englund write:

Today the most famous buildings of Babylon are the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate. They were situated at the northern limits of the old city, where access had been confined by the outer walls of the palaces. The road was thus bordered on both sides by walls and town planners were afforded the opportunity to decorate the course of the street with a frieze of glazed bricks. The choice of decoration was determined by the New Year's Festival. On the eleventh day of the festival the procession of gods followed the street on its way from the outer festival house to the temples in the center of Babylon. Building inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II point explicitly to this fact. The visitor to Babylon saw two rows of striding lions - symbols of the goddess Ishtar - before he arrived at the gate. In a stretch of ca. 180 m were once 120 lions, 60 on each side.

The Ishtar gate was built approximately between 605 B.C. and 562 B.C., meaning that the Isrealites were present in the city at the time of construction. Some of the Israelites may have assembled the gates; certainly, they saw it.

The walled street canyon was 20 m wide and 250 m long. This enclosed part of the Processional Way was, however, shorter than its continuation to the corner of the Etemenanki sanctuary, where it turned off and ended at the bridge over the Euphrates. Destination and high point of the outer part of the city was the Ishtar Gate. Integrated into the procession course, it had been furnished with colored reliefs, here covering the complete outer wall. Erected in three building stages, the uppermost level displayed colored representations of dragons and bulls, the symbols of the gods Marduk and Adad. In the Vorderasiatisches Museum, only parts of this installation have been reconstructed: about 30 m of street walls 8 m apart, as well as the smaller city gate with its two flanking towers. From countless fragments, the animals of the relief have here been pieced together with some parts of the walls, showing that the reconstruction largely matches the original.

To stand in Berlin and see the Ishtar gates is to see the same physical objects which Ezra and Nehemiah, and many others, saw more than 2,000 years ago. Such tangible history complements the primary texts which are the foundation of History.

The Habsburgs: A Most Enduring Dynasty

It would be oversimplification to the point of error to say that the history of Europe is the history of the rivalry between the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollern. Such a proposition ignores the Bourbons and the Plantagenets, the Stuarts and the Windsors.

The Habsburgs may, however, claim the significance of having reigned and otherwise exerted influence over a longer span of time and over a greater area of territory than any of these other royal families.

The founder of the dynasty is generally understood to be Count Radbot, who constructed a castle in Switzerland around the year 1020. The genealogy of the family goes back several generations earlier, but with Radbot begins the name and the claim to various titles.

The last official claim of the family to power ended with World War I, but even so, the current Prince of Liechtenstein, Hans-Adam II, has Habsburg elements in his bloodline. So, to this day, the Habsburgs are ruling Europe.

This dynasty has over a millennium of accumulated reign.

The territories over which the Habsburgs ruled changed constantly over the course of that millennium. When they emerged onto the world stage, the map of Europe had none of the modern nation-states which now determine it. Instead, it was a patchwork quilt of many smaller kingdoms. The Habsburgs built empires by collecting those kingdoms into alliances of various types.

At times, the Habsburg have ruled in part or in whole regions which we now identify as Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Portugal, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and others.

As the Habsburg lands expanded and contracted over the centuries, the most famous Habsburg empire was the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), which they ruled from 1415 until its demise in 1806.

The HRE was a loose coalition: the emperor did not have the absolute powers of the earlier Roman emperors or of the later French absolutist monarchs. He could implement his policies only by achieving a consensus among the ‘Electors,’ a group of princes called the Kurfürsten, of whom there were six.

After the HRE, the Habsburg exerted their influence via the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That they maintained a dynastic rule well into the industrial age made them anachronistic, as historian Alan John Percivale Taylor writes:

The Empire of the Habsburgs which was dissolved in 1918 had a unique character, out of time and out of place. Metternich, a European from the Rhineland, felt that the Habsburg Empire did not belong in Europe. “Asia,” he said, “begins at the Landstrasse” - the road out of Vienna to the east. Francis Joseph was conscious that he belonged to the wrong century. He told Theodore Roosevelt: “You see in me the last monarch of the old school.”

The nature of the Habsburg Dynasty sheds light on a twenty-first century concern. Some political scientists have wondered what the world would look like if the nation-state, in our modern understanding of the term, was not the defining unit of the globe.

The world of the Habsburgs was not structured by the nation-state, and the Habsburgs were not the least bit nationalistic. In fact, they were opposed to nationalism. The Habsburgs were not Austrian, Spanish, or German; they were not Hungarian, Bohemian, or Czech. They were simply the Habsburgs. They were not identified by any particular language, culture, or geographical region.

The Habsburgs were identified by their bloodline, and their business was the dynasty. They were not interested in establishing or sustaining any particular territory or culture. They were interested in maintaining themselves.

To this end, their dominion was known primarily not by names like ‘Austria’ or ‘Spain,’ but rather simply ‘the lands of the Habsburgs,’ as A.J.P. Taylor writes:

The collection of territories ruled over by the House of Habsburg never found a settled description. Their broad lines were determined in 1526, when Ferdinand, possessing already a variety of titles as ruler of the Alpine-Germanic lands, became King of Bohemia and King of Hungary: yet for almost three hundred years they had no common name. They were “the lands of the House of Habsburg” or “the lands of the [Holy Roman] Emperor.” Between 1740 and 1745, when the imperial title passed out of Habsburg hands, Maria Theresa could only call herself “Queen of Hungary,” yet her empire was certainly not the Hungarian Empire. In 1804, Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, saw his imperial title threatened by Napoleon and invented for himself the title of “Emperor of Austria.” This, too, was a dynamic name; the Empire was the Empire of the House of Austria, not the Empire of the Austrians. In 1867 the nation of Hungary established its claim to the partnership with the Emperor; and the Empire became “Austria-Hungary.” The non-Hungarian lands remained without a name until the end.

Those who wonder about how the world would look after the demise of the concept of the nation-state might consider how the world looked prior to the rise of the nation-state. A world without a nation-state is the world of the Habsburgs, and the rise of the nation-state was the fall of the Habsburgs.

The Habsburgs were a world-historical force. Those nations not directly shaped by the dynasty were nonetheless indirectly shaped by it: England and Scandinavia, for example.

Yet most of the Europe was directly shaped by the Habsburgs, and their imprint remains to this day on the continent, and with it, on civilization as a whole. It is difficult to overstate the lingering influence of the Habsburgs up to the present time. Where their influence fades, it is often the case that civilization and humanity itself also fade.

To be sure, the Habsburgs were not perfect. Their courts were filled with intrigue, deception, power brokering, manipulation, and a host of other sins. Yet they remain a high point of human civilization, and as such, a reminder that humanity at its very best is still deeply flawed.

Without sycophancy it can be said that the Habsburgs were great and their reign glorious.

Michael Faraday and History of Science: A Creative Tension Between the Mathematical and the Intuitive

The principles of electromagnetism are essential to nearly all technology, science, and industry in the early twenty-first century. The world’s digital computing and communication systems are founded on the laws of electromagnetism, and both impossible and unimaginable without those laws.

Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in England, and his discoveries, both in the field of chemistry and in the field of electromagnetism, have shaped and built much of the world’s current and future technology.

Faraday’s scientific thought was both unique and yet founded on the work of scientists who lived prior to him. His uniqueness lies, in part, in the manner in which he conceptualized his investigations.

While electromagnetism is an inherently mathematical discipline, Faraday proceeded mainly along intuitive lines, visualizing fields as shapes rather than as equations. His written works, both published and unpublished, contain many drawings and sketches, and sometimes surprisingly few mathematical formulas.

Two of Faraday’s followers, Williams Thomson and James Maxwell, considered it their task to translate Faraday’s results into the quantified language of science.

Like Einstein a century later, Faraday made his discoveries on an intuitive level. Those discoveries had then to be repackaged into the language of mathematics, as Alan Hirshfeld writes:

In February 1854, Maxwell wrote to William Thomson, who had first “mathematized” Faraday’s lines of force, and asked for a readling list of great works on electricity and magnetism. Maxwell sought a path toward the observed phenomena untrammeled by doctrinaire thinking or mathematical abstraction. He wished to avoid what he termed “old traditions about forces acting at a distance” and instead tackle the subject without prejudice. Although Thomson’s reply is lost, there is no doubt about his prime recommendation, for soon Maxwell was immersed in Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity. It didn’t take him long to realize that this was truly “a first step in right thinking.”

Faraday did his work at a time when physicists and chemists were making discoveries in large quantities. The observational and empirical natural sciences had been primed for growth by worldviews worked out in previous centuries.

The debt of modern science to the Middle Ages lies in the medieval view that there was a rational - and therefore mathematical - structure to the universe. Algebra and geometry are not only self-contained consistent systems of thought, but rather also express themselves in the mechanics of the universal.

The laws, and lawlike regularity, of motion demonstrate a rational ubiquity in the universe. On the macro scale as well as the mico - from the motions of planets and stars to the behavior of microscopic dust particles, mathematical reasoning manifests itself as the skeleton of the physical world.

The work of Thomas Bradwardine reveals how this medieval foundation underlies modern physics. Bradwardine explained how acceleration, specifically gravitational acceleration, is mathematically explained by exponential growth. In the 1300s - Bradwardine died in 1349 - he was giving an algebraic explication of the ‘Law of Falling Bodies,’ as it came to be called.

By the time of Michael Faraday, this view of the empirical sciences was becoming an almost unconscious assumption within European culture: that it was an assumption that the study of chemistry and physics was informed by algebra and geometry.

At a young age, his education still in very much in process, Faraday focused on electromagnetism. Alan Hirshfeld, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, writes:

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, science and its institutions were in flux, spurred as much by new discoveries as by the growing belief that scientific research might enhance a nation’s agricultural and industrial development. The fundamental building blocks of matter - atoms - were as yet unknown. Electricity, magnetism, heat, and light were variously “explained,” none convincingly. Through careful measurement, the mathematical character of nature’s forces could be determined, but their underlying mechanisms, interrelationships, and means of conveyance through space were subjects of dispute. Faraday plunged headlong into the melange of ideas, trying with his meager knowledge to sort out fact from fancy. All around was God’s handiwork, in plain sight, yet inextricably bound up in mystery, a seemingly limitless horizon of possibilities for off-hours study.

Eventually, Faraday’s knowledge would no longer be ‘meager’ and would enable him to make the discoveries and formulate the laws which then generated nearly all of the world’s modern electronic technology.

As an adult, Faraday took on leadership roles as his knowledge and education grew. Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, writes:

Throughout his long and productive life, Michael Faraday was also a committed Christian. Not a social church-goer - although he spent more hours in a pew than any of us are likely to; not just a conforming member of a “Christian” society - although he lived in a society which saw itself as Christian; on the contrary, he belonged to a distinctly nonconformist denomination, which demanded from its members an extremely high level of commitment and devotion: the Sandemanians. Moreover, in addition to his lifelong lay involvement, he acted for significant periods of his career as co-pastor (strictly ‘Elder’) of the London congregation of which he was a member. During those periods he preached (or rather, exhorted) in the services and undertook the spiritual oversight and pastoral care of the people in the congregation.

The synonymous words ‘Sandemanian’ and ‘Glasite’ (or ‘Glassite’) are usually used to describe Faraday’s thought.

The brilliance of Faraday’s work in electromagnetism may arise, in part, from the tension which exists between the absolute necessity of mathematics for his work, and his inclination to express both laws and observations intuitive concepts and images rather than formulas and equations.

The Same Thing, Only Different: The Babylonian Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire

Sorting out the history of Babylonia is not easy. The city of Babylon began as a small town in the Akkadian Empire. Gradually, the city grew in importance, and eventually became a seat of power for the Akkadian Empire or for its successor empires.

Under the famous King Hammurabi, Babylon achieved its own empire, and flourished in the 1700s and 1600s B.C. (These dates are approximations; scholars debate the exact timing of Babylonian chronology.)

The Babylonian Empire came to an end, and Babylon was sacked. The city was subject to alternating waves of invasions, interspersed with attempts to re-establish its own political independence. Finally, it was under Assyrian rule from the 900s to the 600s B.C.

As scholars Joachim Marzahn and Klaudia Englund write,

The beginnings of Babylon lay in the 3rd millennium B.C. Only at the beginning of the 2nd millennium, however, does a dynasty of Babylonian kings become evident, constantly contesting neighboring states for the rule of Mesopotamia. King Hammurabi (1792-1750) eventually succeeded in uniting into one empire the lands from the region of the Persian Gulf all the way to eastern Syria. At the beginning of the first millennium B.C., Babylon was under Assyrian rule. Following the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in 612, Babylon once more became a capital. The so-called Neo-Babylonian Empire, whose most important kings were Nabopolassar (625-605) and Nebuchadnezzar (605-562), comprised the entire cultivated land and the steppe regions of the Near East west of the Tigris. From all parts of the empire, booty and tribute as well as merchandise flowed into the city and formed, next to an enormous agricultural income, the base of its wealth, which was to find its architectural expression in buildings of a hitherto unknown scale. But already in 539 the Persians conquered the country, and Babylon lost its significance. In the course of the following centuries the city was slowly deserted.

Babylon managed to free itself from Assyrian rule in 626 B.C., but its freedom was never secure, being constantly threatened by not only the Assyrians, but other military powers in the region as well. This independence was short-lived, and in 539 B.C., Babylon fell to the Persians, never to be an imperial power again.