Dome

Second only to the Hanging Gardens, Babylon’s most famous monument was undoubtedly the great staged tower or ziggurat, Etemenanki, ‘the house that is the foundation of heaven and earth’, the source of the legend of the Tower of Babel. This was situated in a vast enclosure north of the Temple of Marduk. Nothing but the foundation of the tower was left when Koldewey began his excavation, since the ziggurat itself and much of the rest of Babylon were destroyed by the Achaemenid king Xerxes (reg 485–465 bc). It would appear that Alexander the Great had intended its restoration. Indeed his soldiers had cleared the ruins, their rubbish tip surviving (until the late 20th-century restorations at the site) in an artificial mound of brick rubble north of the Greek theatre. A nearby mound is believed to mark the site of Hephaistion’s funeral pyre. A theatre and a gymnasium, now restored, survive as visible symbols of the Greek presence.aerial view, remains of foundation