Biblical and classical scholarships’ knowledge on ancient Babylon is scanty and vague, and seeing ancient Mesopotamia as Babylon is unscholarly and baseless.

For more than two centuries and above, this land which Alexander found next to Gangetic plain and which Ptolemy has shown in his maps in a similar manner, could not be believed by biblical scholars even though the name of the Bible comes from the name of Byblos same as Babylon; it was Bubastis of Egyptian mythology, and Bahika and Balhika of Indian puranas.

Mesopotamia is different from Babylon; and Near East is again different from it. East marks Jerusalem, and Mesopotamia marks land of the King Mesh; it was also called Seir and as same as the land of the Edomites neighbouring to Shechem and Moab. Ras was situated in between Jerusalem and Babylon which was then capital of Cush or Kusha. It identifies the Third Heaven of the Bible and its history was history of ancient ascribes.

A reading of Felipe Rojas’s review of Mario Liverani’s book, Imagining Babylon: The Modern Story of an Ancient City. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records, in BMCR(2018.03.28), makes one feel how academic scholarship misleads itself and others by publishing a book like the one under this review .

‘How has the ancient Near Eastern city been imagined and visualized, studied and reconstructed over the past two hundred years’ can be seen from this book.

Archaeologists have captured the ownership of the classical geography.  The  ‘western perspective, according to which nearly all protagonists in “the modern story of the ancient city” are either European or American and were born after 1900’ is a nice statement that reflects the faulty areas of academic scholarship.

Historical approaches to the ancient Mesopotamian city in broad cultural contexts should be seen along with God Chemosh whose follower was King Mesh himself and whose seat of worship identifies Comar Island same as Qumran of the Bible.

Ancient texts marks Mesopotamian city in India only; and without studying Indian puranic literature, one’s biblical knowledge on Babylon cannot be seen as complete. Pali texts mention it as Baliharana.

It is very interesting to see how Max Weber, Gordon Childe, and Karl Polanyi exerted their influence on the study of ancient Mesopotamian cities which they find as same as Iraq. This made the wrong path to widen itself. Each and every classical scholar contributed something in  building of a false image of the classical world in Europe and in Middle East and few scholars even criticised ‘for stubbornly equating ‘ancient’ with ‘Graeco-Roman’ at the expense of Mesopotamian and all other available alternatives’.

There is no record of any early modern European traveler’s visit to ancient Mesopotamia. Scholars of British Museum who took interest in ancient Mesopotamia are all wrong who equate the present Iraq with this ancient city.

To see Babylon as an anti-city or a non-city ‘because it was too big, too empty, too centred on the palace, devoid of citizens and civic structure’ bears no sense of history. And again to hear that it was not a classical city sounds like a mad man’s utterances on the ancient world itself. Archaeologists’ ideas on Mari and Ugarit lack historical sense behind these two places. While the former explains the land of the moeris, the latter identifies the Serpent Plain or the Negev.

Assyriologists have done a great disservice to the history of Assyrians when they failed to understand that Assyrians were as same as the Seirs or the Lions’ people.

Ancient Babylon identifies the hermitage of Sage Valmiki where Sita lived after being removed by Rama from Ajodhya or House of Fama on the basis of a ‘rumour’. Lava and Cush were born here. Place where Sita lived came to be known as Sitabana or Strabon of the Eratosthenes. It was a place on the bank of the river Ras.