Babylon was taken by the Hittites, the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Macedonians. Each time it was sacked, absorbed, or reduced to a province. Each time it re-emerged as the cultural and religious centre its conquerors felt obliged to respect, and several of them chose to be crowned there.

This documentary is about why a city kept mattering long after it stopped holding power.

It begins with the setting: a flat alluvial plain with no stone, no timber, and no defensible terrain, where everything depended on canals and where the political map was therefore never stable for long. It covers the city's early rise under Hammurabi, and the law code that survives, which tells us less about justice than about how the state saw the people it governed.

The middle chapters cover the long centuries when Babylon was subordinate: the Kassite period, the Assyrian domination, and the destruction under Sennacherib followed by rapid rebuilding, which is itself the clearest evidence of what the city represented to the region.

Later chapters cover the Neo-Babylonian revival, the building programme under Nebuchadnezzar, the walls and gates and the temple complex, and the deportations that placed foreign communities inside the city. The documentary then covers the Persian conquest, and Alexander's plan to make Babylon a capital, abandoned when he died there.

The closing chapter covers the long decline as the rivers shifted and the canals silted, and the rediscovery by excavators in the late nineteenth century, who found the gate and shipped it to Berlin.

Narration is calm and unhurried, suitable for sleep. Where the record is thin or the chronology disputed, this is stated.