City
Babylonia
Babîl ~ Hillâ, بابل
Listen to the story
Written in red letters and with no picture beside it, Babylonia marks a whole region rather than a road station. The name means the land of the city of Babylon, and the map also names the city itself with exactly the same word, so the two are easily confused. The region is the flat river country of the lower Euphrates and Tigris in Iraq, around the ruins of Babylon near Hilla. Greek writers took the name from a Persian province and handed it on to the Romans, who knew the land for its grain and its famous date palms. The label is easy to miss, and one scholarly index of the map overlooked it entirely.