Babylonia derives it's name from the city Babylon. It was located in what is now southern Iraq. Babylonian literature was well developed in the 3rd millennium BC Records have been found of highly developed religion, history and science, including medicine, chemistry, alchemy, botany, zoology, math and astronomy. In the Old Testament it is called "Shinar," "Akkad" and "Sumer," as well as "the land of the Chaldeans."

The Babylonians lived in Mesopotamia, a fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

They developed an abstract form of writing based on cuneiform symbols. Their symbols were written on wet clay tablets which were baked in the hot sun and many thousands of these tablets have survived to this day. It was the use of a stylus on a clay medium that led to the use of cuneiform symbols since curved lines could not be drawn. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Babylonian's calculating skills was their construction of tables to aid calculation.

The Babylonians had an advanced number system, in some ways more advanced than our present system. It was a positional system with base 60 rather than the base 10 of our present system. Now 10 has only two proper divisors, 2 and 5. However 60 has 10 proper divisors so many more numbers have a finite form.

The Babylonians divided the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. This form of counting has survived for 4000 years.

The Babylonian Epic of Creation Enuma elish is written on seven tablets, each between 115 and 170 lines long. It was to be recited at the New Year festival in Babylon and reports about the success of the hero-god Marduk, the city-god of Babylon: how Marduk became the supreme deity, king over all gods of heaven and earth.