Babylon was originally a Semitic Akkadian city dating from the period of the Akkadian Empire c. 2300 BC.
Originally a minor administrative center, it only became an independent city-state in 1894 BC in the hands of a migrant Amorite dynasty not native to ancient Mesopotamia. The Babylonians were more often ruled by other foreign migrant dynasties throughout their history, such as by the Kassites, Arameans, Elamites and Chaldeans, as well as by their fellow Mesopotamians, the Assyrians.
The remains of the city are in present-day Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, about 85 kilometres (53 mi) south of Baghdad, comprising a large tell of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city itself was built upon the Euphrates, and divided in equal parts along its left and right banks, with steep embankments to contain the river's seasonal floods.
Available historical resources suggest that Babylon was at first a small town which had sprung up by the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC (c. 2000 BC). The town attained independence as a small city state with the rise of the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in 1894 BC. Claiming to be the successor of the more ancient Sumero-Akkadian city of Eridu, Babylon, hitherto a minor city, eclipsed Nippur as the "holy city" of Mesopotamia around the time an Amorite king named Hammurabi first created the short lived Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC. Babylon grew and South Mesopotamia came to be known as Babylonia.