Babylon: The phoenix city

Throughout its history babylon was razed to the ground, its population starved in long siges and deported afterwards, but it bounced back to importance time and time again until 141 BC when it was destroyed for the last time.... what if it never was destroyed? would it simply be a tourists destination? would its presence and presumably surviving elements of its culture impact on the civilisations that would come to rule it (romans, Sassanids and arabs)???
 
I don't believe that Babylon was destroyed, it was just abandoned slowly over centuries. The Babylonian Chronicles of the Hellenistic Period show that city life continued well after the founding of Seleucia. Parts of the city were used as a quarry but it seems that time has been Babylon's greatest enemy. Most of the city is still there but it's buried and the Iraqi situation has been absolutely terrible for archaeology for decades now. Even by Roman times the majority of the city would have still been visible and standing.

If you're talking about a situation where Babylon remains an important city, then it pretty much butterflies history to the point where it's difficult to tell what would happen. Avoiding major PODs I think the best you could hope for would be Babylon surviving as a town on the site, but in that case significantly less of the ancient city will survive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Chronicles
 
wasn't part of the problem of Babylon (and lots of other ancient cities in the ME) climate change? So many people in one place for so long meant that forests nearby vanished, grazing lands became barren, etc., which meant that water sources were threatened as well. To survive, I'd think Babylon would have to go through periodic population reductions...
 
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