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Fall of Babylon

Babylonia was absorbed into the Achaemenid Empire in 539 BCE, becoming the satrapy of Babirush (Old Persian: 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽, romanized: Bābiruš).

A year before Cyrus' death, in 529 BCE, he elevated his son Cambyses II in the government, making him king of Babylon. He reserved for himself the fuller title of "king of the (other) provinces" of the empire. It was only when Darius I acquired the Persian throne and ruled it as a representative of the Zoroastrian religion, that the old tradition was broken and the claim of Babylon to confer legitimacy on the rulers of West Asia ceased to be acknowledged.

Immediately after Darius seized Persia, Babylonia briefly recovered its independence under a native ruler, Nidinta-Bel, who took the name of Nebuchadnezzar III, and reigned from October 522 BC to August 520 BC, when Darius took the city by storm, during this period Assyria to the north also rebelled. A few years later, probably 514 BC, Babylon again revolted under the Urartian king Nebuchadnezzar IV; on this occasion, after its capture by the Persians, the walls were partly destroyed. The Esagila, the great temple of Marduk, however, still continued to be kept in repair and to be a center of Babylonian religious feelings.

Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 333 BCE for the Greeks, and died there in 323 BCE. Babylonia and Assyria then became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire. It has long been maintained that the foundation of Seleucia diverted the population to the new capital of Lower Mesopotamia and that the ruins of the old city became a quarry for the builders of the new seat of government, but the recent publication of the Babylonian Chronicles has shown that urban life was still very much the same well into the Parthian Empire (150 BCE to 226 CE). The Parthian king Mithridates conquered the region into the Parthian Empire in 150 BC, and the region became something of a battleground between Greeks and Parthians.

There was a brief interlude of Roman conquest (the provinces of Assyria and Mesopotamia; 116–118 AD) under Trajan, after which the Parthians reasserted control.

The satrapy of Babylonia was absorbed into Asōristān (Middle Persian for "the land of Assyria") in the Sasanian Empire, which began in 226 CE, and by this time East Syriac Rite Christianity, which emerged in Assyria and Upper Mesopotamia the first century, had become the dominant religion among the Assyrian people, who had never adopted the Zoroastrianism or Hellenistic religion or the languages of their rulers.

Apart from the small 2nd century BC to 3rd century independent Neo-Assyrian states of Adiabene, Osroene, Assur, Beth Garmai, Beth Nuhadra and Hatra in the north, Mesopotamia remained under largely Persian control until the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century AD. Asōristān was dissolved as a geopolitical entity in 637, and the native Eastern Aramaic -speaking and largely Christian populace of southern and central Mesopotamia (with the exception of the Mandeans) gradually underwent Arabization and Islamization in contrast to northern Mesopotamia where an Assyrian continuity endures to the present day.