After a siege of roughly eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar II's Babylonian army breached Jerusalem, burned the Temple of Solomon, the palace and the houses of the city, and pulled down its walls. The Judaean elite, craftsmen and administrators were deported in successive waves to Babylonia, where they were settled in rural and canal-side communities with names such as Al-Yahudu recorded on cuneiform tablets. Babylon itself was then the largest city in the world, with its processional way, Ishtar Gate and ziggurat, and the exiles lived inside an imperial metropolis of a scale Jerusalem never approached. After Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE, returning groups rebuilt the Temple and, under Nehemiah in the mid-fifth century, the city walls.
It is the founding episode of forced urban resettlement as an imperial technique, moving whole skilled populations to serve a capital, and of the diaspora community as a durable urban form. The exile and return also produced one of the oldest surviving narratives of deliberate city reconstruction, from wall survey to allocation of resettlers, that later European and colonial planners repeatedly invoked.
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