Pan-Babylonism

a school of bourgeois historiography that derived all the world’s cultures from Babylonia. It arose in the late 19th century and ceased to exist in the early 20th century. The pan-Babylonists, among them the German scholars H. Winckler, P. Jensen, and F. Delitzsch, asserted that Babylonia was the cradle of most of the world’s civilizations, including those of the Mediterranean, India, China, and South America. The groundlessness of this view was revealed by a number of scholars, among them the German F. X. Kugler.