The Babylonian Origins of Trier

Isidore of Seville complains: ‘Concerning the question of by whom a city was founded, disagreement is a common thing, so that even the origin of the city of Rome cannot be established with certainty’.1 In Trier, the memory of the fact that the city was temporarily one of the capital cities of the Roman Empire led to the construction of a legendary prehistory which was to surpass that of all cities, except perhaps Rome, with age and grandeur. This circumstance is well known and has often been investigated. In this contribution I will summarize how the legend of the founding of Trier developed in the course of the Middle Ages and how the humanists of the Renaissance reacted to it; finally, I will touch upon the rather delicate question of the ideas of architectural history behind such an early dating.