the great temple of Bel, however, still continued to be kept in repair and to be a center of Babylonian religious feelings. Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 333 BC for the Greeks, and died there in 323 BC. 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 southern 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 BC to 226 AD). 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 (meaning The land of the Assyrians in Middle Persian) in the Sasanian Empire, which began in 226 AD, and by this time East Syriac Rite Syriac Christianity (which emerged in Assyria and Upper Mesopotamia the first century AD) had become the dominant religion among the native Assyrian-Babylonian populace, who had never adopted the Zoroastrianism or Hellenic religions and languages of their rulers. Apart from the small 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD 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 AD, 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. Culture Bronze Age to Early Iron Age Mesopotamian culture is sometimes summarized as "Assyro-Babylonian", because of the close ethnic, linguistic and cultural interdependence of the two political centers. The term "Babylonia", especially in writings from around the early 20th century, was formerly used to also include Southern Mesopotamia's earliest pre-Babylonian history, and not only in reference to the later city-state of Babylon proper. This geographic usage of