[3] As his career and productivity increased, The Babylonian Marriage Market was shown at the Royal Academy, selling for 6,605 pounds,[3][6] the largest price a painting had ever been sold at the time.

[9] Holloway College notes that while this law was a significant improvement from the previous one, many women remained uncontented and demanded greater reform.

[10] Bohrer, a leading Art Historian and Archaeologist notes that The Babylonian Marriage Market was ground-breaking in Long's use of Western painting tradition and Eastern myth.

[11] The English artistic audience of the time had been exposed to Babylonian / Assyrian subject matter on a range of earlier occasions.

[11] These women are brides waiting to be auctioned off on the white stone stepped pedestal featured in the middle ground of the painting.

[19] Bohrer notes that the underlying event and subject of depiction is the alteration of women into commodity through the process of the market place sales system.

[25] She further observes that Long's painting however, is set in a building reminiscent of a modern auction house, the men gathering in a line, not a circle.

[10] The painting made its public debut at the Royal Academy in 1875, where it drew large crowds and won widespread acclaim.

[10] The silent film Intolerance (1916) includes a seven‐and‐a‐half‐minute scene closely based on this painting,[34][35] and it is recreated in the historical sequence in The Marriage Market (1923).

[3][17] Art critics of the period did not question Long's attention to archaeological detail and instead were primarily interested in the figures and narrative occurring within the setting.

[11] It has been noted that when the painting was originally displayed its meaning was ambiguous,[17] without clearly signalling endorsement or disapproval at the Babylonian ritual.

[20] Social theorist Sander Gilman puts forth that the painting is evident of how 19th-century European culture had internalised a conception of femininity and beauty that is distinctly racial.

[17] Media outlets at the time were aware that the work was not just a fable, but aimed to make an important comment on the status of women in the Victorian era.

[40] The painting was inspired by a passage in the Histories by Herodotus,[41] and the artist copied some of the images from Assyrian artefacts in the British Museum.

[43] The Graphic notes Long's enduring inspiration borne from myth and events from ancient History, especially those described by Herodotus.

[11] Bohrer reports that artists practising at the time, such as Ford and Long, used Babylonian/Assyrian artefacts that were newly available to them not in order to recreate the strict Babylonian setting, but rather as imaginative inspiration.

The motif of a carved stone with handle, probably of Elamite origin, and found in a foundation deposit of the Sumerian king A'annepada (circa 2500 BCE), was reused in the decoration of the white platform at the center of the painting.