why does the Stage manager menton Babylon when he's discussing the time capsule?

In his unpublished preface to Our Town, Wilder wrote that since visiting ancient archeological sites in Rome, he often tried to look at the world around him through the eyes of a future civilization. "Babylon once had two million people in it," the Stage Manager says in his monologue halfway through the first act, "and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, -- same as here." (Never mind that there were no chimneys in Babylon.) Thus there is a commonality of human experience-from Babylon to Grover's Corners-which Our Town tries both to enact and to remember, as it were.