Visualizing the greatest metropolis in the ancient world requires the full powers of imagination. This is partly due to simple geology. The sun-hardened mud bricks favored by Babylon’s builders have ...

Recent events in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey recall ancient and equally dramatic events in Babylon and Mesopotamia, whose lands these countries now occupy. A magnificent storyteller and a careful historian ...

The sun hangs heavy over central Iraq in late afternoon, painting the ruins of Babylon in heat and light. Dust rises from the ground in soft clouds, carrying a faint scent that seems older than time ...

Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia cover a range of topics, from exorcising ghosts to uncovering the location of Noah’s Ark. Cuneiform tablet, c. 2nd–1st century B.C.E., Mesopotamia, probably ...

Most of Babylon city was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein on its historical foundations. (Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images) Of all the world's lost cities, none surely can compete for evocative splendour, ...

These ruins of the city of Babylon in Iraq date to the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 B.C.). A 22-inch-high basalt stela depicting Babylon’s king Nabonidus (r. 556–539 B.C.) shows him wearing a ...

The August heat made Berlin feel like Baghdad. Inside the Pergamon Museum, and constructed specially for the travelling Babylon show, were narrow winding ways impenetrable to air conditioning. In ...

This book discusses the alphabetic scribes (sēpiru) mentioned in Mesopotamian documents of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods - specifically, of the 6th-5th centuries BCE. The period in ...

Clay bricks from the building projects of ancient kings recorded a historical “map” of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, a new study has found. About 3,000 years ago, for reasons that aren’t well ...

Approximately 4,000 years ago, Babylonian emerged as one of the principal languages of ancient Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq) often described as the ...

New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 2012. Pp. x, 310. Illus., maps, biblio., index. $27.99. ISBN: 9781250000071 Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization is a synthesis of the most recent ...