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 ...

In world history class, students often learn that human civilization arose in Mesopotamia — the so-called "Fertile Crescent" — and in the same breath, many teachers dive into the history of Babylon.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Bible paints an unflattering portrait of Babylon as a corrupt civilization cursed by ambition, excess and power-hungry kings. In the Book of Genesis, its residents build the Tower of Babel in a ...

The dissolution of the colonial creation named “Iraq” is now almost complete. Perhaps what comes next is a return to the past; not a brutal Islamic “caliphate,” but something more basic. Today, ...

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 ...