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    Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
    Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
    Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
    Audiobook12 hours

    Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

    Written by Paul Kriwaczek

    Narrated by Derek Perkins

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Civilization was born eight thousand years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place.

    In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period and explores the political and social systems, as well as the technical and cultural innovations, which made this land extraordinary. At the heart of this book is the story of Babylon, which rose to prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi from about 1800 BCE. Even as Babylon's fortunes waxed and waned, it never lost its allure as the ancient world's greatest city.

    Engaging and compelling, Babylon reveals the splendor of the ancient world that laid the foundation for civilization itself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 27, 2019
    ISBN9781541404588
    Author

    Paul Kriwaczek

    PAUL KRIWACZEK was born in Vienna. He travelled extensively in Asia and Africa before developing a career in broadcasting and journalist. In 1970, he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced, and directed for twenty-five years. He also served as head of Central Asian Affairs at the BBC World Service. He is the author of Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Award, as well as In Search of Zarathustra: The First Prophet and the Ideas that Changed the World.

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    Reviews for Babylon

    4.5/5

    131 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was a really great journey, and the author did a fantastic job of bringing different regions and times and people together. It was amazing to see how all of these familiar ancient cities layered and coexisted. It was written in a very informative but entertaining style, and the narrator was very pleasant to listen to.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book laid a great foundation for understanding the earliest written history of man and civilization.
    • 5/5
      Es un libro para oírlo o leer poco a poco y así poder saborear y asimilar toda la información
    • 4/5
      By some quirk, many Westerners habitually think of the Nile Valley in Egypt as the birthplace of civilization. I may be projecting a little, but until not too long ago, I operated from that point of view. With only slightly more exposure to archeology, we learn that that honor belongs to Mesopotamia. In a highly readable, persuasive text, Paul Kriwaczek recounts the beginning of what’s called the Urban Revolution, through the multiple cultures and empires that arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to a final absorption by Cyrus the Great of Persia in about 323 BCE.Near the shore of the Southern Sea, what we now call the Persian Gulf, many miles north of its current location, at some point prior to 4000 BCE, some people thought about the earth in a new way. Rather than try to adjust to seasonal and annual lotteries of rainfall, flood, and drought, they decided they would become the earth’s master, and improve it to further their own ends. So at a place called Eridu, they built a permanent edifice, visible above the sandy and windswept expanse of the surrounding steppe, a shrine to kingship which had descended from heaven. It was the first permanent signal of a modern human culture still alive in various ways and manifestations today.Called the Urban Revolution, the making of cities was actually the least of this sea change in human affairs. As Kriwaczek says, With the city came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labour, organized religion, monumental building, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics and law, not to mention a vast array of new inventions and discoveries, from items as basic as wheeled vehicles and sailing boats to the potter’s kiln, metallurgy, and the creation of synthetic materials. And on top of all that was the huge collection of notions and ideas so fundamental to our way of looking at the world, like the concept of numbers, or weight, quite independent of actual items counted or weighed, that we have long forgotten that they had to be discovered or invented. Southern Mesopotamia was the place where all that was first achieved.Kriwaczek provides his stamp on his history, asking us to update our understanding of ancient civilized humans—what they believed, what they aspired to, how they reacted to stresses. Much of his narrative is given over to successive empire builders, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, and the Assyrians, among others, and to who was skilled and who bungled archeological digs, and how Assyrian and Babylonian geopolitics is reflected in the various books of the Old Testament.If you are interested in Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, this is an excellent entry point. Written by a lay person for lay people, it is a very useful and concise recap of the fateful moment when people decided to socialize in permanent settlements, and the broad sweep of human history which followed. There are probably other, more detailed speculations about Babylon’s precincts, architecture, and plan, but they will be just that, speculations. As Kriwaczek laments, the truly glorious city was wiped away in a flood, and its foundations are lost to history.
    • 2/5
      I've wanted to read something about ancient Mesopotamia for quite some time and after looking through reviews I decided on this book due to its "accessibility". Retrospectively perhaps I should have looked for something a bit more "academic". The author, irritatingly in my opinion, constantly kept trying to throw in analogies to more current times -- you could hardly get through two pages without a comment on how a particular phenomenon was similar to the USSR or England during the Industrialization, ect. I am content with my knowledge of those times - just tell me about the Mesopotamians already! Research on the author shows he was a well know documentary writer, I feel that this lead to a lot of his stylistic approach. I suppose your opinion of this book more or less boils down to how you like history presented to you -- I just prefer something more along the traditional academic history framework.