Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

By Paul Kriwaczek

In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of ancient Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements around 5400 BC, to the eclipse of Babylon by the Persians in the sixth century BC. He chronicles the rise and fall of dynastic power during this period; he examines its numerous material, social and cultural innovations and inventions: The wheel, civil, engineering, building bricks, the centralized state, the division of labour, organised religion, sculpture, education, mathematics, law and monumental building.

At the heart of Kriwaczek's magisterial account, though, is the glory of Babylon - 'gateway to the gods' - which rose to glorious prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi, who unified Babylonia between 1800 and 1750 BC. While Babylonian power would rise and fall over the ensuing centuries, it retained its importance as a cultural, religious and political centre until its fall to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Aug 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782395676

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.

Reviews for Babylon

[Piotr Obminski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Most of the history written today is a lot of 'facts' (often doubtful), some stats, plus a greater or smaller number of politically correct utterances... Something very useful perhaps as a source of information for a real historian, but sterile and quite often pretty boring as a final product. This is something different! An intelligent, inspiring, here and there a bit controversial from the 'purely scientific point of view' (lol)... A great book! Something that may stand on the bookshelf next to Robert Ardrey and Oswald Spengler.

My personal preference, whenever I have the chance, which sadly isn't so often, is to read something like this, more than one if possible, presenting differing views and intuitions, and then 'verify' those far-reaching and 'not necessarily absolutely scientific visions' against those 'scientific facts' in those simpler, less risk-taking works. Otherwise, in my humble opinion, without 40 years of studying some historical niche one has no great chance to understand much of history and will forever remain in that pitiful 'academic'. politically correct paradigm ruling today. (And how it works in real life everybody having eyes can clearly see for himself.)

History will never be strict science, 'cause there are no unequivocal patterns or repetitions, and still lots of people who should know better try to convince themselves and everybody else that it should and must be. But this book, as I already said, makes no such stupid error.

[bethanyinthetaiga · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.