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Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by [Kriwaczek, Paul]

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization Kindle Edition

by Paul Kriwaczek (Author)

79 customer reviews

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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.

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Length: 321 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

File Size: 3793 KB
Print Length: 321 pages
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (March 27, 2012)
Publication Date: March 27, 2012
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B00603KW4U
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Not Enabled

Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,515 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14 in Books > History > Ancient Civilizations > Assyria, Babylonia & Sumer
- #20 in Books > History > Ancient Civilizations > Mesopotamia
- #24 in Books > History > Middle East > Iraq

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Great introduction for an educated, but non-expert audience.

September 6, 2012

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The author uses a 'popular documentary' style, switching between current events/recent history, myths and stories, and the real meat of the book -- the history of ancient Sumeria and the Babylonians who followed them. I'd been searching for just such a book for quite a while. He makes a special effort to recreate a vivid sense of what life was like and discusses theories of how their first brilliant inventions were conceived and developed. The civilization is pretty much in full swing when he begins -- he does not spend much time in the development of agriculture, but still gives a brief overview of development from hunter-gathering, pastoralism, and early village life to full-blown urban civilization. I highly recommend the book.

56 people found this helpful

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If you like history, esp. of the ancient world, you should find this fascinating

April 1, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Almost went to four stars because the illustrations in the paperback edition were not as easy to read as they might have been. But, not the author's fault, and honestly, this guy is pretty amazing. He gives you a sweeping overview of something I know little about, though I had plenty of Latin and Greek in college. In fact, that is part of his point: the history of Mesopotamia was erased, partly because of the shift from cuneiform to the alphabet. That fact alone is worth the price of the book. If you like history at all, you'd have to like this book. Kriwaczek seems to know everything (where did he learn so much about so much?). And yet, he keeps it interesting. I get that it's a lot of history to get into one book, but it's hard to imagine telling such a long and complicated story any better than he does it.

4 people found this helpful

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Good summary for the non-scholar

April 20, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The history of Mesopotamia is a subject in which I've long had interest, but little education. I knew about the "Fertile Crescent" and had impressions from church and youthful Bible study. But I didn't know my Assyrians from my Amorites, my Akkadians from my Elamites. I didn't know anything about Ur (except that Abraham purportedly hailed fro there) or Uruk (arguably the first city to exist). I also didn't know what these cultures valued, believed, or of the little ways in which these rich cultures contributed to the civilizations that came after. They had myths, gods, commerce, agriculture, writing, political sophistication, and (beautiful) poetry, long before such things were recorded elsewhere. This book is a fantastic introduction to Mesopotamian history, and the kingdom best known to most of us -- Babylon. It also helps explain who these peoples may actually have been, as opposed to how they have been represented during the intervening centuries.

25 people found this helpful

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A Romp Through 2,500 Years of History

October 3, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Babylon by Paul Kriwaczek is certainly not modest in its choice of subject: Mesopotamian history from 3000 to 500 B.C. But it is somewhat like histories of Western civilization that begin with Athens and go on to describe post Cold War America and Europe. So many distinct cultures, so many technological innovations, so many dramatis personae that all one gets is a briefly drawn sketch of each era. For the non-specialist this may be sufficient. But for one who wants to take in the wafts from the Hanging Gardens it comes up somewhat short.

Kriwaczek likes to focus on the cultural gifts of the Babylonians. Thus not only cuneiform and the first multinational empire are Babylonian but also the modern notion of freedom, the wheel, monotheism, etc. It’s almost as if Kriwaczek was a cultural salesman trying to convince the reader that everything important in Western civilization is Babylonian in origin.

Questions like the Babylonian influence on Judaica are, however, barely touched upon. Similarly the cultural links between pre-Homeric Greece and Babylon are dismissed with a mere few sentences.

What one gets is an elegant plea for respecting the civilizations between the Tigris and Euphrates. What one does not get is a serious introduction to Babylonian civilization and its cultural descendants. For this reader this was somewhat disappointing but others may like this more cursory perspective. Those who want a deeper dive must still turn to more academic treatments.

One person found this helpful

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seeds of current events planted 4500 years ago

January 11, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This book shows how the distant past has much to teach us, and one thing that caught me by surprise was that the financial system was every bit as complex as ours (futures and all), and it's impressive because they did it without computers. A scribe was a combination lawyer/ banker drawing up contracts, and all they had was their memory, a stick and slabs of clay. Their free-wheeling economic system crashed and burned too, usually resulting in people having to sell themselves or other family members into slavery to cover their debts. Fortunately we have now have bankruptcy as an option and have done away with the slavery, but you can see that either way there is no happy ending. It's too bad this isn't widely known or maybe someone might have spotted the parallels with our own situation in time to avert trouble.

The book is packed with fascinating facts and you learn a lot about why the Middle East is the way it is. Some thinking that seems backward to us makes perfect sense when you find out the context and back-story; we still may not agree with it but at least we will understand it better. This should be a text book used in grade school when studying about the earliest civilizations instead of the boring stuff they're using now. I love history and reading but was put off this subject in school years ago due to the horrible text books, and only started reading about the period again after taking an art history course- the images drew me in. These people are interesting, and Mr. Kriwaczek makes it clear that there were some real characters. After all, history is the never-ending story of what actual people did, and it should be a crime to squeeze the life out of it. That's not a problem with this book and I enjoyed learning from it.

6 people found this helpful

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