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Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization, by Paul Kriwaczek
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Review
“The lively mixture of topicality, politics, history, myth and culture in this anecdote is typical of Babylon at its best.†―The Independent (UK) “Historical detail gives authority to this tale of human misery and military magnificence.†―The Times (UK) “Eloquent and consistently thought-provoking account of ancient Mesopotamia.†―Scotland on Sunday “An outstanding survey of a civilization that endured against great odds but has now essentially vanished.†―Booklist (starred) on Yiddish Civilisation“A landmark book.†―Library Journal on In Search of Zarathustra“Lively and fast-paced.†―Publishers Weekly on In Search of Zarathustra
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About the Author
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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Product details
Paperback: 338 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (March 27, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250054168
ISBN-13: 978-1250054166
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
81 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#90,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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