Babylon

Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

De: Paul Kriwaczek

Narrado por: Derek Perkins

Civilization was born 8,000 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.

©2010 Paul Kriwaczek (P)2019 Tantor

Mesopotamia - the birthplace of cities

Listening to this book has been a real eye-opener for me. I have always had the perception that Egypt was where civilization as we know it originated and that the Greeks took what they had gathered from the Egyptians and expanded on that to form what we know of today as our democratic societies. I was aware that somewhere around the same time as the Egyptian kingdoms were flourishing that there were societies in the area of Mesopotamia, but never really had more than a fuzzy picture of what those societies actually were. This book goes into detail of how much of what we have credited the Greeks and Egyptians with were actually from Mesopotamia. For example, Pythagoras' formula for finding the length of the third side of a triangle was known in Mesopotamia a thousand years before Pythagoras lived.

I found this book to be well researched and written so as make it easy to follow the course of events as they happened in the various areas of Mesopotamia. The author did this in a way that included important personalities but did not focus solely on that; instead, including what life was like for the typical person, how the society functioned economically and administratively, how various migrations effected the make up and direction of a particular culture, and how for 2500 years Mesopotamia was a major center of the world for the birthing processes of human civilization. This book was a pleasure to listen to. The reader did a great job with a very clear and pleasant voice. I was successfully introduced to a world that I barely knew existed, and I'm very grateful to both the author and the reader for that.

Did not know how advanced the mesopotamian sicieties were

Great listening on ancient mesopotamia. Amazing heritage of our modern civilization in perfect amount of detail.

Fascinating

An amazing amount of scholarship went into this book and all of it perfectly narrated by Derek Perkins.

A great history listen.

Although fairly well-versed in modern history, I knew very little of really ancient history. This book serves as a good introduction and the reader makes it even better. I especially like how the author weaves in current events and archeological findings.

A very good performance of the narrator

That was a good performance of the narrator. great, but missed a bit more details that I would like to learn

Superb!

Brief Synopsis:
This book shows how Babylon emerged amidst the early experiments to unite people in various ways in the Fertile Crescent. Babylon is presented as the apogee of this pursuit by early man, yet first there was Eridu, Uruk, and Ur in the age of Gilgamesh. The Old Testament narrative unfolds in a sort of parallel timeline to that given by the various inscriptions discovered during archaeological digs. This is, a ‘charming’ book. Its assertions are never too incendiary, and are made with care. For example, climate change is mentioned as an occasional force driving change, yet Kriwaczek proceeds with a careful analysis that does not overweight such a factor as a driver of transformation. Marxist and early Free-Market theories of economics are each used to hypothetically consider an instance of an early ‘hero cult’ form of political organization, yet, Kriwaczek, rather than deferring to either approach, masterfully extracts the most salient elements from each, to produce his own novel articulation of a very nebulous religio-political ideation. This is not to suggest that Kriwaczek engages in pedantry or ‘complexity for complexity’s sake’, but instead to marvel at how Kriwaczek strives vigorously to characterize the emergence of cities by capturing all of the subtlety and complexity he can. This makes for a thorough, yet tidy analysis, that remarkably, makes for a fast-paced good read!

Personal Synopsis:
This book was interesting because it shows how Babylon emerges as the product of the clashes amongst early governmental-cultural conceptions following the coalescing together of cities. Groups, united by economic purpose within a variety of terrains, struggled against their neighbors in relation to scarcity. Then, as cities struggled to continue growing beyond various inevitable limitations, necessity being the mother of invention, political and religious ideology began to lend itself to leaders of various polities with varying degrees of success. The author presents these administrative experiments as a cascade, occurring amidst a backdrop of ebbs and flows of non-settled, rural peoples relegated to the periphery.

Amidst the emergence of such cities, Kriwaczek illustrates that, as most early peoples continued to be born into a stolidly rural existence, they were faced with the challenge of striving in the periphery to earn relevance and thus ascend to membership in these budding, nearby polities. Alas, as membership in such cities fluctuated in desirability, proportional to the size of the population within and availability of resources hereto, so also did competitiveness on the steppe fluctuate amidst its ever-burgeoning masses.

Thus, when cities needed or wanted for little trade within, and a small urban group was able to enjoy their abundance, blissfully ignorant of the strife and woes of those in nearby rural domains, such groups would, (necessity, again being the mother of invention) unite for having been driven to seek abundance with the sword.

Thus, we can see, as regional stakeholders, cogently and subconsciously began to imagine into being various coalescings together of people, these models became increasingly effective at uniting and focusing the various skills of an ever broader morass of individuals. The cities most effective at magnetizing people and their skills, and redirecting those skills into cooperative yet innovative pursuits on behalf of the broader urban group, enjoyed longevity, prosperity, and legacy. The less-skilled a city was at attracting, refocusing, and uniting whatever abilities rural candidates could offer, enjoyed more sporadic, tenuous existence of occasional or cyclical primacy, or perished due to the most basic of challenges.

A bit too academic

I'm sure that scholars of Mesopotemia and Babylon would enjoy this book more than I did. I was lost at times but still, the narrator is amazing and the topic is truly fascinating.

Good basic background

Enjoyable background on the Fertile Crescent and its cultures. I thought the narration was fine and the content made me want to know more.

Fantastic Overview of Mesopotamian civilization and its relevance

Some might be a bit disappointed at the lack of deep dives into Babylon itself, but this is unfortunately inevitable due to the fact that Babylon has sunk into groundwater.

However, this book does a better job of getting across the wonder of Mesopotamian civilization and its modern relevance than anything I've read. It really imparts up on the reader strong inoressions of the character of the societies in Mesopotamia and Assyria and gives an entertaining overview of its chronology, personalities, culture, and archeology.

very enjoyable, very accessible,

a lot of material that I didn't know about and might not have accessed otherwise