Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization Paperback – Illustrated, March 27, 2012

Extremely interesting and well written history! Going back before 4,000 BC; speaking of Gilgamesh and The Flood and how civilization developed into Babylon and Assyria. Black and white maps and photos. Highly recommend!!

This is a decent book on the origins of civilization. A little long for me. Too secular for me. But it is a good read and is sometimes disturbing in that civilizations and kingdoms pass away unnecessarily, except they simply ran out of reason to exist. Much like the way the world is going today. Western civilization is weakening for no reason at all except lethargy and ingratitude fed and led by the American left with its arrogant soul searching emptiness.

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.

What a great book! I learned so much. I started with Frahm’s book Assyria, and then moved on to this one. It was a very fun way to learn about Mesopotamia and the birth of empire.

I purchased the Kindle version of this book in 2017. I was looking for something about the beginnings of civilization. For me, the book turned out to be a real snoozer, mostly owing to the tidal wave of historical gobbledygook. Not what I was hoping for in learning about Mesopotamian beginnings and everyday life. So, I put the book aside. However, earlier this year, an audiobook version of the book was offered by Audible. Thought I would give it a try. I listened to the audio narration while reading the Kindle version. This time, I got through the book. While the underlying research was impressive, the presentation was still historical gobbledygook. One huge annoyance was that the Kindle version did not provide the photos (20) that the author was describing in his explanation. I had to search for the photo being described on another device – i.e., a true multimedia approach to reading a single book. I agree with the reviews that found the book too wide and too shallow. Hard to understand why a book entitled “Babylon” did not offer a single word about its famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world (I did a search of the book). This book was not for me. I do not recommend it.

As far as a history book goes this is great. However, with the title Babylon and a subtitle Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization it is quite deceptive. The book only dealt with the Babylon of the 6th and 7th century BC in half of the final chapter. I kept looking at the number of pages left and wondering when he was going to get to the reason I bought the book.All that to say that it was a book about Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization with a quick mention of Babylon towards the end.I like history and as far as Mesopotamia goes it was a great book. However I gave it four stars because of the deceptive title. Now I'll have to find another book about Babylon, because I really didn't learn much about the Babylon most people think of when you talk about Babylon.

This is an excellent survey of ancient Mesopotamian civilisation, from its beginnings 5000 years ago until the occupation of Babylon by Cyrus of Persia. Kriwaczek writes in an erudite journalistic style that is a pleasure to read. The author uses major historical events to provide a kind of narrative tension, and between these he draws on many different sources to recreate detailed impresssions of ancient daily life, including excerpts from the actual stories, myths, epic poems and letters preserved on steles and clay tablets. The result is a remarkably well paced overview of human civilisation as an arc, passing through different societies over thousands of years. The book itself is a very satisfying read, but it also concludes with a long annotated reading list, for those want to explore specific topics in more detail.* Note that the Kindle edition has all of the maps (there are 8 of them) but none of the photo illustrations, which is really a pity. And I can't imagine why it should have been so difficult to include them: even a low-res black & white photo would be enough to give first-timers like me an idea of what a ziggurat looks like, for example. But the text of the book still reads well enough without them.