Visualizing the greatest metropolis in the ancient world requires the full powers of imagination. This is partly due to simple geology. The sun-hardened mud bricks favored by Babylon’s builders have ...

Recent events in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey recall ancient and equally dramatic events in Babylon and Mesopotamia, whose lands these countries now occupy. A magnificent storyteller and a careful historian ...

Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia cover a range of topics, from exorcising ghosts to uncovering the location of Noah’s Ark. Cuneiform tablet, c. 2nd–1st century B.C.E., Mesopotamia, probably ...

Most of Babylon city was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein on its historical foundations. (Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images) Of all the world's lost cities, none surely can compete for evocative splendour, ...

The August heat made Berlin feel like Baghdad. Inside the Pergamon Museum, and constructed specially for the travelling Babylon show, were narrow winding ways impenetrable to air conditioning. In ...

The sun hangs heavy over central Iraq in late afternoon, painting the ruins of Babylon in heat and light. Dust rises from the ground in soft clouds, carrying a faint scent that seems older than time ...

These ruins of the city of Babylon in Iraq date to the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 B.C.). A 22-inch-high basalt stela depicting Babylon’s king Nabonidus (r. 556–539 B.C.) shows him wearing a ...

This book discusses the alphabetic scribes (sēpiru) mentioned in Mesopotamian documents of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods - specifically, of the 6th-5th centuries BCE. The period in ...

The ancient site of Babylon in Iraq has undergone a lot of damage in recent years but archeologists hope it will still get special status. Babylon in ancient Mesopotamia was known as the site of one ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 2012. Pp. x, 310. Illus., maps, biblio., index. $27.99. ISBN: 9781250000071 Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization is a synthesis of the most recent ...