Babylon - Paul Kriwaczek

   2010; 283 pages.  Full Title: Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilisation (sic).  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Mesopotamia; History; Ancient History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

   Without a doubt, my favorite class in 7^th grade was History, more specifically, World History, Part One.  The details are hazy, it’s been a few decades, but I do remember learning bits and pieces about a place called Mesopotamia, aka “The Cradle of Civilization”, the land in Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  Here’s what I recall.

 

    First there were the Sumerians.  Who got conquered by the Akkadians.  Who got conquered by the Babylonians, followed by the Assyrians.  Or maybe vice versa. Or maybe both.  Then the Persians conquered everybody.  Then Alexander the Great kicked the Persians' butts, and that was the end of the Mesopotamian empires.

 

    They wrote on clay tablets in something called cuneiform, a strange writing consisting of grooves.  One of the kings was named Hammurabi, who wrote some famous laws.  “An eye for an eye” and all that.  They built terraced pyramid-like things called ziggurats.  A king named Nebuchadnezzar figures in there somewhere, and they liked to use a “bas-relief” style in their architecture.  Don’t ask me why I remember that last bit.

 

    That’s about it, which is kind of embarrassing since I consider myself a history buff, with emphasis on the ancient stuff.  That's why I decided to read Paul Kriwaczek’s book, Babylon.

 

What’s To Like...

    The book is divided into ten chapters, the first of which gives an introductory overview.  Chapter 2 is devoted to “Before 4000 BC”, with each subsequent chapter moving straightforwardly up the timeline, culminating with chapter 10, dealing with “After 700 BC”.   Paul Kriwaczek considers the Persian conquest to be the end of the story.  To me the “European” triumph by Alexander the Great seems a more logical stopping point, but hey, that’s splitting hairs.

 

    The writing style is what I call “scholarly”, with long sentences and big words, and I liked that.  The text is written mostly in English, but sometimes in American, kind of like somebody made half an effort to accommodate us Yanks.  So you have an extra “u” in “colours”, but the “z” spelling of “recognize”.  Weirdly, it’s “civilization” throughout the text EXCEPT for the cover page (see above) where it’s “civilisation”.  Go figure.

 

    Paul Kriwaczek mostly presents what we know about each era based on the available archaeological evidence.  He points out that we’ve barely scratched the surface in this regard: most of the known archaeological sites have not yet been excavated, and only fraction of the million or so cuneiform documents have been studied and translated.  It is a tremendous asset that we can decipher cuneiform, but apparently many of the glyphs can have multiple meanings, which muddies the translating.

 

    Cuneiform tablets have one major advantage over writing on papyrus: the latter disintegrates with time when it’s buried in desert sands, but clay tablets don’t degrade at all.  So there are a surprising number of cuneiform documents still around (albeit, often in pieces), with all sorts of topics to read about, such as:

    Chemistry: how to artificially make lapis lazuli

    Mathematics: how to calculate in a base-60 numbering system (wowza!)

    Agriculture: the best way to grow crops (kind of a Farmer’s Almanac)

    Baking: recipes for making pastries

    Beer: some Babylonian drinking songs (really!)

 

    Babylon added depth to my Mesopotamian history knowledge.  For instance, Sumer and Akkad both had a much more profound and long-lasting impact on the area's culture than I thought.  They had a well-developed sewage-disposal system early on, told elaborate stories on vases, and believed the entire world floated on a huge freshwater lake.  Now I can’t wait to teach my drinking buddies some Babylonian booze songs.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 365 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.94/5 based on 1,421 ratings and 166 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Numinous (adj.) : having a strong religious or spiritual quality.

Others: Fossicking (v.); Caesura (n.); Dirigiste (adj.); Laissez-Passer (n.); Chowkidar (n.); Entrepot (n.); Clowder (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    This elite class could not appear in society while stone technology was still the mainstream.  Stone is an egalitarian material.  Even the special varieties needed for tool-making are found widely distributed, and by long tradition going back to the beginning of the genus Homo, each household made its own tools.  There were always, no doubt, specialists who excelled at the manufacture of particular items, but in the main, making stone tools was seen as a private, domestic activity.

    The introduction of metal-working changed all that.  (loc. 2023)

 

    Though fallacious, the belief in omens tells us something important about the Babylonians’ outlook.  They saw the world as based on laws and rules: if this occurs, then that is likely to follow.  To them events did not take place, as some religious believers hold even now, because God or the gods arbitrarily decreed from moment to moment that they should.  Babylonians did not think, as even modern Kabbalists do, that the world only exists from day to day by a miracle.  Rather they noted that there was an underlying order and logic to the universe, which careful observation had the power to disclose.  Today we call that science.  (loc. 3435)

 

Kindle Details…

    Babylon sells for $11.99 at Amazon.  Paul Kriwaczek has three other e-books books, two of which are also history-oriented, the third being about how to make a film documentary.  These range in price from $6.99 to $63.99.  That high-end price is for the documentary book.

 

When, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, our civilization finally lies dying in the gutter, some of us will still be looking, as the ancient Mesopotamians taught us to do, at the stars.  (loc. 4879, and the closing sentence of the book)

    My quibbles mostly concern some technical shortcomings in the e-book version.

 

    There’s a detailed index in the back of the book, but since there aren’t any links or page numbers, it’s totally useless.  There’s also a list of 20 photographic illustrations, which sadly were not included in the e-book version.  Last and least, I didn’t expect to find any cusswords in a book about history and archaeology, so the one exception here: the f-bomb, took me by surprise.

 

    Other reviewers were not so enamored.  The full title of this book: Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilisation should be noted.  One person was shocked that the book doesn't mention the (titular) city of Babylon until halfway through.

 

    More creditably, several reviewers didn’t like the author's tie-ins of ancient history to current world affairs.  True, those can be distracting if used too often or in a preachy tone.  But here, I felt they were done effectively, giving the readers food for thought.  See below.

 

    Overall, Babylon was both an entertaining and enlightening read for me: just the right length, just the right depth, just the right balance of archaeology and history.  Perhaps this will spur me to read some other history books that and languishing on my Kindle and TBR shelf.

 

    9½ Stars.  One example of a modern-day tie-in:  At the very beginning, the author points out that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush claimed that God had personally spoken to them about going to war in the region; Hussein when he decided to invade Kuwait, Bush when he decided to invade Iraq.  Direct quotes are given for both proclamations.  It worked out better for Dubya.  Deities are a fickle lot.