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A history of Babylon and the land between the rivers, from the first cities to the ruins today: the invention of writing, Sargon and Enheduanna, Hammurabi and his law code, the Kassite kings, Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar and the Ishtar Gate, the exiles of Judah, Cyrus and Alexander, the last cuneiform tablets, and the rediscovery of a lost city. Every quotation comes from a public-domain source, and every era's sources are named.
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Chapter 1
All 30 chapters as high-quality MP3s to download, plus the PDF edition with the full text, a timeline of every era, and every source.
Get the downloadQuotations come from public-domain translations: Caesar (McDevitte and Bohn, 1869), Gregory of Tours (Brehaut, 1916), Einhard (Turner, 1880), the Song of Roland (Scott Moncrieff, 1919), Joinville (Wedgwood, 1906), Froissart (Berners), the trial of Joan of Arc (Murray, 1902), Commynes (Scoble, 1855), Montaigne (Cotton), Saint-Simon (Bayle St. John, 1857), Rousseau (Cole, 1913) and Hugo (Hapgood, 1887). Every page the research opened is listed under its era.
Narrated by an AI voice. Written and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, from published scholarship, museum records and the ancient texts themselves; where scholars disagree, the book says so. Dates before the colonies are approximate. Events of 2025 and 2026 are told from official records and news reports available when the book was finished, in November 2026.
Want to see it? The Babylonian history timeline has the people and events in this book, with sources.