The Hegemony of Babylon: A Comprehensive History of the Metropole of the Gods
Babylon was the greatest city the ancient world ever produced, a metropolis of three thousand years of continuous life, intellectual ambition, and cultural achievement whose legacy shaped the modern world far more profoundly than its absence from our history books suggests. The Hegemony of Babylon is a comprehensive narrative history of the city from its prehistoric origins on the Mesopotamian plain to its long, extraordinary decline under Persian, Macedonian, and Seleucid rule, tracing the full arc of a civilisation that gave humanity the sixty-minute hour, the 360-degree circle, the personal horoscope, the written law code, the world's first literary epic, and the mathematical astronomy that underpinned western science from Hipparchus to Newton.
Drawing on the full range of cuneiform scholarship, archaeological evidence, and comparative cultural history, this book argues that Babylon is not an antiquarian curiosity but a living foundation, that every time we read a clock, divide a circle, consult a horoscope, or invoke the principle that the strong shall not oppress the weak, we are the inheritors of the Babylonian achievement. From Hammurabi's Code to the Ishtar Gate, from the Enuma Elish to the Astronomical Diaries, from Nebuchadnezzar's imperial ambitions to Alexander's unfinished dream, The Hegemony of Babylon restores to one of history's most misunderstood civilisations the full measure of its extraordinary significance.
