Babylon: The Biography of a Metropolis

A vibrant, colorful, and authoritative exploration of the world's first and most illustrious metropolis.

'Babylon' is a name that has a double life: it denotes the great ancient Mesopotamian city with a long and complex history, and it is also a fictive allusion with a wide variety of connotations, from the Hebrew bible's Tower of Babel, through the New Testament's 'Whore of Babylon' to the iconic song 'The Rivers of Babylon’ in the 1970s.

The first royal dynasty of Babylon was founded by an...