A History Of The Babylonians And Assyrians

As an introduction to the ancient history of Iraq, Goodspeed's book has stood the test of time. The reader is given a detailed rendition of the history of the Old Babylonian, Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian Empires. Although out of print for many years, the book is consistently cited as a helpful introduction to the subject.

The rediscovery of Babylon and Assyria in the 1840s transformed Western views on the origins of civilisation. The excavation of Nineveh proved that even the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians together did not constitute the ancient world. These peoples had nothing to do with the beginnings of civilisation on Earth. It was in Mesopotamia that humanity took the first steps on its path towards the society we know today. The Sumerians inaugurated civilisation itself, but it was the Babylonians and then the Assyrians who fulfilled its potential. Their early experiments in state formation remain fascinating to us today: just like our governments, for a thousand years Babylon and Assyria grappled with the challenges of organising central power, administering distant territories, and engineering social harmony in empires and their cities. These achievements form one of the momentous episodes in human history; the Mesopotamian invention of writing revolutionised our minds and increased our intellectual possibilities a hundredfold. The First Great Powers is a revelation: of kingship, warfare, society and religion. Here at last we can discover what it meant to be an ancient Mesopotamian living in such an extraordinary world.

Excerpt from A History of the Babylonians and Assyrians The preparation of this volume has occupied a much longer time than was anticipated when the invitation of the editors to contribute to this series was accepted. The new materials, constantly supplied by the indefatigable activity of excavators and by the scientific investigation of philological and historical scholars, require the unceasing adjustment, enlargement, and revision of historical conclusions, and force one quite to despair of reaching anything like finality. The historian of Babylonia and Assyria, therefore, must be satisfied to sum up fairly and fully the information at present in hand without undue appreciation of new and tentative theories. Accordingly, the present work finds its justification in the desirability of putting a compact, popular, and fairly comprehensive sketch of the history of these ancient states, as it is to-day conceived, into the hands of all who are interested in the progress of human civilization in its earliest stages, and especially in the development of the peoples who came into so close relations with the Hebrews. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"The author of this book is one of the leading Assyriologists of our time, and his mastery of his subject is evident throughout." --Arnold Toynbee, The Observer

Color photographs of letters, numbers, coins, and common objects introduce the alphabet, coinage, and the counting system.