Babylon: for eons its very identify has been a byword for luxurious and wickedness. 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept', wrote the psalmist, 'as we remembered Zion'. one of many maximum towns of the traditional global, Babylon has been eclipsed by means of its personal sinful recognition. for 2 thousand years the genuine, actual city lay buried whereas one other, ghostly urban lived on, engorged on money owed of its personal destruction. extra lately the location of Babylon has been the centre of significant excavation: but the superb result of this paintings have performed little displace the numerous different attention-grabbing ways that town has persevered and reinvented itself in tradition. Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian fable to affiliate himself and his regime with its wonderful prior. Why has Babylon so creatively fired the human mind's eye, with effects either strong and ailing? Why has it been so captivating to such a lot of, and for thus lengthy? In exploring solutions, Michael Seymour' s e-book levels widely over area and time and embraces paintings, archaeology, historical past and literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, through Strabo and Diodorus, to the publication of Revelation, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Voltaire, William Blake and glossy interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Gore Vidal, the writer brings to gentle a carnival of disparate assets ruled through the strong and intoxicating concept of depravity. but desirable as this darkish mythology used to be and has persevered to be, at its root lies a impressive and complicated imperial civilization whose complicated state-building, legislations- making and faith ruled Mesopotamia and past for millennia, prior to its incorporation into the nonetheless wider empire of the Achaemenid kings.