Status Updates From Mesopotamia: The Mighty Kin...

One thing that I think would really benefit from these books would be a map of these empires rising and falling over the many millennia of its time.

This reconstruction somehow survived WWII.

Okay, so Germany was able to send completed reconstructions to not only Iraq and Turkish museums but also to the US and Europe. That's better.

"'We consider ourselves the guardians responsible for a great historical treasure, which we are bound to treat with the greatest care.'" Here is the White, Western sense of superiority that rears its head and continues to do so whenever this topic comes up again and again in the present day.

1928 Germany was when and where they were rebuilding the broken fragments of Babylon? I'm starting to think why Nazi Germany was so interested in researching the occult and digging up more artifacts.

Ishtar being a goddess of love, fertility, and warfare reminds me of the worship of Shiva in India, who is also a woman and also is a patron of opposing domains.

Babylon's significance continued to wax with the Parthian Empire (rival to the Roman empire), wane in the 100s AD, and wax again with the Arabic Empire making it a center of knowledge and science once again. Thus ends the text of this book, and now on to the efforts made to preserve its legacy in the modern day.

Persia has finally taken over most of the known world. I'm surprised that they weren't included more in this book. Then again, they could probably take up a whole book like this just like Egypt.

Like how English has become simpler and much more dominant throughout the world as a trade language, Aramaic had dominated the language of the ancient Middle-East with its simplicity and usefulness in trade among the lower-class. Cunieform tablets become replaced by Aramaic inscriptions and papyrus scrolls.

Not only could Babylonians calculate celestial bodies and record it down to 18th c. standards, they were able to split the day into hours, the hours into 60 minutes, minutes into 60 seconds, the radius of a circle, a lunar calendar into 12 months with 30 days each, able to multiply and divide, find squares and square roots, cube and cube roots, medicine became more advanced instead of religious-based!

Not only did Babylon have 1,179 temples (an interesting number, I wonder how they found that out?) but they owned almost half of all the land in Babylon and were almost as wealthy as the king!

"To the captive Jewish residents of Babylon who worshiped a single, all-powerful, invisible god, the natives' adoration of idols must have seemed, as the Bible calls it, an 'abomination'" Just leaves out the Ark of the Covenant. Like, come on!

And this is the same Nebuchanezzar who invaded Jerusalem, razed it, and possibly took the Ark of the Covenant.

The Hanging Gardens is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one that has still yet to be found. Perhaps it's not in the way that we thought either, some grandiose structure like a ziggurat or pyramid, but rather just some roof-top garden.

I've finally reached Nebuchadnezzar. The famous one who is in Civ V.

"In 1991 the Louvre undertook ambitious plans to transfer its collection of Assyrian artifacts to the museum's new Richelieu Wing. The relocation, which was inspired in part by a desire to highlight the Louvre's Mesopotamian treasures..." Treasures stolen.

Any chance that these winged bull statues were returned to Iraq to be placed in their museums? No? I didn't think so.

Thus ends Assyria's dominion of Mesopotamia. Was Babylon the next superpower of the region? Or was it the reverse? And then Persia swoops in.

Ashurbanipal's scholarly pursuits and his grand library at Nineveh certainly explain why he was chosen as a leader for Assyria in Civilization V.

There are a lot of conspiracies over who are now considered the "10 Lost Tribes of Israel." And it's been going on for decades. Don't Mormons believe that Native Americans are one of those tribes?

I wondered if this was the time period when the Israelites were subjected again to more powerful empires. The Judean king, Hezekiah, who is mentioned in the Bible, had rebelled, and for his punishment, Lachish, Beersheba, and Arad were sieged and razed to the ground. Not only is this event recorded in the Bible but also in Assyrian tablets and images.

"As an aftermath of conquest, Tiglath-Pileser prepared the ground for Assyrian power in vanquished territories by mass deportations. Entire communities- men, women, and children by the thousands - were run out of their native places and escorted by Assyrian troops to new homes many hundreds of miles away." That's a lot of words to just say mass genocide and slavery.

Even the Assyrians have Amazonian warrior-queens, although Semiramis' legend seems to be just that: a legend with very little historical veracity to it.

The need to outstrip one's predecessors has continued to be part of the human condition from antiquity.

An people say that the Aztecs were brutal with their horrific rituals and conquest of Central America. The Assyrians were just as bloodthirsty in their conquest of the Middle East.

How much of these numbers of people and food at the feast was exaggerated?

Now that cuneiform is able to be deciphered, all of the clay tablets and the massive libraries of the Assyrians are able to be translated and the historical information that they provided would be a wellspring of knowledge.

"The hunt for monumental treasures, rather than a detailed investigation of the site itself, was Layard's first priority." Like I said, grandising Western, white supremacy and progress by showing the thief of cultural relics from these other countries. They should've helped to establish museums in the Ottoman Empire to place these relics rather than taking them back to France and Great Britain.

In the past, searches for Biblical locations were often the reason for these archeological excavations. Archeologists were sometimes under the mistaken belief that they were digging up a famous Biblical city when, in reality, they were digging up a different one. That is no longer the case.

Henry Rawlison, British emissary to Baghdad: "It pains me grievously to see the French monopolize the field. Botta's celebrated finds would constitute a national glory in future ages, when perhaps the Turkish Empire that we are now struggling so hard to preserve shall be but a matter of history." 1st, the British have a monopoly on ancient Egyptian discoveries. 2nd, it's ironic that the Brish fight the Turks in WWI.