Samuel Peterson’s Reviews > Mesopotamia: The Mighty Kings > Status Update

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!