A Short History of Babylon.

• Author: Nielsen, John P.

A Short History of Babylon. By KAREN RADNER. London: BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2020. Pp. xxvii + 239, illus. $19.95 (paper).

The stated purpose of Bloomsbury Academic's Short Histories series is to present "authoritative and elegantly written introductory texts which offer fresh perspectives on the way history is taught and understood... that have strong appeal to university students and their teachers, as well as to the general readers and history enthusiasts." Karen Radner's contribution to this series, which takes as its subject the city of Babylon, attempts to accomplish these aims in just 159 pages of amply illustrated text augmented with another seventy-nine pages of endnotes, bibliography, and indices. This is an ambitious undertaking even if, as Radner points out in her first chapter, there are cities in the Middle East such as Erbil and Aleppo that are much older than Babylon and which remain inhabited to this day; Babylon may have emerged later than many other cities in the cradle of urbanism, but its light burned more brightly, if also more briefly.

Of course, there is still much to cover over the "brief span of two millennia when Babylon did thrive, and Radner succinctly sets the stage in her first chapter by introducing to the reader Babylon's geographical position within the "three-river region" of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Diyala, the city's agrarian economy and the trade networks that reached beyond Babylon's walls, and the cuneiform script developed for mundane record keeping and utilized for a broad range of literary purposes, all of which are critical for reconstructing the history that Radner lays out in the subsequent chapters.

Rather than start with Hammurabi and Babylon's emergence onto the world stage in Mesopotamia, Radner begins her history in chapter 2 with the emperor Trajan's disappointing visit to the ruined and mostly abandoned Babylon in 116 CE. Radner follows this opening with a brief discussion of how Babylon retained its hold on the human imagination through Classical, biblical, and Arab writers to set the stage for the modern rediscovery of Babylon, beginning with Pietro della Valle's visit to Babil in 1616 through the excavations of Hormuzd Rassam and Robert Koldeway. Radner smartly relates these developments to Europe's imperialist projects around the globe before turning to Babylon's continued significance to both Saddam Hussein's regime and to post-Saddam Iraq. By accentuating Babylon's continued...