Babylon: The Mother of All Cities | Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

The Real History Behind History's Most Legendary City

Babylon: The Mother of All Cities by acclaimed historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones strips away the myth surrounding one of the ancient world's most famous names and reveals the real, breathing metropolis that stood on the banks of the Euphrates. Long remembered as the purported site of the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, and cast in the Bible as a byword for decadence, Babylon was in truth a thriving mega-city: a maze of streets and marketplaces filled with schoolteachers, artisans, priests, soldiers, and merchants going about their daily lives.

Llewellyn-Jones traces the city's rise under extraordinary rulers such as Hammurabi the great lawgiver and Nebuchadnezzar II, whose reign saw Babylon glisten with gold and lapis lazuli, through to its eventual decline and fall into ruin. Drawing on ribald drinking songs, sharp-tongued royal letters, and a wealth of ancient sources, this is both a rigorous work of scholarship and an immersive journey into a long-lost world.

• A vivid, meticulously researched history of ancient Babylon from foundation to fall
• Written by leading ancient historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
• 528 pages, single volume
• Praised by William Dalrymple, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Telegraph
• Perfect for readers of ancient history, Mesopotamia, and the biblical world

"Compelling and authoritative... an exhilarating portrait of one of the world's greatest cities" — Simon Sebag Montefiore. "A remarkable feat of urban resurrection" — William Dalrymple. If you've ever wondered what really lay behind the myth of Babylon, this is the book that brings it back to life.