Babylon, a City for the Ages: Interview with Professor Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones

Tides of History

Audible / Patrick Wyman

History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The city of Babylon has appeared in our episodes time and again over the past several years: as the center of empires, a victim of vicious conquest, a wealthy center of economic innovation, and even the place where Alexander the Great drew his last breath. Professor Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones joins me to discuss his new, comprehensive, and fascinating new book on Babylon's long and engaging history.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now.
0:05.2	Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad...
0:08.0	Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman.
0:17.6	Thanks so much for joining me.
0:19.9	As we've traveled through the centuries and millennia here on tides of history,
0:24.1	there are some places to which we've returned again and again.
0:27.9	Rome, Carthage, Constantinople, and a hundred other locations that have been the sites of
0:32.8	essential events and processes over thousands of years.
0:36.7	But few places have more history to them than Babylon.
0:40.4	It was where Hamarabi ruled in promulgated laws in the center of more than one empire,
0:45.2	a city where priests made extraordinarily detailed astronomical observations, and prosperity
0:50.3	created one of the pre-modern world's most stunning examples of economic growth.
0:55.4	Alexander the Great died in Babylon two centuries after his predecessor on the Persian throne, Cyrus the Great, conquered it.
1:02.6	Babylon was a place where things happened, and we can't understand the broad course of history without giving it a central role.
1:10.8	Today's guest has written a wonderful new
1:13.3	book on Babylon. Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones is chair in ancient history at Cardiff University,
1:19.2	a specialist in the history of ancient Greece, Persia, and the wide world of antiquity, and the
1:24.3	author of several books, the most recent of which is entitled Babylon,
1:28.3	the biography of a metropolis. It's a book that I really enjoyed and I cannot wait to discuss.
1:33.9	Professor Llewellyn Jones, thank you so much for joining me today.
1:36.9	Patrick, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here.
1:39.8	So I absolutely enjoyed the heck out of this book. And as I was telling you before we started, this is the book that I have been hoping that
	...

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