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Hello 6,000 years ago between the Tigress and the Euphrates the first cities were being built

The great empire to spring from the region was Babylon which held sway for over a thousand years

And in that time managed to garner an extraordinary bad press

It's associated with the Tower of Babel with Nineveh where Jonah was sent to preach repentance and perhaps most famously with

Mystery Babylon the great the mother of Harlots and abominations of the earth the horror of Babylon who in

Revelation is taken to personify the city itself. It's not just the Old Testament

Herodotus described the Babylonians as effeminate the Syvius and decadent as well

But what's the true story

Classics in this country has met a study of Greece and Rome

But there's an increasingly vocal contingent that claims that Babylonian culture has been hugely undervalued and that there's a great wealth of

Extraordinary literature waiting to be translated with me to discuss the culture of Babylon is Eleanor

Robson lecture in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and a fellow of all souls Oxford

Irving Finkel curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East of the British Museum and Andrew George

Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London

Eleanor Robson. Let's really begin near the beginning. Can you give us a broad outline of the history of the region we're talking about?

Mesopotamia

more or less nowadays

Iraq and the very first civilizations which developed

Okay, well farming developed in the Middle East from around 10,000 BC

But that was up in the north of the area in the mountainous regions as that time the south of Iraq was very marshy

...