And so we’re off! — 2014, a new year, ready or not. Resolutions or not, there’s something about recognizing the end of a year and the beginning of a new one that’s downright refreshing. The earliest public celebrations that we know about are Babylonian, dating back thousands of years. I’ve been spending a lot of …
These mid-August days, some 2500 years ago, witnessed a violent turn-about in power — regicide followed by a week of king-less days. Imagine for a moment the uncertainty, the chaos. Imagine the mother of the assassinated king. Still alive, for the time being — a foreigner in a court conflicted about its cosmopolitan nature, a …
If I had to pick one grand architectural image to go with the Cyrus Cylinder, I think it would be the Ishtar Gate (though built by Nebuchadnezzar II, not Cyrus). Oddly enough, the best place to see the ruins from Babylon of a gate complex named for the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war is …
I was just thinking: wouldn’t it be fun to have a spot to feature artifacts, documents, persons, architecture, anything concrete related to my historical fiction set in ancient Babylon and Persia? Perhaps provide a wee bit of commentary, maybe how the things fit into the story,…? In the absence of any nay-sayers (admittedly none nearby …
Babylon, bab-ilu, Babel, “Gate of the gods” was the Big Apple of its day. Yet we get “the whore of Babylon” and the “Tower of Babel,” Bob Marley’s Babylon site of oppression and reputation for excess. The biblical view of Babylon is no less real in its critique than the grandeur that we know Babylon …
I finally broke down and went all junior-high with my research — different colored pens for the different accounts of Cyrus’ taking Babylon. The most ancient records are notoriously problematic. Each one has a either a bone to pick or a bridge to sell, and they simply don’t agree on the facts. Did or did …
Did you know that even though the weeping willow came from China, its scientific name associates it with Babylon… because of the Bible? Diana Wells explains in her new book The Life of Trees that it’s called Salix babylonica because of the biblical tradition of Jews weeping for Zion after being taken into exile by their Babylonian conquerors. Think: Psalm 137 …
