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The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon
- An Elusive World Wonder Traced
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
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Publisher's summary
The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection involving legends, expert decipherment of ancient texts, and a vivid description of a little-known civilization. Recognized in ancient times as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the legendary Hanging Garden of Babylon and its location still remains a mystery steeped in shadow and puzzling myths. In this remarkable volume Stephanie Dalley, a world expert on ancient Babylonian language, gathers for the first time all the material on this enigmatic World Wonder. Tracing the history of the Garden, Dalley describes how the decipherment of an original text and its link to sculpture in the British Museum has enabled her to pin down where the Garden was positioned and to describe in detail what it may have looked like. Through this dramatic and fascinating reconstruction of the Garden, Dalley is also able to follow its influence on later garden design. Like a palimpsest, Dalley unscrambles the many legends that have built up around the Garden, including the parts played by Semiramis and Nebuchadnezzar, and following the evolution of its design, she shows why this Garden deserves its place alongside the Pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes as one of the most astonishing technical achievements of the ancient world.
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Esteemed Egyptologist Barbara Mertz updates her widely praised social history of the people of ancient Egypt, which was originally published in 1968. Combining impeccable scholarship with a delightfully personal style, the author reconstructs the life of the Egyptians from birth to death, and beyond death, too.
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Brilliant
- By Elizabeth on 04-03-10
By: Barbara Mertz
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Three Stones Make a Wall
- The Story of Archaeology
- By: Eric H. Cline
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1922, Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb for the first time, the only light coming from the candle in his outstretched hand. Urged to tell what he was seeing through the small opening he had cut in the door to the tomb, the Egyptologist famously replied, "I see wonderful things". Carter's fabulous discovery is just one of the many spellbinding stories told in Three Stones Make a Wall.
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Some shallow digs into archaeology
- By Beechwold on 10-09-20
By: Eric H. Cline
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The Sumerians
- The History and Legacy of the Ancient Mesopotamian Empire That Established Civilization
- By: Charles River Editors
- Narrated by: Neil Holmes
- Length: 1 hr and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia: the Sumerians.
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love these
- By amy on 12-14-16
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The Birth of Classical Europe
- A History from Troy to Augustine
- By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
- By David I. Williams on 01-12-14
By: Simon Price, and others
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Magicians of the Gods
- The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization
- By: Graham Hancock
- Narrated by: Graham Hancock
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Graham Hancock's multi-million bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth's lost civilization. Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light.
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"Brilliant" is an understatement.
- By Brian on 11-13-15
By: Graham Hancock
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Sumerians
- A Captivating Guide to Ancient Sumerian History, Sumerian Mythology and the Mesopotamian Empire of the Sumer Civilization
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Duke Holm
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The sheer importance of Sumerian culture in regards to world culture as a whole is impossible to overstate. This civilization is single-handedly responsible for some of the most major innovations in nearly every field relevant to maintaining a civilized society - this includes religion, lawmaking, architecture, schooling, art, literature, and even entertainment. Naturally, most of what we see as negative aspects of society were established in ancient Sumer as well. There wasn’t an aspect of Sumerian life that wasn’t plagued with corruption or devastation of one form or another.
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Lots of information in short book
- By Pamela on 01-04-19
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The Story of Egypt
- The Civilization That Shaped the World
- By: Joann Fletcher
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the world's greatest civilization - spanning thousands of years - is full of epic stories, spectacular places, and an evolving society rich in inventors, heroes, villains, and pioneers. The story of the world's greatest civilization spans 4,000 years of history that has shaped the world. It is full of spectacular cities and epic stories of a constantly evolving society peopled with inventors, heroes and heroines, villains, artisans, and pioneers.
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Egyptian history is fascinating, this book is not.
- By Mary Elizabeth Reynolds on 08-24-16
By: Joann Fletcher
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Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs
- 100 Discoveries That Changed the World
- By: Ann R. Williams - editor, Douglas Preston - introduction
- Narrated by: Mari Weiss
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending high adventure with history, this chronicle of 100 astonishing discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fabulous “Lost City of the Monkey God” tells incredible stories of how explorers and archaeologists have uncovered the clues that illuminate our past.
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Just what I wanted
- By Amazon Customer on 01-16-22
By: Ann R. Williams - editor, and others
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Babylon
- Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
- By: Paul Kriwaczek
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Civilization was born 8,000 years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place. In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period.
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Solid overview 3000 years of history
- By Alsor2000 on 07-19-20
By: Paul Kriwaczek
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A Brief History of the Celts
- Brief Histories
- By: Peter Berresford Ellis
- Narrated by: Christopher Oxford
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries the Celts held sway in Europe. Even after their conquest by the Romans, their culture remained vigorous, ensuring that much of it endured to feed an endless fascination with Celtic history and myths, artwork and treasures. A foremost authority on the Celtic peoples and their culture, Peter Berresford Ellis presents an invigoration overview of their world. With his gift for making the scholarly accessible, he discusses the Celts' mysterious origins and early history and investigates their rich and complex society.
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A bit dry, but overall interesting
- By Lokkish on 04-13-15
What listeners say about The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Shariff Fudin
- 11-06-14
Quest for Truth
Where does The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
An exquisite and informative historical research title from Stephanie. I have watched her work from the BBC's Documentary before.
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- Shelley Nealley
- 05-08-16
Outstanding book
What did you love best about The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon?
Excellent book - great for history lovers and engineers
What did you like best about this story?
Well explained references
What aspect of Napoleon Ryan’s performance would you have changed?
He was terrible
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Yes - it was really entertaining for a book on ancient architecture
Any additional comments?
Ryan was terrible...
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1 person found this helpful
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- Frank
- 03-09-15
A really solid academic book
This was a cool book. Thankfully more and more books on Assyriology are available on Audible. The writing wasn't quite as fluid, or maybe just enthusiastic, as Irving Finkel's book I read about a month ago on Mesopotamian flood stories but this was still really good.
The scholarship here from Stephanie Dalley is really, really solid. The prose is super straight forward and she presents her thesis really well and breaks the chapters down really logically and in a good order.
Her main point and thesis is challenging the idea that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built in the actual and literal city of Babylon but instead the Assyrian city of Nineveh.
She shows several different historical examples of how in several different cultures, like classical Greece and Rome, Babylon was used to name several different cities in Mesopotamia. She also talks about this Sumerian idea of Archetypes, I'm not sure if that's the word she uses or not, that were kind of a pre-dating of Plato's Forms.
She describes the Sumerian idea of Archetypes as initial gifts from the gods to humans, things like literature and engineering.
Then she shows how this concept led to people throughout history being associated with figures from the past or their ideas being associated with people and ideas from the past to give them legitimacy in their own time.
Also Stephanie Dalley shows how literal interpretations of the Hebrew Bible led several scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries to believe that Nineveh ceased to exist and thrive after 618 (or 612?) BCE because of The Book of Jonah.
She spends a lot of time showing several textual examples from several sources how Nineveh continued to thrive and exist well beyond its original conquest around 618 BCE.
There is also a lot of time spent talking about Archimedes screw and where it likely came from and how it pre-dates Archimedes by some time, I think.
There is a decent amount of general Ancient Mesopotamian history and information here, too, though maybe not as much as I would have liked. This book stuck to its main thesis pretty closely and didn't go off on too many tangents.
But yeah, it's great seeing really solid publishers like Oxford Press putting out solid books on Assyriology and seeing them come out as Audiobooks. This was definitely a great read.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Teresa
- 10-29-14
I Loved This Book!
Where does The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I loved the book, the author, and the perfect voice for the read! I first saw ms.Dalley on pbs. She charmed me then and there. Her charm speaks clearly thoughout the book. And her choice of Napoleon Ryan as the voice of the ancient kings is inspired. Truly a shocking revision of our common culture. Intelligence, Determination, Persistence. The Berries!
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1 person found this helpful