An accessible guide to the history of the Assyrian empire from the perspective of its powerful elites.
 
At the height of its power near 660 BC, the Assyrian empire, centered in northern Iraq, wielded dominance from Egypt to Iran. This vast region was ruled by a series of kings who demonstrated their power with magnificent palaces adorned by sculptures depicting rituals, battles, and hunts. Established by military might, the empire thrived under the guidance of scholars who interpreted divine will and administrators who relocated tens of thousands of people to serve the state. This book relates the history of Assyria through the lens of its royal family and the officials who commissioned its buildings, art, and literature—each a critical part of the foundation for the later Babylonian and Persian empires.

For those who believe that globalization is a purely modern phenomenon, this book holds a startling and absorbing lesson. From Egypt to Babylon immerses readers in a world of exotic empires and states as they waxed and waned and interacted in a period of extraordinary internationalism—all before the rise of the Persian Empire.

The ancient Egyptians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites, Hurrians, Aramaeans, Israelites, Urartians, Mannaeans, Assyrians, Phrygians, Kassites, Chaldaeans, Elamites, Scythians, Medes, and Persians: these are the societies who for a millennia peopled the world from the Aegean and Egypt in the west to what we know now as Iraq and Iran in the east. In a concise introduction, illustrated with objects drawn largely from the collections of the British Museum, this book takes the reader through the vast and varied landscape of this period, where a far-flung world was linked by military expansion, diplomatic relations, and movement of goods and peoples that brought about profound cultural exchanges and technological and social revolutions. The story brings the reader from the foundations of the Egyptian empire through the turmoil at the end of the second millennium bce to the unprecedented political unification of the whole region by kings of Persia.

From Egypt to Babylon weaves together the political histories of the region’s diverse societies for the first time, tracing shifting fortunes and burgeoning colonies, trading connections and cultural pressures in what was truly the world’s first international age.

The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world’s earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BCE. They have been credited with the invention of nothing less than cities, writing, and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our own urban, literate world. But is this picture correct? Paul Collins reveals how the idea of a Sumerian people was assembled from the archaeological and textual evidence uncovered in Iraq and Syria over the last one hundred fifty years. Reconstructed through the biases of those who unearthed them, the Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past.