Saggs H.W.F. Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria

B.T. Batsford and G.P. Putnams, 1965. — 116 p.For over 2000 years one of the greatest of human achievements, the civilisation of Babylonia and Assyria, lay buried and almost forgotten beneath the soil of the land we now know as Iraq (earlier called Mesopotamia). There remained of it only certain accounts, of doubtful reliability, in Greek literature, together with some Biblical statements, perhaps biased, about the Assyrians, and more dubious traditions of a much earlier period in a land called Shinar. In Shinar, according to the Biblical account, had been built the tower of Babel; here too had lived the sole surviving family of the great Flood, whilst somewhere in this region, at the beginning of man's history, had been the mythical Garden of Eden.