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georgenaylor

georgenaylor

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Herodotus: The Father of History (The Great Courses)
Progress: 8 %
The Western Literary Canon in Context (The Great Courses): Audio CD set
John M. Bowers
Progress: 8 %
A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex
Chris Jericho
The Great Courses, The Skeptic's Guide to American History
Mark A. Stoler
Progress: 4 %
The Vampire Megapack: 27 Modern and Classic Vampire Stories
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The Werewolf Megapack: 22 Classic and Modern Tales of Shape-Shifters!
Jay Lake, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Gregory Betancourt
Dracula's Guest and Other Victorian Vampire Stories
Michael Sims
Progress: 4 %
The Captain of the Polestar, and Other Tales
Arthur Conan Doyle
Tales from the Perilous Realm
J.R.R. Tolkien
Progress: 21 %
The Iliad of Homer
Richard Martin, Richmond Lattimore, Homer
Progress: 20 %

Legends of the Ancient World: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Charles Rivers Editors

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There are four good things about these books by Charles Rivers Editors: 1) They are usually brief, 2) They do provide a good overview of a particular topic, 3) They usually have a decent bibliography and 4) They can usually be got for free.

 

This book does a good job of describing what the ancient sources say about the Hanging Gardens. It also details the mystery of what the Gardens looked like and whether or not they actually ever existed. The most fascinating part of the book was the time devoted to the theories of Stephanie Dalley, who has postulated that the Hanging Gardens were mistakenly attributed to the Neo-Babylonian city of Babylon but are more likely to have been in the Assyrian capital of Ninevah. I’d never heard of her research and theories before and thought just the brief outline of them presented in the book was intriguing and made for a compelling case.