Imagining Babylon: The Modern Story of an Ancient City

Stereotypes of the oriental city before and after their rediscovery. Oriental versus Western city. The improvements in digging techniques and in graphic visualization. From evolutionism to neo-evolutionism. From colonialism to decolonization. Neo-marxist and neo-capitalist theories. City, village, and countryside. Temple-cities, palatine cities, and the communal sector. The totalitarian models and their crisis. The advent of new geography and new archaeology, the reconstruction of paleo-environment. The advent of system theory, and the explanation for collapse. Post-modernist de-structuration of the ancient oriental city. The end of a cycle: political instability in the Near East, declining resources in the West, recourse to computer graphics and remote sensing, in order to get a "virtual" reconstruction of ancient cities.