This ambitious and wide-ranging popular history is the first narrative account of the entire Near East (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States), from the genesis of civilization in the fourth millennium BCE until modern times. It provides an historical outline of the civilizations and cultures that dominated the region, one that has had an immense impact on the development of humankind, ever since the ancient Sumerians invented urban living and writing around 3200 BCE. Later, the Babylonians and the Assyrians built upon the Sumerian legacy. They were...