Paul Kriwaczek

IN SEARCH OF ZARATHUSTRA is a quest to trace the influence of the prophet the Greeks called Zoroaster and considered the greatest religious legislator of the ancient world. Long before the first Hebrew temple, the birth of Christ or the mission of Muhammad, Zarathustra had taught of a single universal god, of the battle between Good and Evil, of the Devil, Heaven and Hell, and of an eventual end to the world. Over several decades, Paul Kriwaczek, an award-winning television producer, has cast his eye across Europe and Central Asia, from Hadrian''s Wall to the Oxus river, from the Pyrenees to the Hindu Kush. Passing via Nietzsche''s interpretation of Zarathustra for a post-religious age, the Cathars of 13th-century France, the Bulgars of 9th-century Balkans, and the prophet Mani''s revision of Zarathustra''s message in the later Persian empire, Paul Kriwaczek then explores the religion of Mithras - before going back past Alexander the Great''s destruction of the Persian Empire, and the era of the great Persian kings Cyrus and Darius in the 6th century BC, to the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium.

In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of ancient Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements around 5400 BC, to the eclipse of Babylon by the Persians in the sixth century BC. He chronicles the rise and fall of dynastic power during this period; he examines its numerous material, social and cultural innovations and inventions: The wheel, civil, engineering, building bricks, the centralized state, the division of labour, organised religion, sculpture, education, mathematics, law and monumental building. At the heart of Kriwaczeks magisterial account, though, is the glory of Babylon - gateway to the gods - which rose to glorious prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi, who unified Babylonia between 1800 and 1750 BC. While Babylonian power would rise and fall over the ensuing centuries, it retained its importance as a cultural, religious and political centre until its fall to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC.

A portrait of a civilisation which flourished within living memory and left an indelible mark on history In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea. In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels. Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

Un recorrido fascinante por los albores de la civilización, un viaje de ocho mil años en el que asistimos al florecimiento y caída de una sociedad cuyo desarrollo tecnológico y social ha marcado el devenir de Oriente y OccidenteEn el VI milenio aC, los habitantes de las riberas del Tigris y el Eufrates crearon las primeras ciudades del mundo. Con ello escribian el primer capitulo de la civilizacion humana tal como la conocemos hoy.Paul Kriwaczek narra la extraordinaria historia de la antigua Mesopotamia, desde los primeros asentamientos alrededor del 5400 aC hasta el dominio de Babilonia por los persas en el siglo VI sC. Relata el ascenso y caida del poder dinastico y examina sus numerosas innovaciones materiales, culturales, sociales y sus inventos: la rueda, el ladrillo, el estado centralizado, la division del trabajo, la religion organizada, la escultura, la educacion, las matematicas, la ley y los grandes monumentos. En el corazon del relato esta la gloria de Babiloniaopuerta de los dioses- bajo el rey amorita Hammurabi, quien unifico Babilonia entre el 1800 y el 1750 aC.