To the Bedouins whose animals meandered around the unsightly mounds, the tells were nothing more than insignificant heaps of dirt. Dul eventually gave way to an Arabic word, tell, which reflected the growing obscurity shrouding the region’s past. As early as the third millennium BC, the Mesopotamians already had a word-dul-for the shapeless lumps of dead cities that even then dotted the horizons, having long ago melted like wax under the sun. Its effects there were uncharacteristically swift, almost impatient it destroyed things before it could age them. Like some relentlessly pressing weight, it sought to smother everything that would rise up out of the flat alluvial plains of ancient Iraq. The great wall of Shulgi has not survived, but then, how could it? Time lay heavily across the landscape of Mesopotamia.

Walls Midwife to Civilization: Wall Builders at the Dawn of History THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, 2500–500 BC The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and-with walls rising everywhere on the planet-timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes learn of bizarre Spartan rituals watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes witness the epic siege of Constantinople chill at the fate of French explorers marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves-rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected on the other, those the walls kept out. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed-to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle.

“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” ( Library Journal)-walls- and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live.

Walls david frye