Imagining Babylon

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.