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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a 1936 essay by George Orwell (1903-50), about his time as a young policeman in Burma, which was then part of the British empire. The essay explores an apparent paradox about the behaviour of Europeans, who supposedly have the power over their colonial subjects.

Before we offer an analysis of Orwell’s essay, it might be worth providing a short summary of ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which you can read here .

Orwell begins by relating some of his memories from his time as a young police officer working in Burma. Although the extent to which the essay is autobiographical has been disputed, we will refer to the narrator as Orwell himself, for ease of reference.

He, like other British and European people in imperial Burma, was held in contempt by the native populace, with Burmese men tripping him up during football matches between the Europeans and Burmans, and the local Buddhist priests loudly insulting their European colonisers on the streets.

Orwell tells us that these experiences instilled in him two things: it confirmed his view, which he had already formed, that imperialism was evil, but it also inspired a hatred of the enmity between the European imperialists and their native subjects. Of course, these two things are related, and Orwell understands why the Buddhist priests hate living under European rule. He is sympathetic towards such a view, but it isn’t pleasant when you yourself are personally the object of ridicule or contempt.

He finds himself caught in the middle between ‘hatred of the empire’ he served and his ‘rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make [his] job impossible’.

The main story which Orwell relates takes place in Moulmein, in Lower Burma. An elephant, one of the tame elephants which the locals own and use, has given its rider or mahout the slip, and has been wreaking havoc throughout the bazaar. It has destroyed a hut, killed a cow, and raided some fruit stalls for food. Orwell picks up his rifle and gets on his pony to go and see what he can do.

He knows the rifle won’t be good enough to kill the elephant, but he hopes that firing the gun might scare the animal. Orwell discovers that the elephant has just trampled a man, a coolie or native labourer, to the ground, killing him. Orwell sends his pony away and calls for an elephant rifle which would be more effective against such a big animal. Going in search of the elephant, Orwell finds it coolly eating some grass, looking as harmless as a cow.

It has calmed down, but by this point a crowd of thousands of local Burmese people has amassed, and is watching Orwell intently. Even though he sees no need to kill the animal now it no longer poses a threat to anyone, he realises that the locals expect him to dispatch it, and he will lose ‘face’ – both personally and as an imperial representative – if he does not do what the crowd expects.

So he shoots the elephant from a safe distance, marvelling at how long the animal takes to die. He acknowledges at the end of the essay that he only shot the elephant because he did not wish to look like a fool.

‘Shooting an Elephant’ is obviously about more than Orwell’s killing of the elephant: the whole incident was, he tells us, ‘a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act.’

The surprise is that despotic governments don’t merely impose their iron boot upon people without caring what their poor subjects think of them, but rather that despots do care about how they are judged and viewed by their subjects.

Among other things, then, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is about how those in power act when they are aware that they have an audience. It is about how so much of our behaviour is shaped, not by what we want to do, nor even by what we think is the right thing to do, but by what others will think of us .

Orwell confesses that he had spent his whole life trying to avoid being laughed at, and this is one of his key motivations when dealing with the elephant: not to invite ridicule or laughter from the Burmese people watching him.

To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

Note how ‘my whole life’ immediately widens to ‘every white man’s life in the East’: this is not just Orwell’s psychology but the psychology of every imperial agent. Orwell goes on to imagine what grisly death he would face if he shot the elephant and missed, and he was trampled like the hapless coolie the elephant had killed: ‘And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.’

The stiff upper lip of this final phrase is British imperialism personified. Being trampled to death by the elephant might be something that Orwell could live with (as it were); but being laughed at? And, worse still, laughed at by the ‘natives’? Unthinkable …

And from this point, Orwell extrapolates his own experience to consider the colonial experience at large: the white European may think he is in charge of his colonial subjects, but ironically – even paradoxically – the coloniser loses his own freedom when he takes it upon himself to subjugate and rule another people:

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

So, at the heart of ‘Shooting an Elephant’ are two intriguing paradoxes: imperial rulers and despots actually care deeply about how their colonised subjects view them (even if they don’t care about those subjects), and the one who colonises loses his own freedom when he takes away the freedom of his colonial subjects, because he is forced to play the role of the ‘sahib’ or gentleman, setting an example for the ‘natives’, and, indeed, ‘trying to impress’ them. He is the alien in their land, which helps to explain this second paradox, but the first is more elusive.

However, even this paradox is perhaps explicable. As Orwell says, aware of the absurdity of the scene: ‘Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.’

The Burmese natives are the ones with the real power in this scene, both because they are the natives and because they outnumber the lone policeman, by several thousand to one. He may have a gun, but they have the numbers. He is performing for a crowd, and the most powerful elephant gun in the world wouldn’t be enough to give him power over the situation.

There is a certain inevitability conveyed by Orwell’s clever repetitions (‘I did not in the least want to shoot him … They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant … I had no intention of shooting the elephant … I did not in the least want to shoot him … But I did not want to shoot the elephant’), which show how the idea of shooting the elephant gradually becomes apparent to the young Orwell.

These repetitions also convey how powerless he feels over what is happening, even though he acknowledges it to be unjust (when the elephant no longer poses a threat to anyone) as well as financially wasteful (Orwell also draws attention to the pragmatic fact that the elephant while alive is worth around a hundred pounds, whereas his tusks would only fetch around five pounds).

But he does it anyway, in an act that is purely for show, and which goes against his own will and instinct.

Discover more about Orwell’s non-fiction with our analysis of his ‘A Hanging’ , our discussion of his essay on political language , and our thoughts on his autobiographical essay, ‘Why I Write’ .

8 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’”

Absolutely fascinating and very though provoking. Thank you.

Thanks, Caroline! Very kind

One biographer claimed that the incident never took place and is pure fiction created to make the points you mention. Is there any proof that it actually happened ?

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Circuses – it still goes on, tragically. https://robinsaikia.org/2021/04/04/elephants-in-venice-1954/

Hmm now I make another connection here. A degree of the hypocrisy of human society. In a sense, the Burmese were ‘owned’ by their imperial masters – personified by Orwell – but the Elephant was owned by the Burmese. the Burmese hate Orwell for being the imperialist and yet they expect him to shoot their elephant who is itself forced into a role it clearly didn’t like. I know it is all very post-modernist to consider things from a non-human point of view, but there seems a very obvious mirroring here.

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Definition of depict

transitive verb

Did you know?

Depict and Depiction

If you depict someone or something, you show what that person or thing is like—either in some kind of image (such as a drawing, painting, photograph, or movie), or with words.

What results from your efforts to depict that person or thing can be called a depiction . The noun depiction is included at this entry without a definition because its meaning can be easily understood from the definition of the verb—it's the act of, or an instance of, depicting something or someone—but some examples of depiction in a sentence might be helpful:

The depiction of the battle in the painting is not historically correct. I think the novel is a good depiction of a typical modern American marriage. Many were moved by the film's depictions of animals helping people. The author's depiction of the practice as uncommon is problematic; it's done by millions of people throughout the world every day. The essay is an honest depiction of life in the city. The book is fascinating in its depiction of the country's early history.

Examples of depict in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'depict.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Latin depictus , past participle of depingere , from de- + pingere to paint — more at paint

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Dictionary Entries Near depict

dephosphorylation

Cite this Entry

“Depict.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/depict. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of depict, more from merriam-webster on depict.

Nglish: Translation of depict for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of depict for Arabic Speakers

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Power Words Every Essay Writer Must Know How to Use

When it comes to essay writing, some words are especially powerful. I call them Power Words. 

I’m Tutor Phil, and in this tutorial, you’ll harness the power of four such words. What can power words do for you? Great question! 

Power words can help you:

• Get your ideas flowing
• Make a better impression on your instructor
• Organize or expand your essay  

Without further ado, let’s dive in and make these power words our own!

Power Word 1: “ Therefore ”

What’s so special about it, and why is it a Power Word? Here’s what it does for you:

• It shows that you’ve done your homework researching the subject
• It tells the reader that you are a smart and logical person
• It adds credibility to your explanations
• If used with correct punctuation, it improves your professor’s overall impression of your writing.

So, how do we use the word “ therefore ?”

We use it to make a logical conclusion from a previously stated thought. For example:

“Apples contain lots of iron and are a great source of heart-healthy fiber. Therefore , apples are a healthy food.”

This word can be used in two different places within a sentence: in the beginning or in the middle. For example:

In the beginning:

“Summers fly by very fast. Therefore, every summer day should be enjoyed to the fullest.”

In the middle:

“Summers fly by very fast. Every summer day, therefore, should be enjoyed to the fullest.”

You can write it either way – both are perfectly acceptable. But here’s a bit of advice:

Alternate the two ways. Write “ therefore ” in the beginning of a sentence a couple of times, and the next time write it in the middle. 

This is a very simple but powerful way to show your professor that you are smart and have a good taste in writing as well as good grammar skills.

Note on punctuation

When you write the word “ therefore ” in the beginning of the sentence, use a comma right after it, just like in the examples above.

When you write it in the middle of the sentence, just enclose it in between commas. The best place to put this word is right between the subject and the verb. 

Power Word 2: “ And ”

The word “ And ” has special powers. It can unite. And it can separate. How can one word perform opposite functions?

Power word “ And ” is a conjunction. When you encounter it while reading, you know that it signals a separation into distinct concepts. 

When you’re writing an essay, using the word “ and ” helps you think more clearly about your ideas. 

Whenever you encounter the word “ and ,” you know that it connects or separates distinct bits of intellectual content.

Many permutations of this word exist. Here are some of its equivalents:

• In addition
• Furthermore

How can this word help you in your college writing? Here’s an example. Let’s say that your professor gives you a writing assignment, and it sounds something like this:

“Discuss Iago’s motivations and methods of persuasion in Shakespeare’s Othello.”

What does the word “ and ” tell you here? It tells you that you should divide this essay topic into two parts.

First , you’ll discuss Iago’s motivations.

Second , you’ll discuss his methods of persuasion.

The word “ and ” has just helped you structure your essay. At least you know the main sections. And all it took was noticing the word “ and ” in the essay prompt, and then applying it to your own essay structure. 

And that’s something very useful to know about writing assignments. 

Take your professors’ writing assignments literally and look for power words which can help you organize your essay. 

Power Word 3: “ But ”

Providing a balanced perspective is a mark of a smart and experienced writer. I’ll introduce you to a word that you already know, but whose power you may not have realized until now. It will allow you to:

• Convey that you are unbiased and value other people’s opinions
• Present you as a serious writer who cares about the subject
• Expand your content even more

This Power Word is “ But .”

Are you surprised? Were you hoping for something fancier than that? You don’t need fancy words to be a good essay writer. Just become a master of a few, and your writing will improve dramatically. 

The word “ But ” acts as a partition within your reader’s mind. It is so powerful because it clearly indicates a separation into opposites. When you’re reading a difficult text, this word can help you make out its meaning.

When you’re writing, it helps you organize ideas, just like the word “ and ” does. 

In the diagram below, you can see how Shakespeare uses this word to divide his sonnet 18 into two main sections, each about a distinct subject:

In this sonnet, Shakespeare states right in the beginning that he intends to compare “ you ” with the summer . And that’s exactly what he does. 

The word “ But ” in line 9 clearly indicates a separation into sections. Section one (lines 1-8) is about the summer , and section two (lines 9-14) is about “ You .”

I actually made a video in which I analyze the sonnet in detail. I highly recommend that you watch it to see power words in action. Here it is:

Here are some of the equivalents of the word “But”:

• Nevertheless
• Unfortunately
• Nonetheless

And here is my video about the Power Words “ And ” and “ But ,” if you like video lessons:

Power Word 4: “ Since ”

Each power word works differently. The word “ since ” has a couple of meanings, but we’re interested in only one – it is essentially an equivalent of the word “ because .”

Let me give you an example. 

“Since I knew I would be free on the weekend, I agreed to participate in the rally.”  

“Since you’re now a college student, you should be more organized.”

In these cases, the word “ since ” works pretty much like the word “ because .” For example, you could say, 

“Because I knew I would be free on the weekend, I agreed to participate in the rally.”

It’s just a bit more elegant to use the word “ since ” instead of the word “ because ” when using it in the beginning of a sentence.

How would you use it to give yourself a boost of creativity?

It’s very easy. When you feel you’re stuck and out of ideas, simply start a new sentence and write the first word: “Since…”

Remember – any sentence that begins with “ since ” must have two parts: the fact and what follows from that fact . Let’s look at this sentence again:

“Since I knew I would be free on the weekend, I agreed to participate in the rally.”

Here, the first part is “ I knew I would be free on the weekend. ” This is the fact. I knew I would be free. In my mind, it is a fact.

Now, here’s the second part: “ I agreed to participate in the rally. ” This is what follows from that fact. Since I knew I’d be free, I agreed to participate. 

In other words, part two is logically dependent on part one . If I am free, I can participate.

Please note that each of the parts is a complete sentence with its own subject and verb.

“I knew” – these are a subject and a verb.

“I agreed” – these are a subject and a verb, as well.

Here’s your formula for using the power word “Since”:

Since [Part 1], [Part 2].

And here’s the formula in more detail:

Since [Subject 1 + Verb 1], [Subject 2 + Verb 2].

You can use this formula whenever you hit the writer’s block. Here’s exactly how to break through.

Step 1. Simply start a new sentence by writing or typing the word “Since…”

Step 2. Now your brain is looking for the fact to state because it knows that it needs one. And it will find it:

“The weather is nice.”

“It’s hard to find a good plumber.”

Whatever is relevant to your essay and to the particular section in it – write it down.

Step 3. Now your brain is already on the lookout for what follows from that fact. So, just come up with the logical conclusion you’re making from it:

“Since the weather is nice, we could go to the beach.”

“Since it’s hard to find a good plumber, I might as well just fix the faucet myself.”

See how this works? Once you’ve practiced this a few times, your brain will know exactly what to do to produce quality material every time you start a new sentence with the power word “since.”

By the way, I created a video lesson on this power word. Here it is:

Make these power words your own and watch your grades go up!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Molded plaque: king or a god carrying a mace

Head of a male

Pendants and beads

Cylinder seal and modern impression: male worshiper, dog surmounted by a standard

Stele of the protective goddess Lama

Top fragment of a kudurru with a mushhushshu dragon and divine symbols

Cuneiform prism describing the restoration of Babylon by Esarhaddon, stamped with Assyrian hieroglyphic inscription

Cuneiform cylinder: inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II describing the construction of the outer city wall of Babylon

Panel with striding lion

Stamp seal (octagonal pyramid) with cultic scene

Cuneiform tablet: letter of Sin-sharra-ishkun to Nabopolassar

Cuneiform tablet: a-she-er gi-ta, balag to Innin/Ishtar

The Whore of Babylon, from "The Apocalypse"

Albrecht Dürer

Michael Seymour Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The city of Babylon lay on the River Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq. Although it was not among the oldest cities in this part of the world (the earliest of which is normally considered to be Uruk ), in ancient Mesopotamian mythology it came to be seen as the first city, made at the creation of the world by its patron god, Marduk. Today little is known of the city’s actual origins; it first appears in texts toward the end of the third millennium B.C.

Babylon rose to prominence in the eighteenth century B.C. when, through a combination of political alliances and military campaigns, Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 B.C.) was able to unite a large state under his rule. A terracotta plaque ( 32.39.2 ) shows a Mesopotamian king of this period in heroic pose, while finely made gold jewelry incorporating divine symbols ( 47.1a–h ) gives some sense of the luxury metalwork of the period; some larger examples of sculpture ( 1972.96 ) also survive. From this point on, Babylon would remain the most important city in southern Iraq (Babylonia) until the time of Alexander .

Babylon was ruled by Hammurabi’s successors until 1595 B.C., when a Hittite incursion into Mesopotamia reached as far as Babylon itself, bringing a dramatic end to what historians today call the Old Babylonian period . In time, a new dynasty emerged. The new rulers, non-Babylonians known as Kassites, adopted Babylonian conventions in their royal iconography and inscriptions. The art of the Kassite period is best known for a type of stone monument known as a kudurru ( 1985.45 ). These monuments, which were once thought to be boundary stones erected in fields (more likely they were placed in temples), carry inscriptions detailing grants of land, often by the king to high officials, and a wealth of religious imagery. The images, which included astral symbols, animals , and other divine attributes associated with particular gods, served to sanctify and protect the commitment made in the text.

Kassite-period cylinder seals are also distinctive. The designs of many are composed of a long and pious dedicatory inscription and the image of a king or sometimes other figures in a position of prayer ( 1985.357.44 ). Babylonian art of all periods places a heavy emphasis on the piety of the king, and similar images recur throughout Mesopotamian history. In some seals, the king is replaced by a goddess, Lama, who in Mesopotamian art is often depicted interceding or praying for a human donor to a more powerful deity . The same goddess is represented in the pendants of the necklace ( 47.1a–h ), and a stone monument, also of the Kassite period ( 61.12 ) depicts Lama at large scale.

The end of the second millennium B.C. saw power over Babylon change hands several times, with Babylonia briefly falling under Assyrian domination. More traumatizing was the sack of the city by an army from Elam, in southwestern Iran, in ca. 1159 B.C. Treasures including the cult statue of Marduk, Babylon’s patron deity, were carried away to the Elamite capital at Susa. The statue was later recovered by Nebuchadnezzar I (r. 1125–1104 B.C.), but the period of Babylonian self-rule that followed was ended by the eighth century B.C., as the region was incorporated into the expanding Neo-Assyrian empire.

Assyrian rule in Babylonia faced frequent and violent opposition, yet Assyrian kings revered the great temples of southern Mesopotamia, and sought to be recognized as legitimate kings of Babylon. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 704–681 B.C.) sacked the city in 689 B.C. in the course of crushing a rebellion, the act was considered so sacrilegious that his successors avoid mentioning it in inscriptions, alluding instead to a natural disaster. A cylinder ( 86.11.283 ) describes restoration work at Babylon by Sennacherib’s son and successor Esarhaddon (r. 680–669 B.C.). Esarhaddon in turn attempted to solve the problem by making one son, Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 B.C.), king of Assyria and the empire, and another, Shamash-shum-ukin (r. 667–648 B.C.), king of Babylon. The two brothers ruled in this way for sixteen years, but finally Shamash-shum-ukin himself rebelled, leading to four years of war and a devastating siege of Babylon. Ashurbanipal emerged victorious and installed a puppet king, Kandalanu (r. 647–627 B.C.), on the Babylonian throne. Within a generation, however, the Assyrian empire was itself collapsing, and under threat from a resurgent Babylonia. A later copy of a letter ( 86.11.370a,c–e ) preserves an appeal from one of the last kings of Assyria, Sin-shar-ishkun (r. 622–612 B.C.), apparently pleading to retain his throne by making an alliance with the Babylonian king Nabopolassar (r. 625–605 B.C.). By this stage, however, the Assyrian state was doomed: Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604–562 B.C.) came to rule most of its former empire, a swathe of territory reaching from the shores of the Persian Gulf to those of the Mediterranean Sea.

Nebuchadnezzar II took his name from the king who had recovered the statue of Marduk from Susa. The later king was ultimately to become far more famous than his predecessor, however: it is Nebuchadnezzar II who appears in the Bible. As king of Babylon, he rebuilt much of the city ( 86.11.60 ), constructing an imperial capital with vast palaces and well-appointed temples, colossal city walls, and a great northern entry point, the Ishtar Gate, approached via a long Processional Way lined with colorful glazed-brick reliefs depicting roaring lions ( 31.13.1 ; 31.13.2 ). At this time, Babylon is thought to have been the largest city in the world. Its population was surely very cosmopolitan: Nebuchadnezzar continued the Assyrian practice of moving large groups of people across the empire, in order to break up potential centers of opposition, to provide labor, or both. In the case of the state of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, such acts earned him biblical infamy. The powerful language used against Babylon by the biblical prophets would eventually be incorporated into Christian visions of the Apocalypse ( 18.65.8 ). By contrast, Babylonian kings saw and presented themselves as pious figures, as can be seen in the emphasis on temple restoration in Nebuchadnezzar’s own inscriptions, or in the many fine stamp seals of the period, usually showing a single figure before altars and divine symbols, often including those of Marduk and his son Nabu ( 86.11.35 ).

The Neo-Babylonian empire was short-lived: in 539 B.C., Cyrus II of Persia conquered the city, building a vast new empire centered on Iran. This was by no means the end of Babylon itself: the city retained its importance and would continue as one of several Achaemenid Persian royal capitals. Two hundred years later, when this empire fell in its turn, Alexander intended Babylon to be the capital of his new Asian empire. He died in the city in 323 B.C., before such dreams could be realized. From the wars of succession that followed, Seleucus I Nicator emerged as the dominant force in the Asian part of Alexander’s empire. He founded a new city, Seleucia on the Tigris, which would gradually supplant Babylon. The older city survived, and the presence of a Greek-style theater and other discoveries at the site show how Hellenistic culture influenced the ancient capital during the Seleucid and Parthian periods, but from this time on Babylon began to shrink. It was sacked by a Parthian army in the second century B.C. and did not recover, although a wealth of tablets show that the city’s temple institutions continued as one of the last centers of cuneiform scholarship ( 86.11.286a ): the last dated cuneiform texts were made in the first century A.D. Villages remained around the edges of the vast site, as indeed they do today, and the medieval traveler Benjamin of Tudela described a substantial Jewish community there. The last reference to a living village actually called Babil on the site comes from the tenth century, in the Abbasid period . Also in the tenth century, a new city, Hillah (originally called al-Jami‘ayn), was founded nearby. The inscribed baked bricks of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon were a major building material for the new settlement, and continued to be recycled for use in new buildings into the early twentieth century, when Babylon’s excavators reported frequently seeing them incorporated into houses in the town.

In recent decades, the site of Babylon has suffered considerable damage from problematic reconstructions of ancient buildings, several large-scale modern building and earth-moving works, the interruption of regular conservation work, and in 2003–4 from the presence of a military base in the center of the ancient city. Today Iraqi archaeologists are working to conserve and manage the site, which remains among the most important in the entire ancient world.

Seymour, Michael. “Babylon.” In  Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/babl/hd_babl.htm (June 2016)

Further Reading

Aruz, Joan, Kim Benzel, and Jean M. Evans, eds. Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. See on MetPublications

Aruz, Joan, Sarah B. Graff, and Yelena Rakic, eds. Assyria to Iberia: At the Dawn of the Classical Age . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. See on MetPublications

Finkel, Irving L., and Michael Seymour, eds. Babylon . New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Leick, Gwendolyn, ed. The Babylonian World . London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Oates, Joan. Babylon . 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986.

Seymour, Michael. Babylong: Legend, History and the Ancient City . London: I. B. Tauris, 2014.

Van De Mieroop, Marc. King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography . Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Additional Essays by Michael Seymour

• Seymour, Michael. “ The Assyrian Sculpture Court .” (December 2016; updated January 2022)
• Seymour, Michael. “ Nimrud .” (November 2016)
• Seymour, Michael. “ Nineveh .” (September 2017)

Related Essays

• The Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods (2004–1595 B.C.)
• Mesopotamian Creation Myths
• Mesopotamian Deities
• The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period (ca. 1595–1155 B.C.) in Mesopotamia
• The Origins of Writing
• The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 B.C.)
• The Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 B.C.)
• Animals in Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Art of the First Cities in the Third Millennium B.C.
• Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition
• Assyria, 1365–609 B.C.
• Colossal Temples of the Roman Near East
• Flood Stories
• The Hittites
• Jewish Art in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium
• The Old Assyrian Period (ca. 2000–1600 B.C.)
• The Parthian Empire (247 B.C.–224 A.D.)
• The Rise of Macedon and the Conquests of Alexander the Great
• The Seleucid Empire (323–64 B.C.)
• Theater in Ancient Greece
• Uruk: The First City

List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Mesopotamia
• Mesopotamia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Mesopotamia, 1–500 A.D.
• Mesopotamia, 2000–1000 B.C.
• Mesopotamia, 8000–2000 B.C.
• 10th Century B.C.
• 1st Century A.D.
• 1st Century B.C.
• 2nd Century B.C.
• 2nd Millennium B.C.
• 3rd Century B.C.
• 3rd Millennium B.C.
• 4th Century B.C.
• 5th Century B.C.
• 6th Century B.C.
• 7th Century B.C.
• 8th Century B.C.
• 9th Century B.C.
• Achaemenid Empire
• Ancient Greek Art
• Ancient Near Eastern Art
• The Apocalypse
• Architectural Element
• Architecture
• Assyrian Art
• Astronomy / Astrology
• Babylonian Art
• Biblical Scene
• Christianity
• Cylinder Seal
• Deity / Religious Figure
• Elamite Art
• Hellenistic Period
• Hittite Empire
• Kassite Period
• Mesopotamian Art
• New Testament
• Parthian Art
• Personal Ornament
• Relief Sculpture
• Religious Art
• Sculpture in the Round
• Seleucid Art
• Uruk Period

Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Bricks” by Sarah B. Graff
• 82nd & Fifth: “Sealed” by Yelena Rakic
• The Artist Project: “Dustin Yellin on ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals”
• Exhibition: “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: Charting a New Empire”
• MetMedia: The Cyrus Cylinder from Ancient Babylon and the Beginning of the Persian Empire