Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon

D. J. Wiseman's Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon, published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in 1985, collects Wiseman's 1983 Schweich Lectures on Neo-Babylonian archaeology, delivered under the British Academy's long running lecture series on biblical archaeology by one of the twentieth century's leading Assyriologists. Its strength is Wiseman's own direct scholarly authority in Neo-Babylonian cuneiform and archaeology, and the Schweich Lectures' standing as a peer reviewed and prestigious venue in the field. Its limit is that as a set of lectures rather than a full excavation report, it synthesises rather than presents new primary fieldwork, so a claim needing the underlying archaeological detail should be checked against the excavation reports Wiseman draws on, including Koldewey's earlier work on the same site, rather than treated as a first hand excavation account.