The most recommended Mesopotamia books

When this book first came out, I was just beginning work on my Ph.D. dissertation and it had a big influence on me. Stephanie Dalley writes in a wonderfully accessible style for general readers about the people of the 18th century BCE cities of Mari and Tell al Rimah, and throughout the book she quotes from the personal letters found there. She overcomes a common perception that the ancient world can seem removed and remote, by letting the ancient people speak directly to the reader. All the while, she also makes fascinating observations about what the documents reveal, and also includes discussions of archaeological evidence (such as culinary molds that were used to make fish-shaped bread, in the section on food preparation!).

At about 10,000 BC, there appeared in Mesopotamia female statuettes, clearly privileging fertility. They came to be associated with the bucranium – the head and horns of the wild bull aurochs, and, over time, the pair took on the unmistakable stamp of a goddess and her consort, a bull.

Jacques Cauvin, who conducted their excavation, was able to link the pair with the birth of agriculture, and in so doing he found that the individual came, for the first time, to stand in a worshipful posture toward an other-worldly existent – bringing about for humanity thereby an entirely new cultural orientation. Indeed, the pair bore “all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominated the oriental pantheon, “right up to the time of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel” (p. 31).

I can’t say how much I love this book. It explains everything we know intuitively about economics but find hard to justify. Hudson was one of the few who saw the 2008 crisis coming, and he is still one of the few who know what we must do now. Taking the discussion of David Graeber’s extraordinary 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years to the next level, Hudson shows how Bronze Age rulers understood economic instability better than we do. When people get into serious debt, their personal crises not only destroy their own lives but ripple outwards to derail society, by giving their creditors enough power to compete with governments. To avoid society being run into the ground, governments must start cancelling debts – as they did long ago.

Scholars have disagreed when written records become literature, yet the earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep (who wrote in Egyptian) and Enheduanna (who wrote in Sumerian), dating to around 2400 BC. Enheduanna is the earliest known Female Poet. She was the High Priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna (Sin). She lived in the Sumerian city-state of Ur in Syria. So this would be my 3rd recommendation for all the researchers of Ancient History.

Enheduanna's contributions to Sumerian literature, include the collection of hymns known as the "Sumerian Temple Hymns", 37 tablets to be exact, from 2,700 BC. The temple hymns were the first collection of their kind, the copying of the hymns indicates that they were used long after and held in very high esteem.

Sīn or Suen (Akkadian: EN.ZU or lord-ess of wisdom) or Nanna was the goddess of the moon in the… show more.

This is a personal account from the decade preceding the Lausanne Treaty.

Jakob Künzler and his wife were stationed in the Swiss Hospital in Urfa, Mesopotamia, and witnessed the destruction of the Armenians at close hand. As disturbing as is Künzler’s sober report, at the same time it is a declaration of love for a turbulent land of different languages, religions, and the people who live there.

People often think that we don’t know much about ancient Mesopotamia because it flourished so long ago, but that isn’t true at all. The excavated documents are full of information about real people and their lives. Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat’s book is a great introduction because she has organized the chapters thematically to examine such features as family life and religion (as it was actually practiced), and because she quotes and analyzes obscure and interesting ancient texts. Readers can also explore ancient Mesopotamian government, economy, and intellectual innovations here, but the author always maintains her focus on the people.

Mesopotamian mathematics is a fascinating subject; their numerical system was based on 60, and the ancient thinkers were adept at many types of calculations and word problems. Hundreds of clay tablets reflect their advanced understanding of mathematical principles. Eleanor Robson explains clearly in this book how historians and mathematicians have interpreted the evidence, and she discusses not just specific mathematical texts, how they are understood, and the way ideas were expressed, but she also introduces the scribes who developed and learned it all, and even the buildings in which they worked. The book is a “social history,” as the subtitle notes, and also an intellectual adventure.

Stephanie Dalley is another one of those Oxford scholars upon whose shoulders the rest of us Assyriologists stand. Her translations are eminently readable and enjoyable, and her focus on certain selected works of the later Akkadian language period sets her apart from the Sumerian specialist mentioned above. This fascinating era provides us with some of the most compelling stories, including the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Another series. When I was a kid, Time-Life Magazines ran a kind of book club. My family had several complete sets—The Seafarers, The Old West, the Science Library. We used to joke that Time-Life Books were the source of all knowledge. 21 titles in the Great Ages of Man series cover the entire span of civilization from ancient Mesopotamia to the 20th Century, each an overview of its period. For The Last Viking I used Barbarian Europe and Byzantium, but Age of Kings is my favorite; I’ve always been fascinated by the violent, glorious 17th Century. Though long out of print, you can still buy them by the set on Amazon. Easier, though, to pick your era and purchase by the title.

This book, like the others, is an essential reference for anyone researching the subject.

It covers in detail geography, rivers and irrigation, archaeology and building, government and society, religion and myth, language and writing, architecture, and the arts, economy and trade, food and agriculture, arms and warfare, everyday life, customs and society in general.

Getting down to finer details is the strength of this book. A great asset it has to be for the finer points in developing a novel.