Wow! eBook
Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization 2nd Edition
Author(s): A. Leo Oppenheim (Author), Erica Reiner (Adapter)
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- Publication Date: 15 Sept. 1977
- Edition: 2nd
- Language: English
- Print length: 493 pages
- ISBN-10: 0226631877
- ISBN-13: 9780226631875
Book Description
A groundbreaking, now classic book that transformed our understanding of the people of Ancient Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has always received less attention from scholars and the general public than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.
A. Leo Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. At the time of his death in 1974, Oppenheim was working on revisions of the manuscript that, with the help of Erica Reiner, who used the author's revision outline, completed the work that became this book. In the decades since, it has become the definitive work on Ancient Mesopotamia.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria.”
-- Edward B, Garside ― New York Times Book Review
“To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written.”
-- Leonard Cottrell ― Book Week
”Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research.”
-- Samuel Noah Kramer ― Archaeology
About the Author
A. Leo Oppenheim (1904-1974), one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
